Bad biofuel breakdown: Efforts to ‘Green up’ palm oil face too many blocks
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil – or RSPO – is an organization made up of companies involved in the production, processing and trade of palm oil and environmental as well as social/developmental NGOs. The aim of the RSPO is to iron out environmental standards concerning palm oil, particularly relating to greenhouse gas emissions in light of the approaching UNFCCC in Copenhagen, aka COP15.
Palm oil plantation in Java, Indonesia, photo by Achmad Rabin Taim (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
But prospects on reaching any significant agreement look dim. Certified ‘Green’ palm oil products, such as biodiesel or food products, have met complications. In other words, European companies and consumers aren’t buying them. In two related articles for Reuters, Niluksi Koswanage lays out the findings of a recent WWF sustainability report concerning palm oil and European buyers and the problems this, as well as other factors, are causing for the RSPO.
In this case, the market simply isn’t solving the problem of sustainable palm oil. Never mind the feel good factor of buying ‘certified Green’ palm oil products, especially when many retailers have not even made them available. The governments of Indonesia and Malaysia have also not adopted policies that favor eco friendly palm farming. For instance, RSPO members have promised not to use peatlands for palm plantations, yet the Indonesian government recently moved in the opposite direction and in Koswanage’s words ‘ended a freeze on new permits for developing estates on peatlands’.
An article in Tuesday’s (October 27) Guardian offers a British perspective on the palm oil predicament. The U.K.’s program to introduce more biofuel into petroleum and diesel markets has met with some criticism because of its incorporation of biofuel from palm oil, which is often farmed with rainforest-destroying, orangutan-threatening slash and burn techniques resulting in a far larger carbon footprint than the fossil fuel it is replacing.
Photo by Tom Low (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
One solution may be for rich countries to compensate developing countries for preserving their rainforests and keeping their greenhouse gas emissions low. This concept of ‘ecological debt’ could be one of the key ideas discussed at the upcoming COP15 climate change conference.
‘Realistically, it was an illusion to think that producers would voluntarily commit to short-term measures in the absence of global compensation mechanisms.’
–Johan Verburg, Oxfam (from guardian.co.uk)
For more information about the problems related to palm oil read this article.
By Graham Land
Additional resources:
Youtube – Naomi Klein on ‘ecological debt’
BBC – ‘Palm oil warning for Indonesia’
The Age (Australia) – Orangutans struggle to survive as palm oil booms
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