Palm Oil Giants and the Snack Food 20 appear to be crumbling under pressure . . . but is it just (diesel) smoke and mirrors?

November saw what appears to be amazing news: multinational corporations that supply and use palm oil are publically announcing new and stringent de-forestation and fair labor policies for their companies and individual plantations.  But this weary erstwhile Aceh forest-dweller wonders: will this really translate into Indonesian and Aceh-based support and implementation of these lofty pronouncements?

Some fabulous eco-warrior-type sites and blogs began reporting this month that as a result of concentrated pressure by campaigns led by Rainforest Action Network, Friends of the Earth, Forest Heroes, and a host of other NGOs who mobilized a groundswell of grassroots support, “the number of multinational companies that say they are committed to supplying and using only deforestation-free palm oil is growing fast. More than 20 global food companies have now made no-deforestation pledges and the big traders Wilmar International and Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) have both made commitments that are far stronger than the standards established by the much-maligned Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).” [which is about time--have I not been saying for years that RSPO is a circuitous crock?]

https://time2transcend.wordpress.com/tag/rhino/

Heavy machinery makes new terraces for oil palm trees in freshly cleared forest inside the Leuser Ecosystem. Local activists say this clearing is illegal. Photo: Michael Bachelard.  See Michel’s video of  Aceh rainforest destruction at http://www.smh.com.au/world/acehs-leuser-ecosystem-pays-a-high-price-for-the-peace-dividend-20140502-zr1qh.html

 

“What a difference a season makes!” commented Forest Heroes, reporting that IOI Loders Croklaan, the world’s largest palm oil trader and recently labeled  “The Worst Company You’ve Never Heard Of” by FH, established a palm oil policy this month requiring zero-deforestation sourcing requirements. http://www.forestheroes.org/

However, like me, the gang at Forest Heroes is not so easily charmed by well-paid rhetoric. “This can’t just be a policy on paper,” said FH Director Deborah Lapidus. “Given IOI’s record, they need to move rapidly to make their supply chain transparent, address serious human rights issues, and secure participation from a credible implementation partner. While we welcome IOI’s commitment to apply the new policy to IOI Group, third party suppliers and subsidiaries, we urge IOI Group to formally adopt the zero-deforestation policy right away.”

Most of the companies leaping onto the we-promise-to-be-good-honest-we-do bandwagon have stated compliance dates for some of their holdings/farms/subsidiaries by the end of 2015. “Wilmar has committed to no development of High Carbon Stock (HCS) forests or High Conservation Value (HCV) areas, no burning, a progressive reduction of greenhouse gas emissions on existing plantations, and no development on peat, regardless of depth.  Its commitment also includes zero tolerance of child, forced and bonded labour and no exploitation of local communities. This includes respecting the rights of indigenous and local communities to give or withhold their Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) to operations on lands to which they hold legal, communal or customary rights.”

“A significant initiative was taken in New York in September. Wilmar, Cargill, GAR, and Asian Agri signed the Indonesia Palm Oil Pledge, [see The Forest Trust at http://www.tft-forests.org/news/item/?n=19862] an agreement that includes a commitment to greener palm oil development policies, more social benefits for workers, and further cooperation in establishing a mechanism to implement pledges. The signatories have also called on the Indonesian government to do more to protect forests.”  [I’ll just bet they have.]

In all of these cases, there’s language there that to my mind still keeps the door open for expansion.  And as far as monitoring all of this . . . well that has always been the issue and I cannot find any information on any of these announcements how accurate monitoring (and maintaining) of these policies is to be conducted.

Call me an old pessimist, but . . . no, just go ahead and call me one.  JMD lives right next to these plantations.  I’ll ask the gang how many armed plantation protectors disappear within the next few months—the disgruntled and jobless ex-combatants who are now paid to make sure no one gets too far in to hear the chainsaws or see the women being assaulted. I’ll bet I know the answer.

However, this may (and I stress “may”) signal a tiny new trend.  Palm oil is too lucrative for the very powerful few to go away any time soon.  The Wilmars and Cargills and Dunkin Donuts of the world can (and might) forgo a little profit in order to regain the goodwill of the pastry-eating public.  But the Indonesian government, the Aceh provincial authority, and the local billionaires who cold give a rat’s ass about their own natural resources? Getting transparent, fair and equitable policies and implementation out of them will be damn near impossible, I am sorry to say.

I wish I were wrong.  But I bet we will not see any time soon a headline that reads

“Provincial and National governments abandon plan to re-zone Aceh’s protected forests for commercial use; instead designate all remaining peat and forestland as protected and/or World Heritage Sites”

Go ahead, Forest Heroes, Rainforest Alliance, and all the lobbyists at Wilmar, Cargill and IOI—prove me wrong!!!

Apparently, “What is Sustainability” is the big question this year. I’m so trendy!

I’ve been a little concerned that the Direct Support to Farmers (DSF) Evaluation that JMD is currently conducting In Takengon was relying too much on fairly qualitative data--that is, anecdotal evidence, stories, personal opinions, etc. in determining whether the project was (and remains) useful.  Especially with the majority of publicized reports coming out of large NGOs these days that rely on statistics and charts and averages (ie quantitative data) that, while useful, really don’t get at individual realities, especially in such a wild and data-illusory place as Aceh. JMD staff have been receiving some guidance on how to implement a good evaluation, and our field officers live in the areas in which they work, and are continuously gathering data, compiling case studies, and making individual plans that further a group’s objectives by helping each farmer work on her own challenges.

So it was music to my ears to discover a guy named Michael Quinn Patton, Founder and Director of Utilization-Focused Evaluation. [“Utilization-Focused Evaluation (“U-FE) begins with the premise that evaluations should be judged by their utility and actual use; therefore, evaluators should facilitate the evaluation process and design any evaluation with careful consideration of how everything that is done, from beginning to end, will affect use.”] 

His book Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods underscores the value of in-depth inquiries, long-term studies as opposed to brief questionnaires and quick visits, and the inclusion of the participants/beneficiaries as co-evaluators.  

“If you know how to listen, systematically collect, and rigorously analyze anecdotes, the patterns revealed are windows into what’s going on in the world. It’s true that to the untrained ear, an anecdote is just a casual story, perhaps amusing, perhaps not. But to the professionally trained and attuned ear, an anecdote is scientific data—a note in a symphony of human experience.”

This is all on a really great site called, cleverly, Better Evaluation (www.betterevaluation.org).

I visited Will Allen’s blog on the site called “Addressing sustainability in evaluation,” and found this rather familiar question: “When we talk about a “sustainable future” what do we mean?”

Sustainability . . .  is starting to be thought of as not only about the environment, but about human rights. These rights include ensuring people have access to food, water, health, security and that they have a voice in their decision making. From this perspective we need to place a real focus on those people whose voice is often missed out or marginalized – taking particular care to ensure the input of societal sectors such as Indigenous peoples, and women. In a complex world we are not just looking at setting one path to the future, but working inclusively with a range of stakeholders to ensure a diversity of development pathways to safeguard both the environment and human rights.  

http://betterevaluation.org/blog/addressing_sustainability_in_evaluation

Another blog, by Deborah O’Connell, discusses her 5-year research on biofuels (ring a bell?) and a report she prepared for the World Economic Forum in 2013.

She writes, “Exploring the concept of ‘sustainable biofuels ‘ required gaining an international perspective on not just the food versus fuel dimension of sustainability, but a range of different sustainability aspects, including the carbon footprint, the water use, the clearing of forests and impacts on biodiversity, and the social issues for direct and indirect effects.

What she found, like we all have, is that sustainability is a mercurial little bugger, and “Even with widely accepted definitions for sustainability and sustainable development, the central questions of ‘sustaining what, for whom, where, and for how long?’ remain laden with human values and social choices.”

She outlines, as many do, an outline for a successful and useful evaluation of sustainability—not just projects like ours but ingrained ways of economic life like palm oil production (yeoowww), and while the prose gets rather technical for me (“cumulative-longitudinal; integration at the case an context levels?”  Excuse me while I cut off a finger) I agree with nearly everything she says . . . and then down she goes, into the bureaucrat’s trap (I’m assuming she wrote the entire blog, so I’m giving he credit for it).

Meeting sustainability goals is one of the most important and urgent challenges for humanity yet for many of us, thinking about sustainability in evaluation means assessing the extent to which the benefits of a project, programme or policy are maintained after formal support has ended.

Well . . . yeah. I’m not understanding the “yet” bit—as if making sure the project continues after formal support ends is wrong-headed.

Another view of sustainability, she says, “will help evaluators and commissioners of evaluation to consider the impact of the project (or other forms of intervention) on ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987).”

See this is where I always have a problem.  If she had only said she did not want to compromise the ability and the desire of future generations to meet their own needs” in the manner established by the project or program, I’d agree.

Projects rarely ask if is this a tradition or a cultural identity that beneficiaries would like to preserve, or that they would like their children to preserve. Frankly, if I were a kid in Aceh I’d want to go to college and get as far away from the coffee farm as I could.  So it would be helpful to find out if this is the case.  What of sustainability then? How, really, are you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm? Or in the factory, or on the shrimp boat?

For answers to those questions, I’m going back to Michael Patton, because it is, really, all about knowing how to listen.

World Bank's response re: AAA/Keumang raises more questions than it answers . . . and $6.7 million still unaccounted for

Last week I wrote a letter to World Bank, addressed to one of the compilers of the 65-page EDFF Completion report expressing shock and surprise that it had left JMD out of the final EDFF report as the DSF subcontractor for IOM’s Arabica coffee project (2009-2011).  I was stunned, I tell you—there it was, big as life on the chart: “IOM had no local partner.”  How many hands and eyes did that report have to pass (including IOM’s), and still they omit JMD’s name? Especially considering that one of the requirements of getting EDFF funding was that a foreign NGO MUST have a local partner.

I also asked some slightly pointed questions regarding the AAA/Keumang project, which the report had rated as “moderately unsatisfactory.” 

No, really?

Well, knock me over with a feather, I received a response from their Jakarta office of External Affairs this week, apologizing for the oversight and promising to include JMD in its amended report, and offering some additional (but not much) information on the ill-fated $6.7 million project that never materialized.

The email stated in part that “With regard to your query about the Action Aid Australia and Keumang Foundation sub-project, the Implementation Completion Report has indicated that this project faced a number of implementation delays and procurement issues (page 49), and was scaled back as result of extensive project monitoring. We attach below the link to the report for reference:

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/05/17816499/indonesia-aceh-economic-development-financing-facility-project.

I thought this was cute as the dickens, since my email to them had quoted this very report and mentioned this very page.  So their answer was to quote me back my question.  Probably because the question's subtext went something like this: “You would have only attributed ‘the project’s failure to a number of implementation delays and procurement issues’ and labeled it ‘scaled back as a result of extensive project monitoring’ if you had never visited the project site or did any comprehensive examination of reports.”  I do believe that ‘scaled back as a result of extensive project monitoring’ really means “worked like mad to figure out something different since the original scope was impossible from the outset, the banks were never on board with the scheme, the implementing partner was crooked, and the lead NGO had little idea of what it had gotten into.”  But that would mean that $6.7 million was not well spent, and that just wasn’t something that anyone wants to admit, not at this late date.

The email went on, however, stating that “in February 2014, the World Bank Group announced the debarment of Mr. Yusri Yusuf, Director of the Keumang Foundation, . . .  for a minimum period of five years, in response to allegations of fraudulent and coercive practices under the Aceh Economic Development Financing Facility (EDFF) Project.” The link explains that “an investigation by [the World Bank’s] Integrity Vice Presidency reveal[ed] evidence that Mr. Yusuf submitted fraudulent expenses and made threats in an effort to have the fraudulent expenses paid.  The debarment represents the first sanctions resulting from coercive practices.”

The AAA/Keumang project ran (if you can call it that) from 2008-2009.  Why did the World Bank take 5 years to make the announcement? Why has AAA been so loathe to rat out what was clearly a horrible agency (whose name still makes people spit on the ground every time JMD staff mentions it)?

My response to the folks in External Affairs:

Dear Ms D----

Thanks so much for your prompt reply.  We appreciate your amendments to the EDFF final report, which will now state that JMD was the subcontractor for IOM's Arabica coffee improvement project in Central Aceh.

We are still interested in the AAA/Keumang project, in that we had written to AAA and World Bank several months ago offering to conduct a monitoring and evaluation visit based on AAA's final report to World Bank/EDFF, a copy of which was forwarded to us by AAA. (We were going to seek a small amount funding for this evaluation from either USAID, WB or another interested donor, and wanted to make sure that it would be a useful addition to EDFF's closeout documents.)

JMD was interested in this project for two reasons: 1) it had been conducting a small but successful cocoa improvement and integrated farming project in the same area since 2009, and was hoping to build on AAA's existing work, and 2) JMD had been asked by a cocoa processing company to provide specific IPM trainings to farmers in some of the locations indicated in AAA's report as containing their beneficiaries.  In March 2012 and again in early 2013 and 2014, staff traveled to those areas to determine the extent of the AAA/Keumang project's completion, to avoid duplication of services.

With very few exceptions, staff could find no evidence of any of the project goals as being completed in terms of construction, materials/equipment, or pre-paid services such as 5-year advance payments for rental facilities.

Since Keumang was tasked with, among other things, participatory rural appraisal and developing baseline data, we understand that it is difficult to gauge the extent to which these particular services were delivered and the funds legitimately allocated to this component.  But as a small agency that was not given the opportunity to bid on this project, and who could most likely have completed it successfully for far less than half of the $6.7million total cost, JMD is interested in learning where exactly  that $6.7 million went.  AAA reports that it spent all of its allocation, and yet both your report and theirs state that many interventions were "scaled back." 

We were not allowed to see the financials for this project, and so have had to make some assumptions based on information which may be incomplete.  However, to date we have not encountered anyone acquainted with that project who knows of any part of it, save one-half of a co-op's construction, that was completed. 

Prior to making any claims of fraudulent activity regarding this project in the link you have provided, we wanted to see if we could pursue the matter through a formal evaluation to determine exactly what services were provided to the 4,000 farmers in north/east Aceh.  Our primary goal is to help these communities become economically self-sufficient stewards of the natural resources that surround them; encouraging production of this carbon-neutral commodity is beneficial to the entire province.   By highlighting the components of this project that have not been sufficiently addressed, we hope that possible future funding requests will be understood by the donor community as not duplicating an effort already addressed by EDFF.

Thanks again for your time and assistance.

See? I can be diplomatic when I want to be.

But it’s killing me, because still, nobody knows (or is telling) where that $6.7 million went. 

And next time, I’ll tell you something even more bizarre: reports that in 2012, supposedly long after this project closed and slunk away and AAA left Indonesia, AAA signed MoUs with Bappeda in Aceh for the same project . . . it’s like the Twilight Zone, I swear.

Interested in seeing how successful a program is? Ask your beneficiaries!

That’s what JMD did when it wanted to check in on its 1,000+ farmer coffee improvement project in central Aceh, which finished in 2011.

This is Takengon--mountains and valleys . . . and lots of Arabica coffee

Since JMD is local, it always keeps track of the projects that it’s initiated in Aceh.  Many international NGOs don’t have that opportunity; once a project is over, they leave the country, and over the past 10 years, the implementing partners they funded (but did not train to be autonomous) could no longer stay open.  This was not the case with JMD’s Direct Support to Coffee Farmers (DSF) project, which was a subcontract of IOM’s EDFF-funded coffee value chain improvement project. However, as we’ve discovered, sustainability means different things to different people, and neither EDFF nor World Bank required any type of follow-up. JMD checked with IOM to make sure; former DSF agriculture extensionists reported that IOM was doing a non-agriculture project in a different district but had not returned to Takengon to see how farmers were doing. 

 

So, since both JMD and I have been stressing the value of insuring that projects continue long after the implementer and the donor have gone, JMD decided to conduct a month-long M&E (monitoring and evaluation) visit in Takengon.  JMD’s new Field Officer starts tomorrow (November 1), and he’ll be interviewing local leaders, Co-op representatives, peer farmer educators, and the coffee farmers themselves to collect sample data on the effectiveness of the project, from actual harvest data to information on the usefulness of the trainings and materials provided. I will  keep you posted.

 

The coffee farms in Takengon were more established and far greater in scope than the cocoa farms in Simpang Jernih.

Most of the nearly 1,200 farms were quite profitable, and comprised the bulk of the respective farmers’ livelihoods.   

And all benefited significantly from cultivation, harvest and post-harvest trainings, and the “Pyramid scheme” model of JMD’s trainers training 50 farmers who in turn were each in charge of 20 farmers made it possible to reach the great majority of coffee farmers in that area.  

 Here, an AEW (Agriculture Extension Worker/Peer farmer educator) explains how to set seeds for a coffee nursery.

 

Of course, we had$750 to run the project, and it employed 56 people, provided extensive equipment and materials, and lasted three years.  So we'd really like to know if it is continuing to be helpful!

 

JMD's extension experts  conducted weekly trainings throughout the district on topics ranging from proper harvest techniques to nursery maintenance to IPM (integrated pest management).  On many farms, women and men shared equally in the responsibilities and decision making.

 

So stay tuned for reports on the progress of our coffee project evaluation.  I’m hoping for good things.  And if there are issues, this gives JMD a chance to help resolve them and keep Takengon producing some of the best coffee in the country.