Rspo

Duta Palma is a notorious palm oil company with an inglorious history of trashing the rainforest. This morning, it became the first company to be kicked out of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

Helen Buckland, UK director of the Sumatran Orangutan Society, reports on developments at the recent Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil meeting...

It's no secret that the palm oil industry is responsible for massive deforestation in Indonesia, but it's now gone some way towards acknowledging the value of rainforests and how vital they are for conserving endangered species, including orangutans.

With so little habitat remaining in Sumatra and Borneo, it is vital to preserve even degraded forests to ensure the survival of orangutans in the wild.

As world leaders line up in Copenhagen to agree a new climate treaty, we've also been working hard to secure a result that will have a positive impact on the global climate - by protecting Indonesia's forests.

Today we're publicly releasing new evidence that Sinar Mas, Indonesia’s biggest palm oil producer, has been persistently engaging in widespread illegal deforestation and peatland clearance. We presented presented the evidence in this dossier to one of their biggest customers, the giant Unilever corporation. Now Unilever has decided to stop buying palm oil from Sinar Mas.

Fire burns through forest in Sumatra, clearing the area for plantations © Greenpeace/Novis

It's been a few weeks since the Esperanza's tour of Indonesia wrapped up with an exhausting but thrilling week of direct action focused on various palm oil tankers, and I've since left those humid equatorial climes to return to a chilly British winter. But even though the ship has moved on to other countries and campaigns, the palm oil campaign continues and in the past few weeks there have been some developments.

The most obvious has been annual meeting of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in Bali - this could have been the moment the industry got its act together and did something other than spin the usual load of greenwash over its involvement in the destruction of south east Asia's rainforests. Sadly, it was not to be. Although our ship painting/blockading actions drew a lot of attention, as did our earlier revelations about United Plantations and their 'sustainable' palm oil, no real progress was made.