There are fears that the departure of an American agricultural developer from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil could bode badly for sustainable farming in the whole of Africa

Is it a land grab or a development opportunity? This is the question increasingly posed to African governments bent on attracting foreign investment in the form of plantation agriculture. Short-lived jobs and negligible export earnings often come at the expense of poor villagers forced off their land. Natural forest habitat is cut down to make way for a monoculture brand whose favoured commodity crop – palm – is presently the world’s cheapest edible oil.

Stepping onto this perilous terrain is the industry-led, WWF-backed, Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). At present it’s the only credible international standard.

Some judge it a remarkable success for having certified 13% of world supply, focusing on environmental and social impact standards. Through most of its 10-year existence, however, the RSPO sought compromise in the hopes of building a broad-based multistakeholder process. Standards are admirably high, but enforcement and grievance mechanisms have lacked ambition.

Better planting

That purportedly changed in early 2010 with the advent of a New Planting Procedure aimed at ensuring implementation of core elements of the RSPO standard before the clearance of any land. In the past, certification often took place after land was already cleared. This has toughened certification considerably – to a point where RSPO members are now jumping ship.

A case in point is the departure of Herakles Farm, a US-based agricultural developer and RSPO member whose 73,000-hectare palm oil plantation in south-west Cameroon faced community opposition. Environmental groups rumour that Herakles – linked to one of the world’s largest private equity firms, Blackstone – is converting high conservation value rainforest for the plantation.

At stake are roughly 45,000 villagers and forestland situated among four major conservation zones.

In explaining the move, Herakles cites the length of time its RSPO application had been pending, while noting that it was “addressing a dire humanitarian need” in Cameroon. Herakles officials also said they received community support for the project but eyewitness accounts suggest otherwise.

“When the company came here, they said that this project had [already] been authorised by the president of Cameroon … So we just kept quiet,” Edward Ndomo, the chair of the local traditional council, told Oakland Institute researchers for a report and film documentary put out by the US-based thinktank in partnership with Greenpeace.

There exist effective pathways to support small farmer agriculture in Cameroon, says Frederic Moussea, the report’s author, citing myriad studies that say palm trees can be planted in combination with a number of traditional crops. Scale in Cameroon and elsewhere in Africa can be achieved through improved crop production training and marketing assistance. “What we need to do is help African farmers by investing in what’s there, instead of eradicating them from the map,” Moussea says.

Adam Harrison, a senior policy officer for food and agriculture at WWF and vice-president of the RSPO, says Herakles’s departure is “unfortunate” but necessary. “The tough part is keeping to the code and for a grower the very tough part is progressing on certification – so tough in the case of Herakles that they decided to leave before the RSPO would have had to discipline and potentially expel them.”

Since 2007, WWF has been working specifically on palm oil in Africa, with particular focus in Ghana and Gabon where there are active RSPO members and, to a lesser extent, in Liberia, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon. “It does show that the RSPO is credible and does insist that the standards cannot be compromised,” says Harrison. “The case also shows that stakeholders in Cameroon are aware of this. The next step … is to make sure that the government starts to impose RSPO standards across the sector and take up these issues in their planning for oil palm expansion and in their negotiations with individual companies.”