Financial Times (19/03/2018) -  Leading consumer goods companies including Kraft Heinz, Johnson & Johnson and Carex soap maker PZ Cussons have failed to disclose the producers of their palm oil supplies, despite pledging to achieve traceability in one of their key ingredients.

A report published by environmental group Greenpeace on Monday asked 16 companies to publish the names of their palm oil producers, but half — Ferrero, Hershey, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Kraft Heinz, PepsiCo, PZ Cussons and Smucker’s — did not.

The other half — Colgate-Palmolive, General Mills, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, P&G, Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever — have disclosed producer lists, although all eight revealed that their supplies still included palm oil from producers that destroy rainforests.

Many consumer goods use palm oil, from ice cream and nut spreads to soap and shampoo, and environmentalists have blamed the clearing of land for its production for destroying vast tracts of forest in south-east Asia over the past few decades.

Some 24m hectares — an area almost the size of the UK — of Indonesia’s rainforest was destroyed between 1990 and 2015 according to government estimates, while a recent study from academic journal Current Biology revealed that more than 100,000 Bornean orang-utans were lost between 1999 and 2015.

Western consumer goods groups have been under pressure to ensure that their raw material is purchased from sources with sound environmental and labour practices.

But Greenpeace said unless palm oil users traced the source of the products, deforestation would continue. “We can’t end deforestation by box-ticking,” said Richard George, forests campaigner at Greenpeace.

Of those that failed to disclose their palm oil producers, PepsiCo and Ferrero confirmed that they would do so in the near future. PepsiCo reaffirmed its commitment to using 100 per cent certified sustainable palm oil by 2020 and said it would publish its list of producers “in the coming days”. Ferrero said it would be producing a full list of the mills from which it sources palm oil in May.

Hershey said it had mapped more than 99 per cent of its palm oil supply chain to the mills, and identified 14 per cent of the plantations where its palm oil comes from but would not publish the names due to confidentiality agreements.

Other companies emphasised transparency over confidentiality.

Marc Engel, chief supply chain officer at Unilever, which was the first consumer group to publish its producer list earlier this year, said: “Due to traditional commercial sensitivities and the complexity of the palm oil supply chain, it has required perseverance to get to where we are now.” He added that “complete transparency is needed for radical transformation”.

Nestlé said its ambition remained that, by the end of 2020, all of the palm oil it used would be both traceable and responsibly sourced.

Alastair Child, vice-president of global sustainability at Mars Wrigley Confectionery, said the company would use its influence to push for further changes while Jonathan Horrell, director of sustainability at Mondelez, acknowledged that the company’s work was not over and pledged to speed up progress on the ground. Reckitt Benckiser said more needed to be done with the entire industry.

Kellogg’s said it had shared its list of suppliers with Greenpeace, but did not challenge the group’s report. Kraft Heinz, Johnson & Johnson, PZ Cussons and Smucker’s did not respond to requests for comment.

Read more at https://www.ft.com/content/51e29f36-2a05-11e8-9b4b-bc4b9f08f381