11/10/2010 (The Jakarta Post), Jakarta - More Indonesian companies have sought certification from the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) amid growing international pressure for oil palm plantations to go green.

The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank arm for private sector development, has recently joined the campaign of environmental organizations against palm oil sourced from plantations that are not certified as managed sustainably according to the RSPO.

The World Bank has frozen all funding worldwide for the palm oil, pending a revision of its strategy to promote environmentally and socially sustainable palm oil production.

The World Bank initiative, discussed at an international conference in Frankfurt last month, followed strong pressure by major environmental NGOs on big industrial buyers in Europe to stop buying from Indonesian palm oil producers that did not have RSPO certification.

Several of the largest industrial buyers in Europe, notably the giant Anglo-Dutch Unilever and Nestle have since earlier this year stopped buying palm oil from several Indonesian producers that do not yet have RSPO certification.

“It is extremely difficult now to sell to the European market if our palm oil is not internationally certified as sustainably managed,” PT Megasurya Mas general manager Wibowo Suryadinata said on
the weekend.

Initially, major upstream producers such as London Sumatra, Musim Mas, Bakrie Plantations and Hindoli (a unit of Cargill) sought RSPO certification for their plantations as Indonesia had become the world’s largest CPO producer, with an annual output of around 20 million metric tons.

But since consumers in Europe have also demanded international certification for such finished palm oil-based products as soap, cosmetics, cream and candles, Indonesian companies have also registered their downstream plants to be audited for RSPO certification.

Suryadinata said Megasurya Mas, a palm oil-based manufacturing company in Sidoarjo, East Java,
became the first downstream company in the Indonesian palm oil industry to gain an RSPO Supply Chain Certificate from Control Union Certifications, an international certifying agency based in the Netherlands.

“We gained the certificate last month because our manufacturing processes were audited as socially and environmentally sustainable, and the basic material [crude palm oil] we use is supplied by an RSPO-certified plantation company, in this case Musim Mas in Medan, North Sumatra,” Suryadinata said.

The certification, however, does not mean the company will return to “business as usual” with regards to sustainable production processes.

The Kuala Lumpur-based RSPO groups the largest palm oil producers from Indonesia and Malaysia — together accounting for more than 85 percent of the world’s palm oil output, as well as major industrial consumers and such respected NGOs as WWF, Oxfam and Sawit Watch.