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Editorial: Damaging Our Green Campaign
Editorial: Damaging Our Green Campaign
01/07/2013 (Jakarta Post) - Indonesia, the 2013 chair of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), which will hold its summit meeting in Bali in early October, has launched a concerted campaign to include palm oil and rubber on the APEC list of environmental goods (EG), thereby entitling these commodities to import tariffs of 5 percent maximum.
The government lobbied the APEC ministers of trade at their meeting in Surabaya in April, but still failed to lead the ministers into a consensus to include both commodities on the EG list due mainly to objections from influential economies within APEC, notably the US.
Trade Minister Gita Wirjawan visited Washington DC early last month to lobby the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to send a fact-finding mission to Indonesia to evaluate whether palm oil and rubber were qualified for classification as environmental goods.
The EPA did send a team, which concluded its evaluation last week. The team is expected to announce its verdict later this month. Particularly worrying, though, is the fact that the visit coincided with the massive forest fires in Sumatra, which have caused what has been claimed to be the worst haze ever in Riau province, Singapore and Malaysia.
Yet more damaging to the green campaign was the preliminary finding by the Environment Ministry that many of the fires that have blanketed parts of Singapore and Malaysia in thick, choking smoke over the past two weeks were caused by slash-and-burn farming techniques to clear land for oil palm plantations and other agricultural products.
The latest incidence of forest fires further validates the allegations by many international environmental organizations that the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, has caused deforestation and damaged peat lands, which are home to globally significant carbon reserves.
Last October, another EPA team that visited Indonesia concluded that Indonesian palm oil could not be included in the US renewable-fuel program based on its assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from biofuel production, distribution and tailpipe emissions.
It is pointless to reemphasize the urgent need for Indonesia to step up its efforts to force big companies to promote sustainable plantation development. It will be a significant loss if palm oil cannot qualify as an EG because, compared to other vegetable oil crops such as sunflower, soybean and rapeseed, palm oil requires less than half the land area to produce the same amount of oil.
Even the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) argues that substituting palm oil with other vegetable oils may create similar, if not even larger, environmental and social problems. The basic issue here is not about the use of palm oil, but the way it is produced.
The government should strengthen its green certification mechanism — Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil — in cooperation with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and major environmental organizations to make the certification system credible and recognized internationally.
The government lobbied the APEC ministers of trade at their meeting in Surabaya in April, but still failed to lead the ministers into a consensus to include both commodities on the EG list due mainly to objections from influential economies within APEC, notably the US.
Trade Minister Gita Wirjawan visited Washington DC early last month to lobby the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to send a fact-finding mission to Indonesia to evaluate whether palm oil and rubber were qualified for classification as environmental goods.
The EPA did send a team, which concluded its evaluation last week. The team is expected to announce its verdict later this month. Particularly worrying, though, is the fact that the visit coincided with the massive forest fires in Sumatra, which have caused what has been claimed to be the worst haze ever in Riau province, Singapore and Malaysia.
Yet more damaging to the green campaign was the preliminary finding by the Environment Ministry that many of the fires that have blanketed parts of Singapore and Malaysia in thick, choking smoke over the past two weeks were caused by slash-and-burn farming techniques to clear land for oil palm plantations and other agricultural products.
The latest incidence of forest fires further validates the allegations by many international environmental organizations that the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil, has caused deforestation and damaged peat lands, which are home to globally significant carbon reserves.
Last October, another EPA team that visited Indonesia concluded that Indonesian palm oil could not be included in the US renewable-fuel program based on its assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from biofuel production, distribution and tailpipe emissions.
It is pointless to reemphasize the urgent need for Indonesia to step up its efforts to force big companies to promote sustainable plantation development. It will be a significant loss if palm oil cannot qualify as an EG because, compared to other vegetable oil crops such as sunflower, soybean and rapeseed, palm oil requires less than half the land area to produce the same amount of oil.
Even the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) argues that substituting palm oil with other vegetable oils may create similar, if not even larger, environmental and social problems. The basic issue here is not about the use of palm oil, but the way it is produced.
The government should strengthen its green certification mechanism — Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil — in cooperation with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and major environmental organizations to make the certification system credible and recognized internationally.