When the Secretary-General of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Darryl Webber, rose to conclude the organisation’s tenth meeting two weeks ago in Singapore, he simply stated his view that “the RSPO is flying”.
In the last two years its member numbers have practically doubled and collective interest in its evolution can be keenly sensed on the part of palm oil growers, processors, traders, investors, retailers, NGOs, and governments alike.
Yet this depiction should not suggest that the flight of the RSPO has been, or will in future be, care-free and easy; far from it. The great achievement of the RSPO, like other roundtables before it, is to unite a wide variety of actors behind a common aspiration: to transform, and make sustainable, global markets for palm oil. No one would deny the challenges that that aspiration entails for the RSPO, especially at the present juncture, with the organisation’s first review of its principles and criteria soon due. Indeed, the RSPO’s members seem acutely aware that the future of their collective enterprise is delicately poised.
From where does this uncertainty stem? Certainly not from the future of palm oil itself, as the world’s most voluminous vegetable oil. Demand for vegetable oils on the whole has been rising steadily for decades, a trend palm oil is uniquely placed to prosper from given its versatility and low production costs (especially in southeast Asia). Palm oil production is now expanding into West Africa, the palm’s ancestral home, as well as Latin America, where more often than not it has avoided contributing to deforestation by remaining within the agricultural frontier.
The challenge for the RSPO is to demonstrate that the continued expansion of palm oil, in both geographic and volumetric terms, can be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. In South-East Asia especially, an area in which 90 percent of current production occurs, its history has often tended to suggest the opposite: large areas of forest have been cleared and many community interests overridden to make way for this unassailably profitable crop.
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