Deforestation: Take Your Rival Malaysia as Example, Palm Oil Leader Indonesia Is Told

Environmentalists are pushing the world’s top palm oil producer, Indonesia, to learn from its competing grower, Malaysia: the latter country recently allowed plantation and land maps to be made public, in a mission to fight deforestation and fires.

“It is a great step forward for transparency and accountability,” says Darrel Webber, chief executive of the Kuala Lumpur-based Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry watchdog which received the legal green light to publish members’ land maps for peninsular Malaysia and the state of Sarawak. “We hope this move will bring greater objectivity to discussions on fires and other topics that have sometimes been attributed to the palm oil sector.”

Indonesia and Malaysia produce around 85% of the world’s palm oil – the most widely used edible oil – and activists have long pushed for them to publish maps of where companies have been given land for plantations to allow third parties to make it easier monitor forest fires and deforestation.

Malaysia’s agreement to go public means more trust for third parties, as it becomes more feasible to identify companies and supply chains violating industry efforts to curb deforestation.