Carrots, Sticks and Palm Oil: the RSPO and the myth of sustainability

Michael Bachelard’s great article (with video!) on the continued destruction of Aceh’s protected forests by palm oil barons and mining companies was followed here by a further exploration of the post-conflict “boom” in the corporate and government-sponsored assault on the Leuser ecosystem by Bobby Anderson. To round out this ghastly trinity of economic and environmental doom I’d like to reprint a 2013 article by Philip Jacobson from the Indonesian magazine Tempo, which provides and update on my posts a few months ago regarding the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).  This entity, established with international donor funding including grants from the World Bank, has gone on to become a parody of itself.  Its extensive branding campaign has touted palm oil as “sustainable” and “green,” while it completely disregards its own regulations requiring regular monitoring for environmental protection, worker conditions, and community concerns.  I was going to say “community development,” but the administration of Aceh has now made this their new buzz phrase for unlimited deforestation and extraction, profiting government officials and the corporate heads and plantation owners. 

I am very excited that I have learned to embed entire documents into this blog so you can read the whole thing below.  I’d like to draw your attention, however, to interview with Tim Benton at the end of the article.  Dr Benton was the keynote speaker at the RSPO 2013 convention and is employed by the United Kingdom “to coordinate thinking on food security challenges over the next decades.”  He says in part: “I think the danger is thinking you can convert the whole of Malaysia or Indonesia into a plantation forest and for it to be sustainable with one or two little blips, small little remnants of forest where you put the orangutans.  You can’t ignore the large-scale problems. If you convert the whole of Indonesia into that same thing then it becomes unsustainable on a spatial scale. Then you’ve got the temporal scale: what looks good over a five-year period or a 10-year period, over a 50 or 100 period looks like shite.” 

The Leuser Ecosystem--and all protected forests in Aceh-- are still under seige, and worse than ever

Our new best friend and favorite journalist, Michael Bachelard has just published the first of two long articles that he wrote after his trip to Aceh last month.  He had also visited the province to write about the political, social and security climate there pre-legislative elections; we posted that article in early April.  I’ve been following his work on deforestation in Aceh for over two years; he’s simply the best reporter of exactly how and why this tragedy is allowed to continue, even after national forest protection orders, civil lawsuits, death and fear and impoverishment of the communities who’ve lived for generations in the area  surrounding the rain forest.  JMD was fortunate enough to meet Michael on his recent visit and travel with him to see the cocoa production project that JMD has been assisting. The article below was published in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age; you should go to the Age’s website because it includes a short video that MIchael took. In 5 minutes you can witness the horror that is happening just a few kilometers from where JMD is trying to help women farmers rebuild the economy of their communities in the wake of the 30-year civil conflict.  It sure looks like a (new) losing battle.

Aceh's Leuser Ecosystem pays a high price for the peace dividend

Michael Bachelard May 03, 2014  

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

Kuala Simpang, Aceh: On the map, the Leuser Ecosystem is shaped like a gigantic pair of lungs. The image is apt. This 2.6 million hectare expanse of tropical forest that spans Aceh and North Sumatra in Indonesia is one of the largest remaining oxygen factories in a country that’s become infamous for slashing and burning its trees. 

Environmental activists such as Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program’s Dr Ian Singleton calls Leuser ''Asia’s last great wilderness'', the only place in the world where orangutans, rhinoceroses, elephants and tigers still roam free together. It’s that way partly because, for well over a decade, the forest provided refuge to GAM separatist rebels fighting a guerilla war against Jakarta.

Since peace was reached in 2005, though, separatist sentiment has turned against the trees. Leuser has come under serious pressure from palm oil barons, illegal loggers and mining companies and the former rebels who now run Aceh’s provincial government have given a green light to development in the name of economic independence and political strength. On the ground, the clearing has begun.

Matsum has lived in and around the Leuser area his entire life and, since 2006, has worked to preserve it. In the past year or so, he says the task has become increasingly fraught.

''We want to protect the forest but the companies just want to make big business,'' Matsum says. ''Now suddenly there is so much activity inside the forest.''

About two hours drive up a dirt road from the south-eastern Aceh town of Kuala Simpang, a hand-painted sign is hammered into the ground by the road. It purports to prevent anyone from entering land owned by the palm oil company PT Mustika Prima Lestari Indah. We are lucky, though, on a sleepy public holiday, that the lone guard makes no attempt to stop us entering.

Inside, almost every tree has been freshly stripped from the rolling hills and valleys. The few remaining sentinels, kempas trees, are scorched by fire. In the distance, heavy machines are gouging terraces into the hillsides in preparation for the young oil palm seedlings to be planted.

According to Matsum, this land is supposed to be protected forest. The clearing is therefore illegal. He says he has complained to the local government but nothing was done. In fact, the Bupati (the head of the local government), Hamdan Sati, tried to convince him that the area was a ''community plantation''.

''The community doesn’t own this,'' Matsum insists. ''A big company owns it and the community will just be paid to clear it.''

Perhaps it does not help that the Bupati himself owns a palm oil company, PT Mapoli Raya, and his business partner is the head of the local Oil Palm Growers’ Association,  which helped him get elected.

''Community development'' is how the Aceh government refers to its opening up of the forests, but evidence from this area suggests that, here at least, it’s a cover for the same old, bad practices.

In nearby Kaloy village, the community knows that the new development will not benefit them. Village woman Asiyah says people who work in the plantations are paid about $29 per week: ''not even enough for our daily lives''.

In the coffee house, Chaeruddin Ambe tells the long history of plantation owners obtaining title over their land.

Developers, ''Chinese [Indonesian] people from Medan'', first came in 1995 with the police and local military to ''negotiate'' with the villagers for land, promising  that 10 per cent of its area would be set aside for local people. The company ''would be like our foster parent'', they said.

But when a permit for 538 hectares was issued, there was no land for locals. The company even had four men arrested as they tried to tap their own rubber trees. 

Soon, though, the separatist war and the presence of rebels meant ''everyone was afraid to go in there'', and development stopped, Chaeruddin says.

After the 2004 tsunami and the 2005 peace deal was signed in Helsinki, the concession had magically expanded to 2496 hectares: ''We don’t know how that happened''.

In the immediate post-tsunami period, though, the forest gained another reprieve. Aceh elected as governor a former GAM combatant called Irwandi Yusuf, who took advice from international environmental NGOs and promoted the radical notion of green growth.

The Leuser Ecosystem includes the Gunung Leuser national park and hundreds of thousands of hectares of surrounding areas and, in 2007, the entire area was given protection under national government laws. Some production forest concessions exist within its boundaries, but Irwandi vowed to protect it all from development.

He appointed rangers and created a government authority, BPKEL, to oversee it. Deara Putra, 22,  was a park ranger and he spent 15 to 20 days each month living in the forest and watching for illegal loggers. He caught plenty too, he says.

Matsum, who now works for local environmental group the Hakka Foundation, said in those times 24 plantations in the area were operating illegally, and 18 of them were taken to court. Other plantation owners gave up their acreage to avoid being taken to court. Some illegally cleared areas were even regenerated as forest.

But Governor Irwandi’s model of green growth lasted only as long as he lasted in power. The 2012 governor’s election saw Zaini Abdullah, the leader of a different faction of former GAM rebels, elected as governor. His party, Partei Aceh, dominated parliamentary elections too.

After Zaini’s election, BPKEL was disbanded, the Leuser Ecosystem’s buffer zone literally wiped from the map, and the bulk of the rangers sacked. It did not take long for the bulldozers to start up again. 

In Kaloy village, the long-delayed palm oil concession was activated and the clearing and planting began. Already the young oil palm trees are sucking up water at the rate of about 8 litres per tree per day, and the river level is dropping.

''Where should our grandchildren find water?'' worries Asiyah. ''When I was younger, the water was quite deep, now it’s quite shallow.'' 

Others have also recently come looking for land. One old man, Nanang, from a neighbouring village, says a mining exploration helicopter piloted by an Australian spent a week taking off and landing from the field in front of his house, flying forays over the forest.

A nearby hill, covered in lush forest is being targeted for its dolomite lime, an ingredient in cement.

In the midst of this, Aceh has drawn up a new spatial plan. But because the Leuser Ecosystem was removed, Aceh’s plan was rejected earlier this year by the central government in Jakarta. The local parliament, though, has ignored Jakarta’s ruling and enacted its plan regardless, reactivating long dormant logging and palm oil concessions.

Politically, meanwhile, the argument over the spatial plan and development in general is one of several issues (including the design of the provincial flag)  which is provoking once again the separatist sentiments that once saw Aceh at war with Jakarta.

Many in Aceh believe the Helsinki accord allowed them complete autonomy over natural resources, and that Jakarta is blocking its implementation.

''We have been colonised and our natural resources taken away from us,'' says Maimun Ramli, convenor of Partei Aceh’s 2014 election campaign and head of the Monitoring Group for the Implementation of the Peace Agreement in Aceh.

''If (true self-government) is not granted, we will take up arms again.''

The head of the Aceh development planning board, Abubakar Karim says ''of course'' Aceh should have more control over its natural resources.

''But we don’t want big rich people to benefit,'' says the man who helped design the spatial plan. ''What we want is to make the Aceh people prosperous … by giving people back their land.''

Abubakar insists his government is about ''community development'', and blames Jakarta, not the provincial government in Banda Aceh for the large-scale clearing that’s under way.

As for abolishing the Leuser Ecosystem, he says the idea of a land buffer was ''about outsiders trying to manage Aceh’s forests, especially the NGOs and the central government''.

If Jakarta is a dirty word in Aceh now, in the coffee shops of Banda Aceh and Lhokseumawe, where former combatants gather to talk, admitting to being from an international NGO is like uttering a profanity.

Abubakar says environmentalists are outsiders only interested in ''shouting and protesting'' about Aceh’s forests as a means of raising funds from donors.

For Matsum, whose lonely work in a local NGO in Leuser is supported by foreign donors, it makes for an uphill battle. 

''I continue to advocate, but since BPKEL was disbanded and the rangers lost their jobs, we basically find that we are powerless.''

See the video:

The Price of Palm Oil

Michael Bachelard journeys into the world of palm oil plantations in Aceh, where land is taken to grow the sought-after product, whatever the cost.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/acehs-leuser-ecosystem-pays-a-high-price-for-the-peace-dividend-20140501-zr1qh.html

Avoided deforestation or avoiding the issue? The “geography of evasion”

I have to admit I took that title from the REDD Monitor’s January 14^th article regarding USAID’s forest carbon project in West Bali National Park in Indonesia. (REDD = reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation)

The whole thing caught my eye because since the March 2013 realization that new Governor Zaini Abdullah was planning on re-zoning protected forest to make it “productive” (ie, a palm oil pipeline) there haven’t been many recent articles on deforestation in Aceh.  Also because JMD has been trying to get USAID Jakarta’s attention since 2008 and with the exception of the radar blip of the Deputy Mission Director and “Strategy Implementation Advisor” being nice to me when I visited their offices to beg for funds in December 2012, JMD has received bupkus in terms of assistance, returned emails/phone calls, or even requests to keep us up to date on projects in the country.

Now, I don’t want to get USAID mad.  JMD needs their support.  But this latest brainstorm of theirs is just so shockingly naïve (or politically motivated with respect to extraction interests) that I am hard pressed to think they would even consider funding a project that actually addressed true and rampant deforestation, no matter how sweet we are to them.  Even the commenters were astounded. The highlighted text is mine. And a lot of the technical references have been cut—not to bolster my point because it doesn’t need it, but just so that you will read to the end, even with some of the jargon in there.  It is really important to know how these programs work, and the fact that they are in their infancy and yet billions are being thrown at them is something we all should be concerned about.  The REDD Monitor is.  That’s enough for me.

January 21, 2014

Last week, a small announcement appeared on the website of the US Embassy in Jakarta: “The United States government and the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry today launched a new rainforest standard for carbon credits in West Bali National Park.”

It’s an extraordinary project. In a country faced with very high rates of deforestation, this is a forest carbon trading project in a national park.

The project will be carried out by the University of Columbia, the University of Indonesia and the Sustainable Management Group with funding from USAID.

Jatna Supriatna, head of the University of Indonesia’s Research Center for Climate Change, told the Bali Daily that, “We have set a target that within the next one year or two, we will have discovered the appropriate and standardized mechanism to develop carbon credits using the RFS [Rainforest Standard] system.”

Supriatna explained that the aim was to sell carbon credits on the voluntary market. Part of the profits are to be used for conservation of the West Bali National Park.

. . .  Tedy Sutedi, head of the park, welcomed the initiative to designate the park as the pilot project for research, saying that it would support the park’s management plan to reduce deforestation rates. He said that based on continuous monitoring, no deforestation occurred in the park, however, there were some cases of ornamental fish and wood thefts by locals.

So the National Park already has a management plan aimed at reducing deforestation rates. And according to Sutedi, it’s very successful, as there is no deforestation in the Park.

. . .The project developers have to prove that the project is additional before carbon credits can be sold. They have to prove that deforestation would have continued or increased in the absence of the project. That’s going to be tricky under the rules of the “Rainforest Standard” that the US Embassy mentions in its press release.

 . . . In his comment for the Bali Daily, Zulkifli Hasan, Indonesia’s Foresty Minister, read from Columbia University’s website:  “The Rainforest Standard is based on the fundamental understanding that the environment, economy, and society are ‘in it together’.”

At the launch of the project, Andrew Sisson, USAID mission director in Indonesia, said that,

“Through this initiative, Indonesia is at the leading edge of preserving biodiversity and setting conservation standards. We believe that scientific collaboration between the US and Indonesia can help to address the challenge of global climate change.”

This claim is ludicrous, based as it is on a project that has yet to start and which is aimed at protecting forest in a National Park in Bali. The project will do nothing to address the drivers of deforestation in Indonesia and less to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel.

Robin Biddulph, a researcher at the Department of Human Geography at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, describes such projects as “Geographies of Evasion”. He explains the concept as “implementing interventions in places where they do not make a difference”.

Comments [I have edited these comments to only include the most basic language about the common sense (or lack thereof) of conducting a deforestation measurement project in a national park with little deforestation.  Both commenters are well-versed in the carbon-credit/biomass removal language, but it is pretty mind-bending so I eliminated it.]

Comment 1  We applaud the author’s concerns that any REDD or REDD-like project demonstrate real and verifiable reductions in carbon emissions. . . . .
Unfortunately, the author is incorrect in asserting that The RFS precludes government gazetted Protected Areas because they do not pass a three-level additionality test. The RFS explicitly states the following:
“ER1: The RFS™ endorses the strict Legal Additionality Test, but allows one exception under very limited circumstances: i.e. where there is a history of recent and repeated Tree Biomass removals inside a Protected Area.
Limiting evidence of removals to those that have occurred inside a Protected Area eliminates consideration of threats from external Drivers of Deforestation such as highway construction or expanding farming and ranching activity. In the view of The RFS™, outside threats should not be considered because the law has already recognized those threats when prohibiting removals inside the Protected Area. In other words, external threats to a Protected Area cannot trigger a finding of Additionality; instead there must be evidence that the Protected Area is experiencing recent and repeated Tree Biomass removals despite its legal protection, i.e., there is clear evidence of ineffective enforcement in the Protected Area. The RFS™ recognizes that there may also be examples of ineffective enforcement of laws against removing Tree Biomass outside of Protected Areas; however, the extent to which any Project Proponent is complicit or compliant with respect to illegal removals is presently deemed too difficult to determine. The RFS™ makes the presumption that the Governmental Authority managing a Protected Area would not be so complicit or compliant. Therefore, The RFS™ retains strict legal Additionality for all Project Areas other than Protected Areas[1].
[1] Reduced Removals in Protected Areas will be able to earn a special form of RFS Credit™ to be known as RFS Protected Area Credits™. Important features of RFS Protected Area Credits™ include: (a) proceeds from their sale must be used solely for the social, environmental, and economic well-being of the Protected Area and its Rightsholders; (b) the credits cannot be resold or transferred by the initial purchaser, and therefore will not be subject to market price fluctuations or speculation; and (c) credit purchase agreements will be long-term and performance-based. RFS Protected Area Credits™ will be used to financially support management of Protected Areas to reduce their deforestation and degradation consistent with the integrated social, environmental, and economic well-being practices required by The Rainforest Standard. . . .  Based on on-the-ground experience of this group of nearly 70 practitioners [who created the Rainforest Standards], a conservative method was developed to include Protected Areas. Why? Because in all but a very few countries, Protected Areas are not protected. The principal reason for the lack of protection is a lack of funding to underwrite a Best Practices Management Plan that includes all stakeholders in the protection of the Protected Area.

Comment 2 [to previous commenter]:.1. Deforestation in West Bali National Park is low compared to many other areas of Indonesia (whether or not they are inside national parks).
2. Determining how much carbon is saved from entering the atmosphere as a result of a REDD project is fiendishly complicated. It’s difficult to measure the carbon accurately and it’s even more difficult to guess what would have happened in the absence of the project. Having said that, it’s even more difficult to stop deforestation in areas of current rapid deforestation such as Sumatra or Kalimantan or where the threat of deforestation is high .  . . . If the aim is to reduce deforestation in Indonesia, why is stopping deforestation in the West Bali National Park a priority?
3. If the aim is to stop deforestation in national parks in Indonesia, why start in a national park with very little deforestation?
4. How much money has the University of Columbia received from USAID for the Rainforest Standard project in total? 

http://www.redd-monitor.org/2014/01/21/avoided-deforestation-or-avoiding-the-issue-usaids-forest-carbon-project-in-west-bali-national-park-in-indonesia/#more-14782

The Lords of Extraction: World Wildlife Fund’s laudable but misguided hope to get palm oil under control

It seems that everyone is enrolling in the "If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em" school these days regarding palm oil. It’s a near-useless commodity, it depletes the soil of any nutrients, and it grows in fragile areas that have to be destroyed in order for it to survive. Indeed, what’s not to love?

I’ve never seen a large international donor or NGO dispute this, and yet palm oil plays such a big part in political relations between countries (ie it makes people wildly rich and powerful and so it is in a country’s best interests to not threaten that) that the only thing these foreign (and sometimes national) entities can do is embrace palm oil and try to find some redeeming value to its cultivation.

What USAID came up with about 4 years ago was an initiative to turn palm oil waste into biofuel. Translation: it’s a horrible crop but at least we can make something from its garbage. Of course, we have to make more of it to make more garbage to make the biofuel producers (and consumers) happy, but what the heck.

See, once you’re on the palm oil train . . . difficult to get off.

Indonesia and Malaysia produce 80% of the world’s palm oil.

Lucky, lucky them.

Agencies like World Wildlife Fund sigh and say, well, okay, palm oil sucks but so do a lot of other commodities and so the thing to do is make its cultivation sustainable.

Which is like saying we’re going to make Ghengis Kahn a pacifist, but okay, I’ll bite.

What does “sustainable” palm oil look like?

Here’s what it looks like in WWF’s project areas.

Welcome to WWF’s Forest Conversion Program (Gee, I’m liking the sound of that.)

Briefly, and minus the jargon that gave me a headache: The goal of the FCP is to ensure that “high conservation value forests” and the plant and animal species that live in them “are no longer threatened by the expansion of palm oil and soy.” This project builds on a 2001 initiative called the Forest Conservation Initiative, that WWF claims to have been successful in “engaging relevant stakeholders;” and in fact it was chiefly responsible for the creation of the 2004 Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) of which I have spoken so fondly in previous posts.

“The rationale behind the roundtables is that development of criteria, their implementation and the mainstream procurement of responsibly/sustainably produced raw materials will transform the markets and thus reduce the pressure on areas with high conservation values.”

And we know what came out of that. RSPO representatives notified us that the regulations and activities were developed by the palm oil companies, and that evaluation and monitoring of any of their recommendations/best practices has yet to be done.

And I’m also still waiting to find out about the “sustainable” in “sustainable palm oil.” If we know that palm oil palms destroy the dirt in which they sit for 25 years, which is one of the reasons for such exponential expansion and forest destruction, how can this practice be “sustainable” and unthreatening to existing forests at the same time? Because sustainability, when applied to palm oil, means the enterprise, not the environment or the local community. Sure, palm oil cultivation can be sustained—as long as you keep churning up the forest to create the stuff.

But I digress.

The Forest Conversion Program believes that the RSPO will “transform the production of palm oil . . . by engaging companies that produce, trade or use products containing palm oil . . . [as well as] the banks and other institutions that finance those companies.”

What does it mean to “engage” a company or a bank? And why would a palm oil company want to be “engaged” in a way that it currently is not?

Concurrently, policy dialogues in producing countries [who is having these dialogues? God, I adore the use of the passive voice. It allows for such . . . hypnotic acceptance of whatever is being shoveled out] will lead to the adoption [by whom?] of a participatory landscape-level [I’m twitching now] land use planning methodology modeled after the high conservation value area (HCVA) concept. [And I am sure it is been vetted thoroughly with the local communities who actually own the land, or the general population who voted for the politicians who vowed to preserve the forests.]

“The project . . . will motivate producers to adopt environmentally and socially responsible practices, including the protection of areas with high conservation value. This strategy will be reinforced by local support in key producing areas aimed at testing and implementing appropriate better management practices and participatory land use planning ”

And monkeys, as they say . . .

But I digress again. I really am not being an obstinate old leftie. I am sincerely interested to know how this project will in any way motivate palm oil agribusiness to “adopt environmentally and socially responsible practices.” There is no monetary incentive. In Indonesia, the incentive is to make more palm oil, whatever the human or environmental cost. The Project could try to get a government on board and actually punish law-breakers, but that’s not going to happen any time soon in Aceh, where the top 4 wealthiest Indonesians include palm oil barons.

WWF goes on to outline its goals for the project, which was presumably completed in 2011. By 2010 most goals were to have been met, and the majority of these goals involved company “certifications” of some sort by the RSPO. Which, as we have seen (and heard from RSPO spokespeople) don’t mean diddly.

Next!

Another component is to get from 14-40% of large European and Asian buyers involved in the project through accepting palm oil only from companies that have this certification. So: wildly successful = 40% from certified companies. And crtification means: documents and policies.

WWF sees its role in all this as a participant in the roundtables to make sure that “robust and time-bound delivery mechanisms are put in place and enforced” and also to keep the commodities buyers involved in the discussion.

I would like to ask WWF how it is ensuring that the “delivery mechanisms” are “being enforced.” But that seems like kicking a puppy; there is no enforcement possible at this point.

Both palm oil and soy roundtables have the ambition to develop widely accepted criteria to mitigate adverse ecological and social effects. Subsequently, these criteria are to be implemented by producers and buyers, in order to eventually reform respective supply chains. As the initiator of both roundtables, WWF should stay involved in the governance bodies, as well as ensuring that its corporate members implement and procure sustainable palm oil and soy. This should include liaising with other NGOs to ensure that corporate members deliver and stay actively involved (good cop vs bad cop-roles).

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to start cutting out pictures of the Aceh rainforest for my scrapbook, because that’s the only way we’re ever going to remember what it looked like.

For an update (of sorts) on WWF's involvement in the (surprise!) unwillingness of palm oil companies to be transparent and conservation-minded, see its November 13^th article, Palm oil sustainability body boosts complaints handling, mapping requirements

http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/successes/?212354/palm-oil-sustainability-body-boosts-complaints-handling-mapping-requirements