- In 2013, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil promised to publish its growers’ concession maps.
- That hasn’t happened, but the RSPO has pledged to make good on its commitment this year.
- Not everyone is on board with the initiative, however, and some doubt it will come to fruition. The public’s ability to monitor the industry hangs in the balance.
In the summer of 2013, as Indonesian fires enveloped the region in a toxic haze, public ire settled on plantation firms as prime culprits in the disaster. Burning land to clear it, while cheap, was heavily restricted, yet satellite data was said to place half of the hotspots on company land. Greenpeace linked 39% to the concessions of oil palm growers belonging to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a global association for ethical production of the commodity.
In response to the accusations, the RSPO Secretariat defended its members, claiming most had done little to bring about the crisis and chiding Greenpeace for basing its analysis on “incorrect” concession maps. Only boundaries associated with the final stamp of approval a grower must obtain from the state in Indonesia, the HGU, could be considered valid, the roundtable contended. But the HGU was not a public document, and Greenpeace argued that it had no choice but to employ a smattering of non-HGU maps that had entered the public sphere through piecemeal means.
“While the RSPO claims [the HGU] maps differ from Greenpeace’s, it has not yet publicly released these, which makes verification impossible,” Greenpeace campaigner Bustar Maitar said at the time. “It would be in the interests of the industry and the people affected by the forest fires that the RSPO be a model of transparency.”
Those words did not fall on deaf ears. Later that year, at the RSPO’s 10th General Assembly, its members, which also include refiners, traders, banks and NGOs, voted to publish the growers’ concession maps. The idea was that good operators should have nothing to hide, but that a lack of transparency was causing everyone to get tarred by the same brush. “Through the provision of accurate maps,” read the resolution that was adopted, “companies will be able to protect themselves from false claims against their operations, and the reputation of the RSPO and its stakeholders can be upheld.”
The resolution was passed by a significant majority, despite “some strong opposition from within the RSPO membership and board, with some strong lobbying required by us and colleagues who had co-signed the resolution,” said Helen Buckland, director of the Sumatran Orangutan Society, an RSPO member. Ultimately, growers around the world were asked to hand over their maps by April 2014. But things have not gone as planned, and two years after the original deadline, the maps remain a secret. A large number of companies have yet to submit; much of what has been given over is incomplete; and the Secretariat has yet to publish anything. The public’s ability to monitor the industry, which is continually linked to deforestation and social conflict, has likewise continued to be impeded.
The Indonesian growers say they want to share their maps but fear government reprisal. Indeed, in February 2015, the agriculture ministry’s head of plantations, Gamal Nasir, claimed in a letter to the RSPO that the intended disclosures were illegal. But a lawyer hired by the RSPO, Andiko Mancayo, reached the opposite conclusion, and in December the Secretariat reiterated its intention to publish the maps.
That declaration might have been premature: many growers are still resisting. In early March, Edi Suhardi, chairman of the RSPO’s Indonesian Growers’ Caucus, told Mongabay he doubted that the maps would be released by the upcoming April deadline.
A vexing letter
The RSPO was established in 2004 to lead the push for more sustianable palm oil, but it may well be falling behind. Last year, the NGO Forest Watch Indonesia used a new information law to wrest a pile of logging and tree plantation maps from the country’s forestry ministry. Now it is going after the HGUs. Greenpeace last week unveiled a new mapping tool with unprecedented (though not comprehensive) oil palm, pulpwood and coal data that had been collected from local government offices across the archipelago.
At the platform’s launch in Jakarta, Abdul Manan, a Sumatran farmer, related how a plantation firm had begun clearing forest in his village without even notifying the community, or properly explaining the terms of its permit. “If the maps had been available, we would have known exactly where its boundaries were,” he told Mongabay.
Reformers are hoping greater transparency is inevitable, even as elements in Indonesia and Malaysia, the two largest palm oil producing countries, resist moving in that direction. In 2013, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations adopted a regional haze monitoring system to hold companies accountable for fires on their land. But the Indonesian and Malaysian governments have yet to provide the concession maps needed to bring it online, despite repeated entreaties from Singapore, which is regularly smothered in Indonesian haze. “It is vital that we deepen cooperation and share information to bring errant companies to account for their irresponsible and unsustainable practices that are the root cause of land and forest fires causing haze pollution,” Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told the 27th ASEAN Summit in November.
Malaysian growers have cited their country’s Official Secrets Act to withhold concession data from the RSPO. Indonesia has no such law, but in his letter to the roundtable, Nasir, the agriculture ministry official, cited a 1997 regulation on land registration to forbid the sharing of maps, in any circumstances.
The meaning of that regulation is now the subject of fierce debate. Nasir’s dictum only mentioned it in passing, but Mancayo, the RSPO’s lawyer, gave it a deeper analysis. The regulation says that the “physical data” over a registered plot of land, defined as its “location, borders and width,” are “open to the public.” Mancayo wrote, “There is no ban, in any regulation, that prohibits the HGU holder from sharing their data with anyone they want.”
Nasir told Mongabay he disagreed. “There is no law for that, for releasing private concession data,” so doing so is necessarily illegal, he argued.
‘It will open up a Pandora’s box’
Suhardi, the Indonesian growers’ representative, acknowledged that publishing the maps would allow companies to defend themselves against unfounded accusations. But he insisted that unless Nasir’s letter was somehow overridden, and unless the Malaysian growers were made to share their maps, too, the Indonesians could not condone disclosure.
In December, the RSPO Secretariat said that only the Indonesian maps could legally be published. Suhardi called that a “double standard.”
“We are going to be more in the spotlight – the attacks will be on us,” he said. “Malaysia will be seen as the golden boys.”
While perhaps beneficial to the industry at large, he explained, public maps could be a double-edged sword, exposing growers to extortion. An indigenous group might stake a false land claim in order to extract compensation from a company. “Provocateurs” could block a road and demand a ransom. “There are some crooks, interested parties, bureaucrats – if they access the maps, they can think of something,” said Suhardi, who is also sustainability director for PT Agro Harapan Lestari, a grower. “It will open up a Pandora’s box.”
Adam Harrison, the World Wildlife Fund’s palm oil lead and a member of the RSPO’s Board of Directors, countered that while conflicts with local communities, whether “founded or occasionally maliciously manufactured,” were real risks, he didn’t see how maps on the Internet would change that. Neither should a rivalry with Malaysia be cause for maintaining secrecy. “The ‘double standard’ is that Indonesian members now have an opportunity to show the world that unlike their Malaysian colleagues their industry has nothing to hide,” he argued.
Suhardi also questioned the credibility of the RSPO’s legal review. Mancayo’s “competency,” he said, “is not up to our expectations.” Others defended Mancayo, who heads the National Forestry Council, which advises the forestry ministry. But so too had the process of the review, Suhardi added, violated roundtable procedure. “Our opinion is that the legal review needs to be thoroughly reassessed. We are not convinced the RSPO has performed due diligence on this.”
In the dark
NGOs are pushing for publication. Anne Rosenbarger, of the World Resources Institute, deemed it “absolutely essential” for the “credibility of the [RSPO] standard.” Tomasz Johnson, of Earthsight, said there was plenty of evidence to show that RSPO members often violate the organization’s rules. Public maps would enable better monitoring of that. “If companies aren’t doing anything wrong, then they have nothing to hide,” he told Mongabay.
“It could be interesting to take a close look at the operations of any members leading the pushback against transparency.”
Some RSPO members, like Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) and Musim Mas, have submitted their maps to the Secretariat. Agus Purnomo, GAR’s sustainability director, said he therefore had “no specific position” on matter. “We go along with whatever RSPO and the government of Indonesia decide to do with our concession maps,” he told Mongabay.
Other companies, such as First Resources, have held onto their maps. “We are in support of greater transparency and accountability in the palm oil sector, but we also want to be cautious in ensuring that we do not violate laws in where we operate,” spokesperson Serene Lim told Mongabay. Efdy Ruzali, of PT Bakrie Sumatera Plantations, said his company was “awaiting the Indonesian government regulation.” Representatives of PT Evans Indonesia and PT Triputra Agro Persada declined to comment.
Because of the legal concerns, the Sustainable Palm Oil Transparency Toolkit, which features a company scorecard assessing many of the largest palm oil firms, has temporarily disabled the scoring indicators related to submitting concession maps.
RSPO spokesperson Stefano Savi acknowledged to Mongabay that the issue falls in a “grey area” in Indonesian law. He said that the roundtable had written to “the highest authorities in Indonesia” in search of “an official final opinion,” but that the matter had yet to be resolved.
The state secretary, Pratikno, with whom Suhardi said the matter rested, did not respond to an interview request. Nasir said he had not heard from the RSPO, but it was possible his superiors had.
Credits
