Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

Migros came to WWF and said, how can we work together to address this problem of unsustainable production of palm oil globally? And out of that process, out of that first engagement, came a small collaboration with a handful of retailers and producers and NGOs, civil society organizations, who came together to begin to develop principles for sustainable production of palm oil.

And so was created the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

RSPO and RSPO, those parties and a growing number of stakeholders from each sector worked together over the years that followed to develop a standard for sustainability in that sector.

Now, if you think about it for a minute, you realize that of course, that's a daunting undertaking because having all the stakeholders together is essential for credibility and could be essential for impact, but it also makes it very difficult to get to agreement on what a standard should be.

And remember, Indonesia accounts for more than half of all global production.

You saw the four largest producers of palm oil in Indonesia step up and say they too were gonna be part of this movement, that they would commit to eliminating deforestation from their production.

And so you get to 2014, that's, well, 13 years after Migros and WWF started the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, about six years after the first campaign against Unilever.

2014, you have 60, 70, some would guess 80% of the sector, that is companies that account for 60, 70, 80% of production committed to eliminating deforestation from this sector.

So, yeah, if we look for that label, I think we can do our part in not contributing to a palm oil link to fire.

I want to look out for, what's it called again? RPD? RSPO, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

And it's easily identifiable labels on the front of the packaging or maybe the back.

You know, sometimes these labels like, you know, prominence is important.

It's been fascinating learning about some of these approaches, the beef aspect as well, and Meatless Mondays, everybody's one option.

to start, to start.

And of course, some of the labeling that we can all look out for from the RSPO label to that suggestion earlier on of the UDR compliant scheme as well.

This has been Talk Back.

And this led to the view of palm oil and other plantations having had a role back then because rapid expansion was very much the key of the day.

And this pressure helped lead to the roundtable on sustainable palm oil, which was set up by the WWF and industry in around 2004.

So that took a few years.

The 2015 haze then pushed the no deforestation, no peat pleasures very fast indeed.

You're all the time referencing things like that.

And this has us, you know, like with RSPO certification and the supply chain models, it's a heads up to people in a business and it gives people evidence that this batch is coming in like this because otherwise it's about head office communicating to head office and that doesn't always work it needs to be day-to-day so it was just something that I was intrigued about and I think just related to EUDR, if I may, was that that was a question of, well, how are people going to move the due diligence reference number along? And will that appear on paperwork? Because that will be the easiest way to do it.

So it has been a conversation I've been having this week.

So, yeah, I think it's a really good idea.

I wonder why Indonesia hesitated when Singapore and Malaysia offered their help weeks ago.

Looks like the RSPO does not work at all.

And perhaps we should all boycott palm oil products altogether.

But to your point, how do you even do that? You literally cannot.

But yeah, I would still try to look for certifications.

It's the best we can do, right, as consumers, if we have time, to look for an FSC, Forest Stewardship Council logo or an RSPO logo on the back of cooking oil as a proxy to at least try to do something that's a bit better for the

planet.

Yeah.

So when we go back over 10 years, we really looked at the fat levels and we changed the oil.

From palm oil to RSPO, palm, and now to a special sunflower oil.

And we brought the fat level down by more than 15 to 20 percent.

On top of that, we brought the... saturated fat down by more than 75% by doing that.