There was an important development on the palm oil front yesterday.
• Back in January, five of the big palm oil producers (including Sime Darby, one of Forum For The Future’s Partner companies), plus Unilever, issued the Sustainable Palm Oil Manifesto.
• One of the commitments in the Manifesto was to establish a high level Steering Committee to undertake a thorough review of all the scientific work done so far on what is called “High Carbon Stock”.
• I agreed to Chair that Steering Committee (together with Dr John Raison from CSIRO in Canberra), and we invited two NGOs (WWF and Forest People’s Programme) to join as full members. And we invited Greenpeace to join as an observer.
• After somewhat tortuous discussions, they all declined, on the grounds that they did not believe that the Manifesto (in itself) provided a sufficiently robust reassurance that growers would not develop on “potential HCS land” while the Study was going on. (It will take a year).
• The growers felt they had already provided exactly that kind of reassurance through existing compliance with new planting procedures under the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil.
• Standoff!
• Over the last couple of months, we’ve made really good progress on scoping the work programme for our Study, and on putting together a group of very eminent scientists to oversee the work.
• On that basis, the growers have now issued a new statement regarding the question of avoiding “potential HCS land” in any new developments, avoiding any remaining doubts as to their intention.
• That statement is here.
• We will now see what kind of response we get from the NGOs.