Corporate Campaigns Are Shifting Demand for Rainforest Destruction

Over the past few years, groups from Greenpeace to WWF have been campaigning to stop the ravages of palm oil cultivation on the unique rainforests of Indonesia.

This week, they had a big big victory. The world's second largest producer of palm oil, an Indonesian company called Golden Agri Resources (GAR), announced that it would no longer cut down rainforests in order to plant palm oil. And possibly even more important, it committed to protecting peatlands—the carbon rich soils underneath many rainforests that are outsized carbon emitters when destroyed.

The move comes after several large Western companies—including General Mills, Nestle, Burger King and HSBC—stopped doing business with GAR and its parent company, Sinar Mas, as a result of the group's notorious environmental damage. Additionally, the industry’s only certification body—the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil—issued them the group’s first-ever censure last fall.

As one of the leading groups campaigning on the issue, Greenpeace rightly notes on its blog, “words without action are meaningless” and GAR’s parent company, Sinar Mas, has a long record of reneging on its environmental promises. So environmental groups will have their hands full watching to see if GAR actually changes its deeply ingrained business model – a task to which Greenpeace has already committed itself.

But still, GAR's new commitment signals a huge shift in the Indonesian marketplace. Pressure from the West to implement standards in palm oil cultivation are clearly having an effect, and Indonesian companies are starting to take note. GAR’s commitment means fundamentally changing their business model—one that previously relied on lots of ‘free’ land that was once rainforest. Such a large shift can only mean that they’ve decided that it’s more profitable to live up to international environmental standards in order to continue to sell to valuable Western markets.

And that means that our job here isn’t done.

Golden Agri Resources is a large producer, but not even close to the only palm oil company—there are still hundreds in Indonesia and Malaysia, and even more spreading the industry into other tropical forested nations, notably Colombia, Brazil and Liberia. To keep up the pressure on this rapidly expanding industry, we need American companies to make it clear that we won’t buy palm oil that destroys rainforests, any rainforests, anywhere.

Let’s start with Cargill – the largest purchaser and supplier of palm oil in the United States. Currently, Cargill is stubbornly holding out on a campaign driven by Rainforest Action Network asking that it implement a palm oil policy to ensure that the palm oil they purchase and trade to the U.S. isn’t coming from rainforest destruction. And worse, they’ve refused to clean up their own plantations – where they are both destroying rainforest and abusing worker’s rights.

That’s just not right. Cargill has outsized market influence, and while they refuse to impose standards, many smaller palm oil companies will keep on cutting down rainforest in order to produce palm oil on the cheap.

Help us get a step closer to the next victory by signing our petition here and ask Cargill to take a lead in making sure that rainforests aren't cut down for palm oil.

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Photo: Indonesian Palm Oil plantation