Our Ignorance Of Palm Oil Industry In Our Own Country, Indonesia
It started from the 2015 Southeast Asia haze. The haze was caused by a forest fire in Indonesia, to be more exact in both Sumatra and Borneo Island. At least more than 28 million people in Indonesia alone were affected by the crisis, and more than 140,000 were reported to be suffering from respiratory illness.[1] It also affected several other countries around Indonesia, with the closest being Singapore, Malaysia, and Brunei.
The Indonesian government estimated that the haze crisis would cost it between 300 and 475 trillion rupiah (up to US$35 billion or S$47 billion) to mitigate.[2] School closures due to the haze were implemented in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore; these affected nearly four million students in Malaysia alone.[3] Among the events disrupted or even canceled due to the haze were the 2015 FINA Swimming World Cup in Singapore and the Kuala Lumpur Marathon in Malaysia.
Wetlands International states that based on the facts, almost all fire forests in Indonesia are caused by human activities, whether intentional or unintentional, and there is not yet evidence of fires that occur naturally (Wibisono et al., 2005: 12). Herry Purnomo, one researcher at the CIFOR institution, said that many parties made big profits from fires. He found that land was often deliberately burned to claim ownership. This is what happened in Borneo. After the fire was extinguished, not long ago, the land was vacant the fire marks contain oil palm trees (Greenpeace Indonesia, 2015a).[4]
With the huge impact spread so wide it then immediately became an international issue. And so many people around the world talking about its environmental effect. The news about Indonesia's forest fire then also became a huge concern for every environmental-based organization such as WWF, and Green Peace.
Petitions were made. Thousands of people around the world mostly Indonesia, signing them to push the government to act faster because the fire doesn’t just affect us humans, but also animals that lived in the forest. With the only tiger specimen left in Indonesia that was supposed to be protected was threatened. So, me being an animal lover has since then had my interest in the palm oil industry in Indonesia.
Indonesia, being the world leader in the production of crude palm oil, has been successful in serving the domestic and world market with palm products and palm derivatives. The industry contributes US$17.6 billion through exports in 2012. At present, the demand for crude palm oil has soared high due to the increasing awareness of the varied uses of palm oil.[5]
The palm oil production volume in Indonesia has gone far beyond domestic consumption, thus Indonesia is able to export in great bulk to other countries. As of 2012, the volume of exports reached 19.6 million metric tons while domestic consumption was way below that level.[5]
And thus mostly the concerns that raised from the palm oil industry in Indonesia are mostly aimed toward giant industry companies that did not come from Indonesia itself.
In May 2015, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) announced a new set of voluntary guidelines, “RSPO+”, “aimed at further enhancing the existing standard’s requirements on issues such as deforestation, peatland development, and indigenous peoples rights” (Butler 2015). This announcement comes in the midst of two other high-profile initiatives, namely the deforestation-free (or zero-deforestation) movement, pledging a commitment from more than 240 vegetable oil buyers, traders, and producers to decouple deforestation from their commodity chains, and the recent “Indonesian palm oil pledge,” a high-profile sustainability pact between the Indonesian government and leading oil palm giants operating in Indonesia (Jacobson 2015).[6]
The Roundtable promotes palm oil production practices that help reduce deforestation, preserve biodiversity, and respect the livelihoods of rural communities in oil-producing countries. It ensures that no new primary forest or other high conservation value areas are sacrificed for palm oil plantations, that plantations apply accepted best practices and that the basic rights and living conditions of millions of plantation workers, smallholders and indigenous people are wholly respected.[7]
For almost three years, I followed and supported WWF, and Green Peace battling company that imported Indonesian Palm Oil without a sustainable certificate from RSPO. And yet forgetting the most crucial problems lying underneath. That country with the most palm oil consumption is also still us, Indonesia.
Indonesia produces more palm oil and consumes more palm oil per capita than any country in the world. This huge amount of consumption is caused by the Indonesian needs of cooking oil. Cooking oil is one of Indonesia’s nine ‘essential’ food commodities of which the government obligates itself to ensure sufficient supplies. As a result, government policy controls significant aspects of cooking oil production, marketing, and price formation in Indonesia.[8]
But the sad part is that none of the regulations (Permendag №80 Tentang Minyak Goreng Kemasan, Permendag №54 Tentang Eskpor Minyak Kelapa Sawit, etc) has never mentioned sustainable palm oil use in Indonesia.
I was reading a WWF article about how instant noodles are killing elephants in Waykambas, Lampung, and started to question more. And I realize that most instant noodles needed cooking oil to be dried, and most instant noodles company uses palm oil to dry them. That’s when it hit me, I for once, is still using palm oil in my everyday life to process my foods. And whether the palm oil that I’ve been using is sustainable or not, I have never cared to know.
But that’s not the only problem. The problem is that millions of Indonesian residents have never thought that far about their own cooking oil. Most of us don’t even question where our cooking oil came from, how it is processed, and the palm oil industry behind it has more impact than some of the food we are consuming daily.
For example, I once asked my friend not to invest her money in a Palm Oil Plantation in Sumatra. And she asked me why. When I explained to her that palm oil farming destroys the rainforest all that she does is snapped at me and said that both are still forests, and both have a green canopy covering the ground. She doesn’t understand, that land conversion from rainforest to palm oil farming is very different. The conversion is not always as healthy too, as we can see from the 2015 haze, though proof of it as an attempt to convert the land is hard to find, it’s already a public secret that land conversion is the target. The changes in landscape and habitat mean changes in the animals living in it too. And I doubt the palm oil farmer wants an elephant or tiger living on their farm. Thus WWF’s article about how products that use unsustainable farm oil killed them.
With everyone's basic knowledge of biology, it is supposed to be easy to understand the difference between the rainforest oil tree farm too. Rain forest consists of trees and plantations that are mostly dicotyledon. This kind of plantation has stronger roots that dig deep into the earth allowing them to save more water than monocotyl plants. And palm tree is a plant that comes from monocotyl, with roots that grow like hair around the tree, and never reach too deep inside of the ground. This often causes floods in the palm tree plantation area because these trees can’t save as much water as a rainforest could.
It is estimated that, in Indonesia, 63 % of palm oil industry growth has occurred at the expense of biodiverse rainforests, and that up to 30 % of these plantations have been established on peatlands, leading to massive CO2 emissions.[9]
Today we are losing animal and plant species at a rate never before seen in the whole of human history. The loss is so high and is happening so fast that scientists are comparing it to the great extinctions of the past, e.g. the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period. The difference is that this time it is not a comet or a volcanic eruption causing the extinctions, but humans, and, in particular, our greed for material growth (and here the countries of the industrialized West should feel especially responsible).[10]
Palm oil plantations have contributed substantially to the loss of biodiverse forests and small-scale agricultural landscapes. Only a tiny fraction of the original species find suitable habitat in these plantations.[10]
Even my aunt who migrated from Java to Sumatra, who owns palm oil land, used to live nearby the plantation area, and often feel the impact of flooding, never cared or knew about the environmental impact of the palm oil industry. And so do other people who invest their money in it.
But it’s not just our fault for never questioning our palm oil industry. The government who obviously knows more than us also has never been open about how they run our palm oil industry. It’s like the problems about sustainable plantation oil is everyone else problems that use palm oil from Indonesia, but never our problem as the one who provides land for it to grow and apparently also consume them the most.
It is our land, our environment, our animals, and even our self that we are hurting. But only a small part of our people realize it. After realizing the Indonesian huge contribution to palm oil, my first thought was how? How am I supposed to stop millions of people from using unsustainable palm oil when I can’t or it’s hard for me to stop myself from using them?
I briefed my parents about how dirty palm oil industry in Indonesia, and ask us to reduce the amount of fried food at home and use other kinds of oil like coconut oil, corn oil, and olive oil. We agreed because healthier for us to eat. But that’s because I’m blessed to be born in a well enough family, for us to substitute some of our cooking oil to something more expensive. And for my parents to understand how important it is to protect our environment. And still, when I have to eat outside, I would still consume our unsustainable palm oil.
What about those who don’t care? Those who can’t substitute their cooking oil and reduce them? The easiest impact to think about is an Indonesian most common street food “Gorengan” which has a high need for palm oil to process the ingredients. Substituting the oil will raise their price. Raising the price drastically would make the seller lose their customer, and the customer would just simply switch to a cheaper stall that still uses palm oil.
Therefore cutting and or substituting our cooking oil in this kind of stage would require and cause huge changes in Indonesian market landscape, and even changes in our culture of food. Changes would always have an adjustment cost tagging along behind it.
The not so easy, still complicated, but also a reasonable way for us to help protect our environment is to start using sustainable palm oil, and for the government to push all of our palm oil industry to be sustainable. Yes there will also be changes, and adjustment costs since sustainable palm oil have a higher price, but the price is less than us slowly destroying the place that we lived in.
Sumatran tiger is the only species of tiger that originally comes from Indonesia, and we almost lose them like we lost our Java species of tiger. We called ourself “Macan Asia” and yet we never cared about the only living “macan” that we have left.
“Southeast Asia’s hazardous haze”. Al Jazeera. 7 October 2015. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
2. Chan, Francis. “$47b? Indonesia counts costs of haze”. The Straits Times. Retrieved 11 October 2015
Au, Eunice. “Schools closed in Malaysia as haze reaches hazardous levels”. The Straits Times. Retrieved 10 October 2015
Tanda Pinem, “KEBAKARAN HUTAN DAN LAHAN GAMBUT: Kajian Teologi Ekofeminisme”, GEMA TEOLOGIKA Vol. 1 №2, Oktober 2016
Agnes C . Sequiño, Jessica M. Avenido; The World’s Leader in the Palm Oil Industry : Indonesia, International Journal of Ecology and Conservation pp.152–164, Vol. 13, January 2015
Faisal M. Mohd Noor, Anja Gassner , Anne Terheggen, and Philip Dobie; Beyond sustainability criteria and principles in palm oil production: addressing consumer concerns through insetting, Ecology and Society 22(2):5, 2017
Factsheet; www.rspo.org
Joanne C. Gaskell, 2015, The Role of Markets, Technology and Policy in Generating Palm Oil Demand in Indonesia, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 51(1), 2015–03–30
J. Miettinen et al.S.E. Page Extent of industrial plantations on Southeast Asian peatlands in 2010 with analysis of historical expansion and future projections GCB Bioenergy, 4 (2012), pp. 908–918 K.M. Carlson et al. Carbon emissions from forest conversion by Kalimantan oil palm plantations Nat. Clim. Change, 3 (2012), pp. 283–287. W. Omar et al. Mapping of Oil Palm Cultivation on Peatland in Malaysia (No 529) MPOB Information Series, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2010)
Martin Wildenberg, 2016, Palm Oil — Environmental Destruction, Stolen Land How We´Re Destroying The Environment And Human Rights, One Snack At A Time, GLOBAL 2000, Neustiftgasse 36, 1070 Vienna
