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ndonesia has been a sitting duck for critical environmental campaigning. Its democracy and transparent governance has allowed green NGOs — a coalition of environmental and social NGOs — to openly attack how the country and its palm oil companies are managing natural resources.

Its biodiversity, rich resources, high carbon stocks and lush forests have become the subject of campaigns to halt commodity-based development in Indonesia where the last vestiges of tropical rain forest need to be conserved.

Global civic organizations and consumer movements in Europe have created a loose coalition in their efforts to preserve Indonesia’s forests and have consequently made the country their common target for a campaign opposed to oil palm plantations.

The impact has been a slowing of the rate of expansion of Indonesian oil palm plantations.

“No palm oil” labeling, palm product boycotts, non-tariff barriers for palm oil derivatives and other forms of campaigning against palm oil have snowballed to become a widespread movement in Europe.

Despite government efforts to introduce strict policies to stop deforestation and preserve biodiversity and to enforce the first mandatory standards through the Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) scheme, the global movement to stop the creation of new oil palm plantations continues to roll on.

The negative campaign and attacks on palm oil also target the global, multi-stakeholder forum, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which was set up in 2004 with the primary mission of promoting the sustainable production and use of palm oil.

The RSPO standards have been seen by the greens as a platform for scrutinizing and penalizing its members for perceived non-compliance. Transparency and wide-ranging membership allow even people who are not members of the RSPO to attack RSPO members with allegations of deforestation and other practices detrimental to the environment.

Both the government and the RSPO seem incapable of defending themselves and palm oil producers against excessive external scrutiny. Efforts to defend and protect the interests of palm oil companies in the RSPO may create a backlash and lead to allegations about violations against the principles of sustainability, democracy and transparency.

The green NGOs should be encouraged to monitor and scrutinize the palm oil industry through various means of communication and even with Google Maps and other real-time satellite images in order to enhance the industry’s sustainability. However, the sustainability goals will be better achieved through constructive engagement with oil palm growers and palm oil processors.

In the case of oil palm growers, the government tried to defuse the attacks by introducing a number of “moratorium” policies and the suspension of development permits already issued, even though these policies affect poverty alleviation programs and cause a lessening of development opportunities.

Such negative campaigns like the “no palm oil” labeling launched in Europe will indiscriminately affect the poor and smallholders as they are the most vulnerable palm oil players.

Committed RSPO members are the easiest targets for the greens to find faulty compliance with the commitments and pledges. Breaches of compliance and violations of the standards are easy to identify and yet have a huge impact on the members.

Nonetheless, the actual impact on the management of the resource on the ground will be minimal as the overall practices have been in line with sustainability standards.

The impact will be much greater if all stakeholders participate in the sustainability campaign.

Rather than pushing the converted to the extreme, the greens need to refocus on convincing the unconverted in a bid to create a critical mass to make all natural resource-based companies, be it coal mines, oil palm plantations, or forest concessions, adopt stringent sustainability standards.

The greens campaigners need to revisit their strategy by providing more positive support to the promotion and enforcement of both RSPO and ISPO sustainability standards and certification. By bringing more palm oil industry players into the sustainability fold, we can create a critical mass and a tipping point to make sustainable palm oil the norm in Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producer.

A mutually agreed principle of three tenets of sustainability consisting of economic, social and environmental dimensions must be internalized. The green NGOs need to emphasize the economic components of the three pillars to attract more smallholders to join the sustainability movement.
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The writer is a vice president of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The views expressed are his own.