Palm oil certification? No silver bullet, but essential for sustainability (commentary)

As one of the world’s most widely traded food and beverage commodities, palm oil is used in everything from baked goods to biofuels. It is produced in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America and sold to customers around the globe. Because no single jurisdiction governs this trade, it is extremely difficult to drive the broad-scale reform needed to counteract the negative impacts of the palm oil industry on forests, climate, biodiversity, and people living in the areas where this crop is produced. So how do we make sustainable palm oil a reality? Foremost, we need a global standard on what constitutes sustainable palm oil and a common system to implement it. Arriving at this consensus requires a convening body to connect every link in the palm oil supply chain, across different countries and jurisdictions. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) has worked consistently for the past 14 years to drive this type of industry-wide agreement and change through its voluntary platform. However, a recent report from Changing Markets Foundation, released with additional comments by NGOs such as FERN, the Environmental Investigation Agency, Mighty Earth, and Friends of the Earth Netherlands, criticizes the RSPO and proposes that certification standards are — as stated by the same NGOs — ‘holding back the progressive reform of the sector’ and may even be causing ‘active damage.’ This report disregards some of the important realities in the industry and on the ground, and fails to offer practical solutions. Simply bashing certification because of its…

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