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RSPO makes palm oil maps public
December 24, 2015
RSPO makes palm oil maps public
By Vaidehi Shah
Thursday 24 December 2015
The industry association for sustainable palm oil announced on Friday that it will make its members’ concession maps public, in a bid to improve the monitoring and enforcement of its rules for environmentally and socially responsible cultivation.
After two years of legal uncertainty, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) said that by the middle of next year, it will publish digital maps of all its members’ palm oil concessions except those in Malaysia, where it is not legal to do so yet.
The maps will be published on the Global Forest Watch Fires online portal, which is managed by US non-profit World Resources Institute.
Green groups agreed that this move marked some progress towards transparency, but maintained that it did little to solve the wider problem of unsustainable palm oil practices.
Annisa Rahmawati, forest campaigner, Greenpeace Indonesia, said that many of RSPO’s non-grower members continue to buy palm oil from firms which are not RSPO members, and therefore have no obligation to make their maps public. She cited edible fat processing firm IOI Loders Croklaan as an example.
Read more at Eco-Business.
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