Unsustainable Palm Oil and the RSPO

Unsustainable Palm Oil and the RSPO
The Orangutan Outreach Point of View

We at Orangutan Outreach feel compelled to write this position paper
because of the recent sudden and dramatic shift by many groups and
institutions that call themselves “environmental” towards accepting oil
palms and palm oil as somehow being okay as long as it has been
certified by the RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil).

We tend to differ. Certification is simply not the Panacea many believe
it to be. Not in countries where corruption is still so prevalent. Oil
Palms are in no way the great solution that they are presented to be by
skillful lobbyists. So what’s wrong? Allow us to explain.

Productivity

Oil Palms are considered the highest producing crop for biodiesel in the
world, but there are far better alternatives such as the sugar palm, an
entirely different type of palm that does not require huge amounts of
fertilizer to achieve a much higher productivity. Unlike oil palms,
sugar palms also do not require herbicides and pesticides, some of which
have been outlawed in the West and have the potential to make soil water
undrinkable for centuries, yet continue to be used freely in Indonesia.

Experts may say that there is a difference between sugar and sugar based
ethanol that is derived from the sugar palms, and the lipids derived
from the oil palm that are used to produce biofuel along with all the
products that fill supermarket shelves. But there are now new
technologies, such as those pioneered by various companies such as
Martek, which use microbial fermentation to go from sugar to lipids (C6
to C18). From there one can easily go to biodiesel, jet fuel or many
different kinds of lipid-based products for food, cosmetics, etc.

Oil Palms may produce a lot, but sugar palms-- even without
fertilization and in a mixed forest-- still outperform oil palms not
just by small percentages, but by a factor of at least twice the
productivity.

There are also other trees, like the local Southeast Asian Illipe nut
trees (several species of Shorea in the family of the Dipterocarpaceae)
that can also produce high quality fats and oils while growing in
natural forests or traditional mixed village forests in Kalimantan
(Indonesian Borneo). Those oils used to be the main source for the local
people that now have to buy increasingly expensive palm oil based
cooking oil.

Biodiversity

Some interesting publications have been brought out by groups associated
with the oil palm lobby indicating that there may be as many as 200
different organisms per hectare living in oil palm plantations, and that
oil palm plantations should, amongst others for that reason, be regarded
as forests and receive the financial forestry related incentives that
are presently under negotiation, such as carbon credits, REDD based
credits, etc. A casual observer from the temperate zones, where nature
is low in biodiversity, and who is accustomed to crop and forest
monocultures and impoverished ecosystems, may think that the people
making this claim have a point… but this is not the case. It is an
illusion.

One has to look at the baseline to make an accurate judgment. In other
words, they need to ask themselves: What was there before and what is
there after replacement with oil palms?

Not much unfortunately-- not only in terms of number of species, but
even less so in terms of what those species actually are. They are
almost the same everywhere and are for the most part common weed
species. In practice this means that oil palm plantations are indeed
monocultures that, because of their heavy fertilization and use of
herbicides and pesticides, are in actuality destroying the natural
biodiversity.

The situation is further complicated by illegal hunting and killing of
animals such as orangutans and wild boar that not only may damage or
destroy individual oil palms and then are killed contributing to loss of
animal biodiversity. But they also contribute significantly to the
dispersal and germination of seeds of other forest plant species and
maintain the species diversity in the forests they roam, and from where
they are lost.

Oil Palm biodiversity mostly consists of a relatively small number of
associated weed species such as the ferns and liana’s seen here that
vary hardly with different locations. To claim this as biodiversity in
comparison with the original vegetation is twisting the facts.

Long term soil fertility

Oil palms need the undulating low-lying lands that are of relatively
good quality, at least physically, in order to prosper. But in order to
achieve a good productivity, an average of 1,760 kilograms of fertilizer
is applied per hectare every year! Much of this is nitrogen fertilizer
that is made from natural gas, a fossil fuel, which is already a scarce
commodity. After approximately 20-25 years the oil palms are no longer
productive and for many more years no new oil palms can be planted in
the same location so that the soil can recover.

The basic issue here is that with the palm oil bunches many macro- and
micronutrients are removed from the soil. Macronutrients, although not
environmentally friendly, can for the major part be replaced, but
micronutrients are much more complicated to restore. Imbalances in their
supply can cause serious long-term side effects that will increase the
risk of diseases and instability. In the future there will be fertilizer
shortfalls. For now the huge amounts of these nutrients being flushed
out of the oil palm plantations into river systems affect not only local
ecosystems, but they also disturb downstream ecosystems, including coral
reefs in the sea.

Food security

Cooking oil is very important for local people. For many years they made
the oil themselves from the Illipe nuts or from coconuts or other local
sources. Now they depend upon the commercially produced palm oil, and
with prices of palm oil rising globally, local people have to pay hugely
more for their local cooking oil-- directly impacting their income. This
has already led to large-scale protests in Malaysia and Indonesia.

Orangutans and other wildlife entering oil palm plantations— desperate
and starving— are viewed as pests and are killed because they eat the
oil palm fruits and shoots. But there are also several places where
humans have had to force themselves to eating the fruits. Try it
yourself! It is initially good tasting, but then the dry mouth begins
and your throat starts hurting and your breathing becomes difficult from
the astringent aftertaste. Still, orangutans and humans too often have
no other choice but to eat these undesirable fruits lest they and their
families are to starve. For orangutans to be killed and local people
prosecuted for such behavior cannot and should be tolerated. So palm oil
is not just taking away land for food production, but it also has a
direct effect on the local cost of living.

Transport of oil palm bunches to the mill. On the right many poisoned
and diseased oil palms. The risk of pests and diseases becomes bigger
the longer the plantations are in place and more micro nutrients are
removed from the soil.

Pollution

Oil palm processing causes huge amounts of stinking effluents that
pollute the local waters. Now much of these pollutants can be dealt with
in practice, for instance through biodigestors, but it will still take a
long time before this will be common practice. The use of long lasting
pesticides, some of them outlawed in the West because of their long term
poisonous effects, is still very prevalent in oil palm plantations.
Again, regulations and strict law enforcement could change this, but
this will not happen very quickly. In countries like Indonesia where law
enforcement for environmental crimes is extremely weak to say the least,
we cannot realistically expect that things will change for the better
any time soon. In addition rodenticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc.
are used with numerous serious impacts upon the natural condition. The
reality on oil palm plantations is horrific. Orangutans that have been
slaughtered by plantation staff are often cut in pieces and the meat
poisoned with rat poison, such as arsenic, spread amongst the palms to
efficiently bait and kill wild boar again. All of these effluents also
reach rivers that local people use to bathe, get drinking water from,
and that flow to the coastal regions where the coastal ecosystems are
also impacted.

Helping local people?

This is one of the main arguments brought up by the oil palm supporters,
but a closer inspection of the issue reveals quite a different picture.
Oil palm plantations only generate around 0.11 jobs per hectare, which,
like sugar cane, is extremely low and in the latter case even only
seasonal. Moreover the jobs created for local people are the lowest paid
only and often involve the heavy and more dangerous work such as land
clearing with chainsaws without the use of any protection as well as
working with pesticides. Most of the time the people have had to give up
their land rights in order to get those few jobs and there are numerous
widely publicized reports of abuse of local people’s rights by oil palm
companies. Still, if one looks at some of the surveys it is possible to
find many places where people actually state that they are happy with
the oil palm development because of the jobs, despite the low incomes.
There are also some basic facilities for local people that the companies
sometimes bring to the region, such as schools, mosques and small
clinics. But how long will it last?

Technology has already begun to move in, and tools have already been
developed to mechanize harvesting of the oil palm fruit bunches. And is
it really possible that when mechanization makes the profit for the
companies even higher that they will prefer to keep the jobs of the
local people at a slightly higher expense? Competition and ruthless
business principles will ensure that as quickly as possible those few
poor jobs will be lost for the sake of “efficiency” and sound “business
principles”. And what will those people do then, when they have lost
their recently acquired somewhat higher income and just got used to a
slightly better life including often the buying of motor bikes on
credit? Naturally they will do the only thing left—they will return to
low input slash-and-burn agriculture. This will quickly lead to the
destruction of the remaining forests. And this may make it even easier
for the oil palm companies to obtain more freshly created “critical”
land for their aggressive expansion when those lands that were once
locked up in the tropical forest vegetation have lost their fertility.
We are looking at a vicious cycle.

Carbon

Many countries have set standards for mixing fossil fuels with biofuels.
By now there are many schemes in place that promote biofuels and we
already have vast areas of biofuel producing crops such as oil palms,
sugar cane, corn and others. But those biofuels that are actually
intended to reduce the use of fossil fuels and as such to contribute to
lessening the impact of carbon emissions upon the global climate, are in
fact not environmentally friendly. Especially when we look at the oil
palms and carbon issues on Borneo we see a very disturbing situation.
About half the oil palm plantations are established on land that is not
the most suitable (SarVision Indonesia, WWF Netherlands commissioned
report). And much of the oil palm plantations have replaced forest that
held great amounts of carbon stored in the vegetation. But especially
worrisome is the planting of oil palms on peat. After planting oil palms
on thick layers of peat, up to 12 cm a year of peat literally vanish
into thin air in the form of CO2 and methane emissions due to the
opening up of the forest and the application of fertilizers and the
disturbance of the hydrology. With a density of 11% organic material of
which 50% consists of C that releases 3.67 times the amount of CO2, that
12 cm represents an emission of 220 tons of CO2 per hectare per year!
This is to say that even relatively small percentages of oil palms on
peat, the last vestiges of the orangutans’ habitat, in fact make the
total effect of palm oil for biofuels a net carbon emitter.

In addition the conversion of peat swamp forests causes serious
downstream problems for local people, increasing the flooding frequency
and severity and reducing the buffering of water during the dry period
because of the lost sponge function of the peat swamps. This has a
measurable impact on the downstream agricultural productivity and
welfare of the local people. Opening up of the peat swamps for oil palms
also increases fire risks and these huge fires cause great amounts of
smoke that have an impact as far away as the ice caps and glaciers. They
also cause health problems and lead to immense economic losses
regionally. The deposition of the brown smog from these peat fires
contribute much to the deposition of the darker particles on snow and
ice, leading to increased melting with all the known negative
consequences.

RSPO

Having been involved in the first three years of the RSPO, the results
until now have been extremely disappointing. More and more studies are
done, more concepts presented to committees, but the real issue at hand
is not the standard, it is law enforcement. Satellite images can look
back many years in time and every big company can afford to check out
whether the plantations providing their so called CPO (Crude Palm Oil)
were established on land that was cleared for the purpose of planting
oil palm or not. There are already simple navigation and tracking
devices such as those used globally by UPS and by Zoll Kollekt in
Germany that enable one to track transports of trucks with extremely
high accuracy and relate them to what is happening on the ground in the
form of land use change as seen from satellite images. We at Orangutan
Outreach feel that too little is done to bring such systems into
practice—despite the relatively low cost. The issue, then, is not that
we do not have the technology. Rather, it is very much like that with
the climate debates in general: there is simply no political will to
implement and commit. So why wait again till 2015?

Some people argue that we need time to educate the local companies on
what is right. But take the case of the orangutans; they have been
protected with the highest possible conservation status in Indonesia
since the Wildordonnantie of 1924. The issue is not one that we need to
teach oil palm plantation workers the best practices to deal with
orangutans when there is really no safe place left for them to go
anyway. The issue is that we need law enforcement. Nothing teaches
better as feeling the economic impact of trespassing laws. And saying
that local people do not know that orangutans are legally protected is
simply not true. Only in some very remote villages, far away from oil
palm plantations, there might be people who may not know yet. We find
that anyone we talk to has heard of orangutans and knows that it is not
allowed to keep them as pets. But as long as high officials or members
of the army and police can get away with trespassing these conservation
laws local people will not feel enticed to take the issue of keeping
illegal wildlife very serious.

The Indonesian and Malaysian governments are avid supporters of the
RSPO. In fact, special funds have even been set up to counter the
so-called “misinformation spread by NGOs that do not understand the
issues”. Skillfully made documentaries were produced by both the palm
oil lobby and many corporate-supported NGOs. In Indonesia it was even
announced with great fanfare that all the orangutan rehabilitation
centers will be closed by 2015, which also happens to be the year by
which most international companies, of those that have agreed to
sustainable palm oil, promise to achieve this goal of only sourcing from
sustainably produced palm oil. At the same time there are efforts from
the government to make it harder for orangutans to be rescued and
released, while law enforcement is the only tool that can save them.
There are also efforts on the part of the governments of Indonesia and
Malaysia to stop the making of international documentaries about oil
palms and orangutans.

So the tools, technologically as well as judicial, are here now to take
action, but it is simply not being done. Additional rules and
regulations can be legislated—and broken. The present depressing state
of the orangutan forests is evidence of the failure to take action in
the field where it is most desperately needed. Every month new orangutan
victims coming from palm oil plantations are rescued, so the problem is
factual and real and needs to be dealt with now. By 2015, the year in
which many companies are claiming they will meet their target for
complying with the RSPO guidelines, it will already be too late for many
more orangutans and the ecosystems they inhabit. We need to act NOW--
not in 2015-- and the technology is there to achieve success!

Conclusion

Even with many improvements in the present day unsustainable practices
of the oil palm sector, the long term sustainability of oil palms is
fundamentally fraught with incompatibilities. Ecologically, socially and
climate wise it simply does not make sense to promote oil palms the way
it is being done now. When NGOs who are claiming to rescue orangutans
and support orangutan conservation in the field choose to side with the
RSPO, they are creating a false sense of belief that by doing so they
are somehow helping the orangutans. This is simply not the case. It is
completely contrary to the truth. Orangutans need our help NOW, and
anything that detracts from this immediate need cannot be positive for
orangutans. To this effect, scientifically unschooled people going
around trying to convince zookeepers-- those individuals in daily
contact with the member of the larger public who are interested in
orangutan conservation and environmental protection-- to support the
RSPO are not doing the orangutans a favor. They are in fact betraying
them. The pressure needs to be kept up to force those in charge and the
RSPO to take the lawful actions needed. There is no time to sit back and
let our efforts slow down to save our majestic and altruistic
orangutans. We are their last hope…

Orangutan Outreach
JANUARY 2011