Singapore can stop the haze with sustainable palm oil
In 2015, when Benjamin Tay came back to Singapore after his studies in Australia, he got smacked by the worse transboundary haze event in Southeast Asia.
“The haze was all around Indonesia, Malaysia, and way up to Philippines. It was quite bad.” He shared with me on a phone call.
The haze caused respiratory issues to a hundred of thousand people especially in Indonesia, flights were canceled, and schools in Singapore were closed due to high levels of air pollution. In the cities of Pontianak and Kuching located on the island of Borneo, air pollution was three times worse than in Singapore. In the state of Penang in the north of Malaysia, Perai Pulau was as affected as Singapore even though it is 700 km away from Merlion city.
Benjamin wanted to understand why air pollution could happen at such scale and intensity. The same year, he joined the People’s Movement to Stop Haze (PM Haze), an organization founded in response to the 2013 haze crisis, but dormant at the time. As part of a new founding group, he brought the organization back to life and registered it as a charity in Singapore. Benjamin volunteered full-time for PM Haze and finally became its Executive Director. Following the smoke from Singapore to Indonesia, Benjamin and his team realized the link between the haze, peatland fires, and palm oil.
There is no smoke without fire
When Singapore was facing peaks in air pollution, across the Strait of Karimata on the island of Borneo, Indonesia was on fire. In 2015, Indonesia recorded more than 30 000 fire alerts, of which one third came from peatlands.
Peatlands naturally occur in the waterlogged areas of Indonesia where the wet, anoxic, and acid conditions protect the dead flora from decomposing. Layers of dead vegetation can accumulate over centuries and form peat down to 10 meters deep.
Peatlands are not suitable for growing crops in their natural states, that’s why farmers drain them to get the right conditions to grow crops like palm oil. The large dry mass of vegetation left after draining the peatland can easily be ignited and burned for months releasing large amounts of greenhouse gas. In 2015, 2.5 million ha of forest and peatlands burnt in Indonesia, one of the worst years of the millennium.
In Indonesia, deforestation is mostly driven by commodity development. It can be for pulpwood or mining, but most likely for palm oil. The archipelago state largely took advantage of its gentle weather and rich soil which gifted it with the highest yield per ha of palm oil in the world. In 2019, half of the world's palm oil plantations were in Indonesia. The country is the largest producer of palm oil and along with Malaysia, they produce 80% of the world's palm oil.
Palm oil is odorless, colorless, and stable at high temperatures; these versatile properties make it very popular in the food and cosmetics industry. Today, palm oil can be found in about half of the packaged products in supermarkets, ranging from pizza, chocolate, and ice cream to toothpaste, shampoo, and lipstick.
Indonesia, Malaysia, are not only producers of palm oil but also important consumers. Thanks to them, one of every three palm oil tins produced in the world is eaten in Southeast Asia. Singapore appears to be a minor consumer; however, it’s mostly due to its population of only 5.7 million people, small compared to the 270 million Indonesians.
A hazy ingredient
Singaporeans have a general knowledge of palm oil. The media often shares stories about how deforestation for palm oil plantations threatens the habitat of endangered wildlife like orangutans and tigers which are wandering the forests of the tropical archipelago.
“A lot of people think palm oil is cheap and unhealthy. Other people are more aware of environmental issues. But when it comes to link palm oil and haze, people are troubled,” said Benjamin Tay.
In a survey Benjamin carried out in Singapore which included over one thousand respondents, four out of five were aware that haze was produced by fires and deforestation in Indonesia and linked it with unsustainable palm oil. However, half of them didn’t know that most supermarkets' products contained palm oil, and most were not aware of the labels for sustainable palm oil.
Although palm oil is widely used, it is always present in very small quantities under hundred different names depending on the derivatives used in the final product. Moreover, the bad reputation of this invisible ingredient does not incentivize companies to proudly display it on their products even when it is from sustainable sources.
PM Haze wants to show people that palm oil can be produced in a sustainable manner, without creating deforestation and haze. The organization works with consumers and product distributors to adopt haze-free sustainable palm oil. They nudge consumers to buy sustainable with “haze-free” stamps on supermarket products and food stalls using sustainable palm oil.
In 2004, the Roundtable for sustainable palm oil (RSPO) was formed to clean the palm oil supply chain and prevent the negative effect of palm oil cultivation on the environment. RSPO developed a global standard for sustainable palm oil and created a market-based tool to promote the production and consumption of Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO).
Producers can earn premiums for their efforts in making the palm oil industry more sustainable while buyers use certified palm oil to demonstrate their sustainability commitment to their customers, partners, and investors.
A company producing palm oil and aspiring to sell CSPO has to become an RSPO member first. Joni Jupesta, who worked seven years in the world's second-largest palm oil company explained the process:
“Before becoming an RSPO member, the main criteria are to not do any deforestation. The company must show that plantations were established before 2005. If plantations were established on forest or peatland after 2005, the company cannot join RSPO.”
After obtaining the license, a company can sell CSPO; however, it must regularly show that its plantations are not encroaching on forest and peatland.
Today, many technologies are making the monitoring of palm oil plantations cheaper and accessible to NGOs and academics around the globe. For example, at the end of 2020, researchers from the University of London’s Forensic Architecture group and Greenpeace used satellite imagery to analyze the pattern of fires in Papua and quickly deduced that the direction and speed of the fires matched the pattern of a man-made land clearing. Later this year, Korindo, the company behind this deliberate burning of peatland, has been stripped of its sustainability status.
A company member of RSPO has different options to certify its palm oil, each with different premium values and traceability requirements.
“The ‘segregated’ and ‘identity preserved’ certified palm oil offers the highest level of traceability where 100% of fresh fruit bunches come from the not deforested area”, explained Joni Jupesta.
But in the “mass balance” model, fresh fruit bunches from certified plantations are mixed with non-certified ones, suggesting that a percentage of conventional palm oil may be contained in the final product.
While large companies have the resources to obtain RSPO certifications, smallholders are rarely registered and may have to sell their harvest to mills that are not certified. Joni Jupesta who worked with smallholders to prevent peatland fires described:
“For smallholders who only own 10 ha, who is going to monitor them? If there is a control, they say ‘I am poor, please don’t bully me’; but even though they are small, smallholders altogether cover a large area. They were responsible for 4–6 million ha of forest loss in the period from 2005 to 2015.”
To address this issue, the RSPO has started an initiative to organize smallholders in associations and cooperatives to provide them with training on RSPO requirements. Then, smallholders can obtain certifications and earn a premium for their fruit bunches.
On the website of the RSPO, some smallholders share their experience in short videos; for example, Bachrun, a member of a cooperative of independent smallholders in Indonesia explained:
“I joined the cooperative mainly to increase the price I got for my crop. Before I joined it, I had to sell through middlemen. The price was low and not transparent. With the extra income since joining, I have been able to renovate my house, buy my own motorcycle, and fund my daughters’ studies at a university in Central Java.”
Even though, opinions are mixed about the results of RSPO in cleaning the palm oil supply chain; Benjamin Tay summarises RSPO success like this:
“You are a farmer, you can turn to RSPO, you buy palm oil, you can turn to RSPO, you are a consumer, you can turn to RSPO. RSPO proposes solutions from upstream to downstream, and that’s the strength of RSPO.”
No one to buy sustainable palm oil
A problem that remains is the very low demand for sustainable palm oil. Only a fifth of sustainable palm oil finds a buyer, the rest is sold without price premium as conventional palm oil. Back in Singapore, a group of students is trying to encourage food hawkers to use sustainable palm oil.
“We decided to work on the demand side because it is not enough for the supply and we focused on food hawkers because they use more palm oil,” detailed Jia Yang, co-founder of the initiative.
In 2018, the group of students founded Hazy Waste and started by surveying the canteens of their university. Four out of five food hawkers used palm oil, and most of the palm oil tins had a halal certification, but almost none was certified sustainable. Food hawkers were more interested in the price and quality of the oil than its sustainability.
“One lady we surveyed decided to switch to certified palm oil because the quality was much higher compared to the one, she used” explained Shi Zhou Tan, one of the student volunteers, “but during Covid there was no student on campus, no customers, so she finally came back to her previous cheap oil.”
Food hawkers usually buy 5 palm oil tins per week, each costing about 20 Singaporean dollars. One certified sustainable palm oil tin costs 3 dollars more than conventional palm oil.
“Food hawkers are very susceptible to changes, they try to pass the cost on customers. And they must rent the place as well.”
Food hawkers in Singapore are usually from a low to middle-income background, the cost of sustainable palm oil is not negligible to them. Meals can be as cheap as 4 dollars at university food hawkers, this means that for each tin of sustainable palm oil, shop owners need one customer to compensate for the extra cost.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 has put a halt to this initiative, but once things come back to normal in Singapore, the group will continue to work with food hawkers at their university and in the city to shift to certified sustainable palm oil to avoid deforestation and the haze.
Meanwhile, farmers will continue to grow palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia, some burning peatland, others adopting sustainable practices.
