Can sustainable palm oil be certified at state or even national level?

Palm oil, now mostly grown in South East Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, originated in West Africa. Once, this was the main region that exported the commodity.

In more recent years, production has declined. Recently in Nigeria, for example, the country couldn’t meet local requirements, let alone be exported.

Now, production is stepping up once again in Edo State, one of Nigeria’s main palm-producing regions. But this time around, they want to do things more sustainably. Rather than certifying an individual palm oil mill or company, the state government sought to certify the entirety of Edo State.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Pal Oil (RSPO) has previously been primarily a certification body for producers. Now, it wants to provide certification for whole jurisdictions: states, yes, but countries as well.

What is the jurisdictional approach?Rather than certifying an individual mill, the jurisdictional approach certifies an entire jurisdiction, or area. It allocates legal requirements and authority to a ‘jurisdictional entity’, which has a multi-stakeholder governing body.

According to the RSPO, this will develop an internal control system to facilitate full compliance with the RSPO’s standards.

The jurisdictional approach does not certify individual companies, but entire areas.

Certifying on a state levelIn order for palm oil to be considered sustainable, it must not be linked to large-scale deforestation. When the land of Edo State was audited, explains Churchill Ebehitale Oboh, general manager of the Edo State Palm programme office, they realised that levels of forest had experienced a large scale decline.

“Areas that we had previously called forest were no longer forest,” he says. “So we wanted to put this land to to use and the best way was to put it into agriculture. And the commodity that we thought of [using] was oil palm.”

Growing the commodity sustainably involves protecting areas of high carbon value and high carbon stock forests, he explains. Furthermore, he says, the programme returned certain areas back to forest.

Certifying at a national levelIt is not only states that can be certified under the jurisdictional approach, but countries as well. One such country that is being piloted for certification under the scheme is Ecuador.

When working at a national level, explains Ruth Salvador, manager of the north Amazon landscape for Conservation International Ecuador, means incorporating sustainable production into national policy.

Conservation International works with a range of stakeholders, Salvador says, not only Ecuador’s national government, but local governments and international companies working within the country. They have created incentives for good agricultural production.

Policy, she explains, is a way of making interventions long-term.

Will products certified through the jurisdictional approach be EUDR-compliant? Products from areas under the jurisdictional approach will be EUDR compliant, suggests Edo State’s Oboh, and the process will be made easier by the certification as due diligence will be less complex.

“If we have the jurisdictional approach fully implemented in different regions of the world, it will be easy for trades to happen.”

Also read → EUDR compliance a challenge for Thai palm oilThis does not mean that there won’t be challenges to attaining such a certification. Balancing the needs of local communities with requirements to be sustainable is already a complex process, suggests Sophie Gett, sustainability manager for Hargy Oil Palms. The entering into force of the EUDR will only add to such challenges.

Gett works in Papua New Guinea, a country of over 80% forest cover. The introduction of the EUDR, whose definition of ‘forest’ is different from that of the RSPO, will make striking such a balance even harder than it was already.

“These communities, they understand sustainability, they want to produce sustainably. But they have limitations,” she explains.

For example, the parameters of the EUDR changes the amount of land available for smallholders to expand to.

What are the jurisdictional approach’s disadvantages?The jurisdictional approach covers far more ground than an ordinary RSPO certification. This means that it takes longer to get said certification, suggests Conservation International’s Salvador. Thus, businesses who need an individual certification, and need it quickly, may not want to choose this one.

However, what is lost in speed is made up for by scale, as such an approach can certify a greater range of stakeholders. For example, in the Ecuador context, the involvement of the government alongside the private sector gives the jurisdictional approach a greater scope than an ordinary certification has.

The multiple agendas, adds Nazlan Mohamad, sustainability general manager for Sawit Kinabalu Group, make the process more complex, as all these different agendas must be aligned.