BANJARMASIN, Indonesia — In October 2023 in the Indigenous Dayak village of Bangkal, Indonesian police fired on farmers demonstrating against PT Hamparan Masawit Bangun Persada (HMBP), a palm oil plantation company owned by Indonesia’s BEST Group.

“Without any trigger from the protesters, the security forces shot tear gas and bullets from firearms,” Bayu Herinata, director of the Central Kalimantan provincial chapter of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), an NGO, told Mongabay at the time.

The farmers in Bangkal, located in the Central Kalimantan district of Seruyan, had taken to the streets to press the firm to release 20% of its land concession to local farmers, as many plantations are required to do by law.

The demonstrators maintained that the BEST Group subsidiary had neglected to fulfill its legal obligation to smallholders under a required profit-sharing scheme known as “plasma.” One person from Bangkal, named Gijik, was shot dead during the protest, Mongabay reported last year.

Now, civil society researchers worry that such conflicts, which are numerous in Indonesia, could be papered over by a proposed change to the way the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the main global body certifying palm oil as responsibly produced, assesses supply chains for compliance.

Normally, the RSPO certifies palm oil produced by a single company, which can then sell it for a premium. Under the new methodology, the RSPO would vet the environmental and social credentials of an entire jurisdiction, like a province or a district, treating it as a single unit.

Backers say the scheme, known as the jurisdictional approach, would bring down costs, especially for small farmers. But critics contend it would sideline farmers who are trying to defend their lands from corporate raiders who often collude with local authorities to dispossess them.

“The seizure of land and living space rights and environmental damage are still ongoing,” said Djayu, Kalimantan head of the Sustainable Community Forestry Foundation (YMKL), an Indonesian NGO.

Slights of the Roundtable

Initiatives to trace the origin of palm oil emerged in the 21st century after the industry’s biggest players, under fire for rampant rainforest clearance, began issuing zero-deforestation commitments.

Founded in 2004, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) currently requires plantations to protect “high conservation value” land and obtain the “free, prior and informed consent” of affected local communities.

Palm oil producers “must complete a thorough and continued verification process through a systematic annual audit process, as well as maintain and improve their compliance status, reflecting continuous improvement,” the RSPO states.

When these tests have been assessed by an accredited third-party assessor, the multistakeholder RSPO approves a plantation’s palm oil output, enabling easy access to European and other markets where consumer goods buyers like Unilever and Danone require traceability of a raw material historically linked to deforestation.

Current RSPO rules require a palm oil producer to apply to the Malaysia-based organization for approval of an individual plantation, or in some cases a group of plantations if run by the same corporate entity.

Trials of the jurisdictional approach to certification began in 2015 in the Malaysian state of Sabah, before expanding later to Ecuador and to Indonesia’s Seruyan district. The RSPO says it hopes the scheme may result in “bringing costs down through scale and leveraging the government’s capacity and authority.”

“A jurisdiction can be any region with politically and/or administratively defined boundaries,” the RSPO said in 2018. “It will be the jurisdiction that obtains certification, and palm oil that is produced within its boundaries can be considered RSPO-compliant.”

Several civil society groups in Indonesia, however, say that issuing group approval for an entire district’s palm oil output risks masking numerous long-running conflicts at the local level in places like Seruyan, which had a population of more than 166,000 people, according to the 2022 census.

“Are the steps taken truly for the community, or just to meet market interests?” said Abdul Haris at forestry nonprofit Transformation for Justice (TuK) Indonesia, which joined with other NGOs in publishing a report on the matter in November.

Palm’s tracks

Indonesia’s palm oil-producing regions on the giant islands of Sumatra and Borneo are awash with conflicts between communities and industrial plantation companies, some three decades of research by nonprofits working on the ground shows.

One count in Central Kalimantan province by TuK Indonesia showed around 300 land conflicts over the last two decades in the province of 2.8 million people.

Many of these companies originally acquired their permits as a result of unscrupulous or illegal practices by licensing authorities. In Seruyan, a rush of plantations was approved by former district chief Darwan Ali, who used shell companies set up in the name of his relatives to sell plantation licenses to conglomerates such as Singapore-based Wilmar International, a joint investigation by Mongabay and The Gecko Project showed in 2017.

Darwan died in November 2019 just weeks after being charged with public procurement corruption in a separate case.

Janang Firman Palanungkai, campaign manager at Walhi, Indonesia’s largest environmental nonprofit, said the drive to securitize this complexity under a straightforward regional certificate in effect risks amnesty for companies in ongoing conflicts.

“An astute approach is required so that the certification does not become a tool to cover up unresolved issues,” Janang said.

Some of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, such as Unilever, banned BEST Group palm oil several years ago in response to incidents predating last year’s demonstration.

Walhi’s Central Kalimantan office said that 15.2 million hectares (37.5 million hectares) in the province remains controlled by mining, plantation and timber companies. Those combined concessions, in just one province, account for an area larger than the U.S. state of Florida, or the South Asian country of Bangladesh.

Some communities remain locked in conflict with plantation firms decades after the company first took over the local land — often with the help of police and military units — and planted oil palm seedlings.

“What happens in the end is significant conflict,” said Kartika Sari, director of Progress, an NGO. “It can last for decades.”

TuK Indonesia’s Abdul Haris said the long-term trial underway in Seruyan had not consulted communities in full.

Certification costs

Budi Purwanto, head of the RSPO jurisdictional certification working group in Seruyan, said that forming palm oil farmers’ groups at scale unlocked new benefits.

“We learned that the approach is more effective if the assistance is on a larger scale, because certification requires intensive assistance, high costs and a longer time period,” Budi said at a panel discussion on the sidelines of the RSPO’s annual conference in Bangkok in November.

Writing in Mongabay in 2019, Dan Nepstad, John Watts and Silvia Irawan of environmental group Inovasi Bumi, which is working with the Seruyan government on the trial, said the jurisdictional approach “provides the incentives and mechanisms for collective action at the landscape scale.”

“Ideally, it should simplify and reduce the costs of certification thus expanding RSPO coverage while improving social and environmental outcomes,” the authors noted.

Data from Indonesia’s SPKS, a major palm oil smallholder union, showed 73 smallholder groups or institutions had obtained RSPO certification across the archipelago by 2023. Sabarudin, the SPKS head, said the costs incurred by smallholder groups to obtain certification were “very expensive.”

The jurisdictional approach cut the average cost per farmer from $170 to just $50, he said.

Budi from the RSPO working group said jurisdictional verification could also enable greater joint monitoring of sustainability efforts, and by an expanded number of parties. He added the Seruyan trial was around 70% complete.

New action against land fires had been taken, Budi said, and a new entity of 11 palm oil companies, farmers’ groups and NGOs was supporting work on the ground.

However, Mahatma Windrawan Inantha, deputy director of the RSPO in Indonesia, acknowledged the possibility that not all conflicts might be resolved before a jurisdiction is given RSPO approval.

Budi said a complainant could seek remedy from government agencies, such as Indonesia’s ministries of agriculture or forestry, or the National Land Agency (BPN).

One of the first palm oil permits authorized by then-district leader Darwan Ali was a BEST Group concession overlapping with Tanjung Puting National Park, a haven for the critically endangered Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus). The firm remains locked in a conflict with the Bangkal village farmers.

After Gijik, the Bangkal resident, died during the October 2023 protest, a spokesperson from the Central Kalimantan police department said officers had been pelted with stones, prompting them to respond by firing tear gas and blank rounds into the air. The spokesperson said five protestors were using drugs.

In the years prior to the fatal encounter, numerous local farmers from Bangkal village were arrested and detained after BEST Group reported farmers to the police for allegedly attempting to farm on land within the company concession.

In 2017 Singapore-based Wilmar stopped buying palm oil from BEST Group. In 2018, Unilever added the conglomerate to its list of banned suppliers.

In 2012, police charged a dozen farmers in Bangkal village following a complaint by the company. Later, in 2020, three farmers were prosecuted, one of whom, Hermanus Bin Bison, died in custody.

“If the RSPO jurisdictional certification in Seruyan is achieved, but a conflict still occurs,” asked palm oil watchdog Sawit Watch’s Carlo Nainggolan, “who should be complained to under the RSPO framework?”

Banner image: Oil palm fruits harvested in Kalimantan. Image by Cooke Vieira/CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

This story was first published here in Indonesian on Nov. 21, 2024.

James Watt, the farmer who challenged a palm oil fiefdom