Really impressive stuff coming out of the palm oil activism front recently. A series of victories in only a few days - a rare thing indeed in the environmental world
I've been to Borneo 2 years ago, the views all over Malaysian parts of it (and actual Malaysia mainland too, you see it from plane when landing in Kuala Lumpur very clearly) were extremely depressing to me - rows and rows of palm trees in perfect grid where you expect true chaotic wilderness, and basically no other plants around it, just bare soil. That put a pretty sour taste to otherwise beautiful vacation, not sure if I want to visit that country again
There was a story posted earlier this week about orangutan populations on decline due to Cadbury using Palm Oil.
This story made me rather angry, as they are just trying to live and we need to make sure they can.
You're seeing results now, but that doesn't mean the actions haven't been going on for a while. When I was at Unilever ~7 years ago, I sat across from one of the environmental lawyers working on their sustainability initiatives. At that point in time, in order to sustainably source palm oil you had to:
1) Define what "sustainable" meant 2) Create, support, or at the very least integrate with whatever body does the certification and monitoring of the sustainability aspect 3) Drill down multiple levels deep and ensure you know the entire chain of custody of your raw supplies at all times. The equivalent of recursively auditing every single dependency of every single dependency in your source code, where every single dependency has the ability to arbitrarily inject net new dependencies without notice. 4) Enough market clout to force suppliers through all of this hassle. Which in the end doesn't net the supplier much additional income, since the increased prices get eaten by the increased compliance and production costs. 5) Enough compliant global suppliers to minimize supply risk. 6) Time delay related to implementation of all of the above, plus contract re-negotiations with suppliers which add in language related to the sustainability obligations.
Unilever disclosed earlier this year the entire list of 300 direct suppliers and 1,400 mills they source palm oil from[1]. They've also shown their suppliers that the requirement has teeth and that non-compliance will result in being dropped[2]. That's only possible after over a decade of effort in rolling out the global resources, infrastructure, processes, and supply chain risk planning necessary to be able to do so at such a massive scale. But now that supply chain transparency for palm oil has been developed at scale by the large CPG[3] companies, the sustainable sourcing barrier is a lot lower for mid-sized manufacturers and we'll hopefully start seeing more of this.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-unilever-palmoil-transpar...
[2] https://www.cips.org/en/supply-management/news/2018/may/unil...
[3] Consumer Packaged Goods. Companies like Unilever, P&G, Mars, etc that make all the random little things you pick up from the store during your day-to-day shopping.