Demand for food is growing faster than supply is keeping up. That has the potential to lead to all sorts of nasty consequences: wars over access to land, civil wars over food prices, food price inflation and more.
That's where Tim Benton comes in. The Leeds University professor is effectively employed by the United Kingdom government to coordinate thinking on food security challenges over the next decades.
On November 11, the day before he delivered the keynote address at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil's (RSPO) 11th annual meeting, Benton sat down with Tempo reporter Philip Jacobson to share his thoughts on the efficacy of the RSPO.
How productive are voluntary certification schemes like the RSPO when it comes to sustainability?
Ultimately there's a question of who has the power. If you look far enough down the chain, it is citizens that have the power to change things, really. They're just often disempowered, because there's an individual citizen and then there's some huge economic corporation that just pushes its own agenda.
But now consumers are starting to say, I want what is good for me, I want food that is sustainably produced because I'm worried about climate change; and I won't buy the food from you, supermarket, unless you're transparent about where that food is coming from.
So you then need to have a body in which that trust is embodied. Maybe that body is the retailer itself, who makes the promise that it will sustainably source from its own standards and that those standards will be transparent and auditable; or maybe it is an intermediate body, like the RSPO, which effectively certifies something. The consumers, the retailers, the citizens need to be able to say: if it's coming from this source then I can trust it.
How effective do you think the RSPO is in tems of ensuring sustainability of palm oil?
I don't think we should think about sustainability as being it is or it isn't. Sustainability is a kind of journey. Any agricultural production system is going to impact the environment. So if you think of it as a journey, there is always a lot more you can do.
I think the RSPO in principle is doing well. In practice I suspect there are a lot of places where you can pick up audit trails where the evidence isn't there. Certainly in my area which is biodiversity and ecological impacts, some of that is very difficult to assess. But to say we are doing it sustainably where you don't have that in place, then it becomes a risk for the brand.
I think that's part of the danger with respect to the RSPO. There is a danger of it being seen as kind a greenwashing brand as opposed to it being seen as really a sustainability producer. But that's also going to be tensions within the organization. Some of the members are going to be very gung ho, let's make this as sustainable as possible; others are going to say, let's make this as cheap as possible, let's do everything we can just to put the sustainability label on our product to get that premium.
The RSPO's philosophy is that you can be sustainable and you can make more money. Is that feasible?
I would say from a true sustainability perspective, sustainable means that you're not reducing the ability of the world to give you the ecosystem services that you require. And the ecosystem services come from natural capital. So if you're spending natural capital, as in financial terms, then that's not sustainable in the long run.
I think the danger is thinking you can convert the whole of Malaysia or Indonesia into a plantation forest and for it to be sustainable with one or two little blips, small little remnants of forest where you put the orangutans.
You can't ignore the large-scale problems. If you have sustainable field management, but you do the same thing field after field, you end up with an unsustainable landscape. It's the same with palm. Maybe people are worrying about soil or carbon for that particular bit of land, but if you convert the whole of Indonesia into that same thing then it becomes unsustainable on a spatial scale. Then you've got the Temporal scale; what looks good over a five-year period or a 10-year period over a 50 or 100 period looks shite. Part of the difficulty for this whole debate is lengthening and widening the view.
