Europe wants sustainable palm oil, but won't pay for it

Areas of forest cleared for oil palm plantations in Bawa village in Indonesia. EPA

As Cop26 ends in Glasgow, a major onus should be on ensuring that all the fine words are put into actions that translate into genuine climate justice. It is also the special responsibility of wealthy nations not to take steps that may salve their consciences but could end up harming developing countries.

The first imperative can be summed up in two words: pay up. At the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, rich countries pledged $100 billion per year by 2020 to help poorer states adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. This target has not been met, and as far as Madagascar's Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Baomiavotse Vahinala Raharinirina, is concerned, this is why her country – which the UN says is facing the first climate change famine – cannot fund a water pipeline to relieve the drought-hit southern part of the island.

"I was wondering during a negotiation session why it is so difficult for rich countries to pay this money," she said in an interview during Cop26. "It's not aid. It's accountability. People from the deep south of Madagascar are victims of something that they didn't do."

The second imperative is for joined-up thinking. Take the issue of deforestation, and the global deal to end and reverse it by 2030.

Indonesia's Environment Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar drew attention with her Facebook post, saying: "The massive development of President Jokowi's era must not stop in the name of carbon emissions or in the name of deforestation. Indonesia's natural wealth, including forests, must be managed for its use according to sustainable principles, besides being fair." This is a reasonable point for any developing country to make, but particularly one whose president, Joko Widodo (known as "Jokowi"), wants to build a new capital for his country on the island of Borneo. No matter how "green" the new city will be, its development is bound to lead to some deforestation.

But this is an issue that many in the EU see in black-and-white terms – to the extent that in 2018, it banned the use of palm oil for use in biofuels by 2030 over concerns that cultivating the crop was leading to deforestation. This is a very big issue for the more than 300 million people of Malaysia and Indonesia: between them they produce 85 per cent of the world's palm oil, which is used in a vast array of products from ice cream and sliced bread to toothpaste, lipstick, soap and, indeed, biofuels.

As Muhammed Magassy, an adviser to the UK-based think tank Centre for Sustainable Palm Oil Studies, wrote recently: "While smallholder farmers are responsible for significant percentages of palm oil production, they are overwhelmingly not responsible for catastrophic deforestation. The EU's decision to apply sanctions to palm oil will cause immense hardship to huge numbers of economically precarious people of colour and threatens to drive them back into poverty."

Even if done in the name of protecting rainforests and endangered orangutans, this is presumably not a consequence the EU was intending. And there are many in Malaysia and Indonesia who do not want to see their richly biodiverse jungles destroyed either. As long ago as 2004, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was set up. With stakeholders ranging from palm oil companies, manufacturers and banks to environmental NGOs, the aim was "to develop and implement global standards for sustainable palm oil", or Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO).

Within a few years, a major stumbling block became evident. Even though about 19 per cent of global palm oil is now CSPO, many manufacturers and retailers, including in Europe, are unwilling to pay the greater price for it. Only half of the CSPO-produced last year was sold as such – the rest had to be sold as uncertified. As Carl Bek-Nielsen, co-chair of the RSPO, told Bloomberg last week: "People have been screaming and shouting for sustainable palm oil, but as soon as it is available, they found all sorts of excuses and disappeared out that door."

Teresa Kok, Malaysia's then minister of primary industries, made a similar point in 2018. "We have produced higher quantities of CSPO but sadly the uptake from British and European entities is far less than previously promised. We find that there is a constant deferment of their commitment dates. As a result, producers, including smallholders, are questioning the overall rationality of CSPO."

As it is, palm oil is far more sustainable than sunflower or rapeseed oil, because the latter require several times more land to produce the same amount. Those two crops are grown in Europe. Would it be too cynical to suggest that the EU ban on palm oil – meaning their own oils would have to be used instead – is another instance of first-world protectionism being given a greenwash?

For, if Europeans are really worried about South-East Asian forests, they should incentivise palm oil producers to go sustainable by committing to buy or find a market for the certified products. Given the EU's capacity to set global standards – many companies around the world align with them simply so they do not risk being shut out – they wouldn't have to take sole responsibility, just perhaps the lead.

I asked Dr Hezri Adnan, executive director of the Malaysian Institute of Economic Research and author of The Sustainability Shift, about the current impasse. "RSPO outlines transnational private standards, and producers break their back to comply, but EU [and US] public regulations say something else," he told me. "I would say there is a degree of antagonism and hypocrisy there somewhere."

There is a simple way forward. As Mr Bek-Nielsen says: "If you want the world to produce sustainable timber, beef, chickens, cars or palm oil, you have to support that movement and be part of the change."

As they head home from Glasgow, that is a message I hope leaders from the Global North take with them. Climate justice means nothing without it.