Palm oil reform was left in limbo after the moratorium lapsed on Sept. 19, exactly three years after its inception through Presidential Instruction (Inpres) No. 8/2018. The moratorium was aimed at improving palm oil governance and responding to concerns about deforestation caused by oil palm plantations near or inside forest areas, and labor exploitation. The moratorium required government agencies to stop granting new licenses for palm oil concessions and to review existing ones every three years.

The government had yet to extend it despite calls for such an extension from environmentalists. Officials said in September that the moratorium was no longer relevant as the jobs law, enacted in late 2020, and its implementing regulations set new mechanisms more or less similar to the moratorium.

These included fines and revocation of permits for oil palm plantations that were opened inside forest areas before the moratorium was in place, whether unintentionally cultivated or not. Meanwhile, plantations inside forest areas that violated the moratorium will be taken over by the government and restored as forest. This is expected to settle overlaps between palm oil concessions and forest areas.

But environmentalists say that without a strict moratorium, the regulations could whitewash oil palm plantations found in forest areas that were planted before or during the moratorium.

Palm oil is one of Indonesia’s biggest export commodities contributing a large share of the country’s foreign reserves.

Palm Oil Farmers Union (SPKS) head of advocacy Marselinus Andri said that the jobs law was not supposed to supplant the oil palm moratorium in the first place, as the latter was meant to improve palm oil governance while the former was meant to streamline business licensing.

He called for the moratorium to be renewed through a new presidential instruction, which was not an implementing regulation of the jobs law. This means that it is not affected by the recent Constitutional Court ruling that also ordered the government not to issue any implementing regulations while it was redoing the lawmaking process of the jobs law.

“We need to improve palm oil governance through the moratorium, without waiting for the jobs law amendment as it will take some time,” Andri said.

Adrianus Eryan from the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL) said the fact that the moratorium was unaffected by the jobs law or the court ruling was enough to warrant an extension.

“Not to mention that some regional administrations had been implementing the moratorium well. They need to be supported by the central government,” he said.

But undersecretary for spatial planning and strategic economic zones at the Office of the Coordinating Economic Affairs Minister Dodi Slamet Riyadi said that the court ruling did not nullify any provisions in the jobs law.

"That includes provisions on palm oil licensing and settlements of spatial use-related conflicts," he said on Wednesday.

The government and lawmakers are scrambling to follow up on the recent ruling on the Job Creation Law, which declared that the procedure of passing the law was flawed and ordered policymakers to redo the process from scratch within two years. On Monday, the government and lawmakers said they hoped to pass the revision early next year.

Meanwhile, Indonesian Palm Oil Association (Gapki) secretary-general Eddy Martono said in a response to calls for a renewal of the moratorium: “Gapki has no problem if the moratorium is extended, because Gapki currently is concerned mainly about increasing [palm oil] productivity be it by Gapki members or smallholders."