W

ith eight months to go before the deadline, only 40 out of thousands of oil-palm plantations have secured a government-issued certificate on sustainability.

Stakeholders in the industry urged the government to roll back the deadline for the certification, as many companies were confronted by logistical and legal issues.

'€œAs of January, about 40 of the roughly 2,500 plantations had received certification and another 153 had applied for it,'€ Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil Commission (ISPO) executive director, Rosediana Suharto, said recently. She said that the commission would not revise the deadline or launch specific initiatives to push the remaining plantations to apply for the certification.

'€œPlantations have to independently apply for the certification, or face the penalties, such as a plantation-class downgrade,'€ she said.

Plantations must have obtained their ISPO certification by this year, following a three-year grace period since its implementation in 2011.

The ISPO certification is an acknowledgement that a plantation has complied with the laws and regulations on sustainable production.

It is compulsory for large plantations to secure an ISPO certificate, unlike the voluntary Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification. While the ISPO is aimed at ensuring plantations will not break the law, they will also need the RSPO certification as a guarantee of ecological sustainability in order to access markets in developed nations, particularly those in Europe and the US.

Rosediana said that many plantations had yet to secure their certification because plantations felt more obliged to get the RSPO certification rather than the ISPO.

Legal issues, according to Rosediana, had also contributed to the lack of willingness among most plantations to apply for the ISPO certification.

'€œA lot of plantations do not have all their permits, such as land-user certification, in place and therefore, are unwilling to apply,'€ she said.

The Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki) chairman, Fadhil Hasan, said it would be advisable for the government revise the deadline given that the vast bulk of plantations were poised to miss it.

'€œIf most of the plantations have not obtained the certification by the end of 2014, the government has to act realistically and postpone the deadline,'€ he said. He also questioned the capacity of the commission to accelerate the certification process due to a lack of reviewers.

'€œWe as producers are prepared to get certified but there should be preparedness as well among those handing out the certification,'€ he said, adding that the ISPO'€™s targets '€œhave been too ambitious'€.

PT Sinar Mas Agro Resources and Technology director, Jean-Pierre Caliman, however, said that the ISPO was certainly '€œa very important initiative'€.

'€œPlantations must contribute to an increase in sustainability in Indonesia,'€ he said.

'€œIt has to be compulsory because if it is voluntary, only those with enough capital and with the belief that sustainability is important will go for it,'€ he added.