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COMMENTARY: EU moves to wipe out palm oil from the European economy
The palm oil issue could become a perpetual thorn in the side of Indonesia-EU relations at a time when they are negotiating a comprehensive economic partnership agreement.
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Palm oil producers are now overseen and ruled under the sustainability standards of the Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) program, which is legally compulsory; and the international multi-stakeholder Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a market-driven certification scheme. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
T
he European Union has since 2013 been slapping anti-dumping countervailing duties on Indonesian exports of palm oil-based biodiesel, despite a lower EU court ruling last year that annulled the duties.
Then early last week, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to totally ban biofuels made from palm oil by 2020 to prevent the EU target of sourcing 10 percent of its transport fuels from renewables from inadvertently contributing to deforestation.
While the motion is not yet legally binding, EU lawmakers are now drawing up amendments to EU legislation that would be legally enforceable if approved by the European Commission.
We see this move and its objective simply as an illusion. Certainly, the EU cannot take a farm commodity out of its economy and think that would solve its problems. The political move would instead only damage EU ties with Indonesia and Malaysia, which together supply more than 80 percent of the world’s palm oil, and many other smaller producing countries in Africa and Latin America.
Yet more worrisome, the palm oil issue could become a perpetual thorn in the side of Indonesia-EU relations at a time when they are negotiating a comprehensive economic partnership agreement.
The EU Parliament’s motion seems to have been prompted mostly by the strong lobbying of the EU vegetable oil (soybean, rapeseed and sunflower) industry, which naturally would never be able to compete with palm oil.
Palm oil, which now accounts for almost 50 percent of global vegetable oil consumption, has increasingly been leading the market as its yield per hectare is estimated by agronomists at nine times as high as soybean, five times as high as rapeseed and eight times as high as sunflower.
