26/04/2013 (Business Times) - The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) hopes to boost the uptake of certified sustainable palm oil from 50 per cent now by improving transparency in the supply chain.

Currently, the uptake is lagging by 50 per cent and this has raised the concern of the oil palm growers and oil processors from Malaysia and Indonesia.

But RSPO president Dr Jan Kees Vis said a 50 per cent take up for certified palm oil was not bad as there has been no single certification programme leading towards a 100 per cent take up in the product.

"I do understand what the (oil palm) growers have had to go through in meeting the certification requests of the market. They now expect the market to buy the stuff," he said after the RSPO's EGM here yesterday.

The low uptake, he said, suggests that the supply chain market, which includes the ports in Europe, is not transparent enough.

The CSPO supply had increased by 250 per cent from 1.36 million tonnes in 2009 to 4.8 million tonnes in 2011, while sales volume had grown by over 6 times from about 343,857 tonnes in 2009 to 2.49 million tonnes in 2011.

Vis has warned palm oil industry players to watch out for stricter standard requirements relating to zero deforestation in the supply chain.

He said these "competing standards" are being addressed by several governments including the US, Indonesia, Dutch, Norway and the UK in a meeting in Jakarta in July.

"So, we will see movement in the market with other sustainability standards with stricter requirement on land use change and greenhouse gas management and deforestation."

He added that the RSPO will need to think through what its position is going to be with regards to this competition.

"Oil palm growers and the RSPO have to understand we do not live in isolation – that we live in a world where others have an agenda and can come up with standards with political support."

At the EGM yesterday, the RSPO, which consists of seven stakeholder groups, adopted the newly-reviewed Principles and Criteria which has been in place since late 2007.

The review taskforce was made up of growers from Indonesia, Malaysia and the rest of the world, supply chain companies as well as NGOs.

The meeting yesterday, however, postponed the resolution on electronic voting to be raised at the AGM in Medan in November.

Vis said the delay would enable the members from Malaysia and Indonesia to be familiar with the voting system which is being widely used in other forums.

Meanwhile, secretary general Darrel Webber denied that the growers membership has stagnated.

More than 100 members registered over the last year, a good percentage of which were growers from Malaysia, Indonesia, Latin America as well as Africa, he noted.