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alm oil was on the minds of more than 600 delegates from multinational companies, conservation NGOs as well as smallholder representatives from some 30 countries who gathered in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm oil (RSPO) conference here last week.

For good reason. In Indonesia, the industry is booming with annual production of over 27 million tons, netting more than US$20 billion in export earnings and creating badly needed employment and opportunities for farmers across the country, notably in Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi.

Financial returns for larger investors have also been outstanding, making the owners of the large palm oil groups among the richest businesspeople in the country, and seem likely to remain buoyant as demand grows.

However, Trade Vice Minister Bayu Krishnamurti seemed irritated by the seemingly perpetual accusations of many international NGOs, which tended to link the palm oil industry'€™s expansion in Indonesia with deforestation and the destruction of biodiversity, wildlife.

'€œIt is in our best interests that we implement best practices for sustainable palm oil. It is for the sake of our future, not because others told us, to do it,'€ Krishnamurti told the opening of the RSPO 11th annual meeting on Tuesday.

Richard Whitehead, the editor of the FoodNavigator Asia newsletter, also acknowledged the palm oil controversy in the developed countries, especially Europe and the United States, set off by a seemingly endless series of bad headline stories.

Unfortunately, these headline stories more than often hide the complex issues behind the rapid development of oil palm plantations and make meaningful, sensible debates difficult.

Adam Harrison, a policy officer with conservation organization the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) recognized that oil palm plantations had produced 65 percent of the world'€™s traded vegetable oils, and that palm oil was a key ingredient in many foods, cosmetics, soaps, detergents and biofuel.

RSPO Secretary General Darrel Webber also acknowledges that oil palms have particularly high yields, providing almost 40 percent of global vegetable oil production while only occupying 7 percent of the total oil seeds'€™ agricultural lands.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global vegetable oil production in 2012 totaled 144 million tons, of which 50 million tons was palm oil, 36 million tons soybean oil, both accounting for 60 percent.

The remainder consisted of rapeseed, peanut and corn and sunflower oils.

But typical of an NGO activist, Harrison also was apprehensive that the rising demand would increase the pressures on tropical forests and biodiversity, risking dangerous levels of carbon emissions from tropical peats and increased community conflicts.

Hence, according to Webber and Harrison, the best solution to address the negative externalities of palm oil cultivation is to ensure that products that contain palm oil meet the sustainability criteria, notably best farm practices, as defined by the multi-stakeholder organization RSPO.

The problem, though, is that the several of the principles and criteria applied by RSPO and the Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) are different in their priorities, especially with regard to issues on environments, wildlife and biodiversity conservation.

Environmental NGOs, which seem to be the most assertive among the RSPO stakeholders, put biodiversity, wildlife and other high-conservation values, virtually on top of the list of their concerns.

These concerns certainly mean little to farmers in Sumatra and Kalimantan who earn less than $2 a day. Their priority is to put food on their tables and send their children to school. They cannot understand as to why conservationists in Europe claim the rain forests around them to be part of the world heritage of biodiversity.

To conservationists in the UK or the US, the loss of orangutans somewhere in the Sumatra jungles might be the end of the world. But to the poor farmers living near those jungles, such a loss does not matter much.

But the inability of the Indonesian government to enforce its own rules, the pervasive corruption within the bureaucracy and greedy businesses, often validate NGOs critics.

Despite these shortcomings, Krishnamurti still considers the perpetual wave of criticism of oil palm development ridiculous as the detractors'€™ bone of contention could easily shift from deforestation, to peatland destruction, the loss of biodiversity and high-conservation value areas.

So disproportionate was the wave of criticisms that many within the government and business world suspect the negative campaign was sponsored by producers of soybean, rapeseed, corn and sunflower oils, who see oil palm as a threat to their hegemony.

Such suspicion is simply understandable because, as Krishnamurti noted, oil palm is nine times more productive than all other vegetable oils.

In this context, the joint study currently being conducted by an independent certifying agency to clarify the disparities as well as to identify the synergies between RSPO and ISPO, could be the first major step to improving communications and understanding between the government and international NGOs as well as other private sector stakeholders.

Focusing on potential damages to the environment and other high-conservation value areas, as most international NGOs have done, is neither the right nor effective way to convey the message.

A disproportional adversary approach would only irritate policymakers and law enforcers in Indonesia because oil palm development involves complex issues of poverty, unemployment and inadequate institutional capacity of regional administrations.

International NGOs should not expect everything to be settled in one night, because such irrational expectations would not help build confidence in the vital importance of sustainable palm oil.

The best way to address the complex issues of sustainable palm oil is to implement an integrated prosperity approach to empower poor people living around primary forests to improve their living standards through best farm practices.

If international NGOs and multinational companies are really concerned about environmental degradation they should focus their energy on capacity building programs to enable regional administrations to better enforce laws and regulations and to empower local NGOs and other civil-society organizations to monitor and oversee the environmental impact of oil palm development by big companies.