This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on November 6, 2019

BANGKOK: The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is proposing a new independent smallholders standard to help smallholders become RSPO-certified.

The new standard is tailor-made to the needs and processes of smallholder palm oil producers, said RSPO chief executive officer Datuk Darrel Webber.

“It (the standard) is trying to place cost-effective tools to smallholders to get certified in a more cost-efficient manner,” he told reporters at RSPO’s 17th annual round table meeting here yesterday.

The proposal would be put forward to RSPO’s 16th general assembly today, he added. Webber said that in addition to the new certification programme, RSPO would also take a jurisdictional approach.

“Instead of certifying management unit by management unit, we want to certify a whole jurisdiction. We have several pilot sites around the world, in Indonesia, Malaysia and Ecuador,” he said.

Webber emphasised that the basic notion underlying this new approach is bringing in governments to help resolve systemic issues surrounding smallholders and the sustainability of their products.

RSPO, he said, has to work with both at the national and local government levels to work on issues such as the legality of land ownership, which is a key step to securing RSPO certification.

Meanwhile, RSPO co-chair and United Plantations Bhd chief executive director Datuk Carl Bek-Nielsen said smallholders should start looking at the benefits of being an RSPO-certified entity.

“There is an equal amount of good agricultural practices stitched into the fabric of the RSPO, if you are a smallholder and you join the RSPO and fulfil the criteria, I can guarantee you that you can increase your yields by a minimum of 30%,” said Bek-Nielsen.

He added that losses that would also come down as waste is now being monitored. However, the effects of adopting RSPO standards will not be felt immediately as it will take between a year to 18 months to materialise.

In an earlier media engagement session, RSPO head of smallholder programmes Ashwin Selvaraj said many smallholders combined to form groups or collectives, and the sizes of such organisations vary — as in Southeast Asia one group can number between 200 smallholders to 500 smallholders.

For many smallholders, he added, it does not make economic sense to be certified individually as the costs of certification are present. As such, many smallholders tend to come together in groups. Ashwin explained that the new certification programme will last three years.

“The first step is creating awareness, we call it the eligibility phase. They then get two years to get trained, where they move to Milestone A, and that is the interim phase of compliance, and they get one more year to achieve full compliance of the standard,” said Ashwin. This training will include financial and business planning.

He added that the funding for the market supports under the new proposed smallholder standard will come from the RSPO Smallholder Support Fund.