You are the chief sustainability and communications officer at Golden Agri-Resources (GAR), the world’s second-largest palm oil producer. You’ve been with GAR for eight and a half years, but before that, you were ten years with Rainforest Alliance. What made you move?
I worked for ten years with Rainforest Alliance and seven years with WWF. It was a long stint, and I was ready for a change. If you’re a communicator from the NGO community, you usually end up in a Nestlé, a Unilever, or a retailer, but brands and sales don’t motivate me. I’m motivated by how we grow things and how farmers farm.
I am the most city of city people. I grew up in Brisbane, but my father was a quintessential Australian who loved the bush. When we were kids, we were always off camping somewhere out West. He was always dragging us off to state forests and national parks. It spurred my love of the natural world and the environment. I’m a product of the 1970s when national forests were still working. I saw land used productively and managed for its environmental values. I believe my father is to blame for where I ended up.
Several former Rainforest Alliance and WWF colleagues have moved into corporate roles. It’s a good thing. You need an intersection between not-for-profit organizations, business, and government. You need them to mix and blend so that they understand each other better.
I was in Singapore in September 2015, and a friend suggested I talk with GAR. I did. It seemed like a great way to do what I love but in a corporate environment. It ticked all the boxes. My family agreed to move, so it all worked out.
I’m also a board member for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, but you look at certification differently when you’re a business.
When you’re the standard system designing principles and criteria, you should ask yourself how the system drives continuous improvement for the whole sector. Unfortunately, it too often becomes, ‘How do you lift the top – the ceiling?’
The big difference for me coming to GAR—and why I joined—is that people will hold the company accountable for the weakest link in its supply chain, the smallholder. As a business, we must lift the industry’s floor with us. It’s what certification should be doing, too.
We’re asking, “Is this about lifting everyone or improving the top two per cent?” If it’s the latter, it’s of no use to us. Lifting the floor is critical to us as a business and industry and to Indonesia as a country.
Is there an issue with certification in that producers pay for it, making smallholders worse off?
I was perhaps atypical, even in Rainforest Alliance, but I’ve never agreed that certification suits everyone. Working in the corporate environment, I see how expensive it is for smallholders.
I share your concern about cost. Who pays? It is challenging because most certification systems don’t break 20 to 30 per cent of global production. The FSC is the most successful at maybe 30 per cent of global timber production.
I want to see smallholders improve their production practices. I want to walk them to the door of certification on the assumption that a standard system represents the best agricultural practice. But we should give them the right to choose. Do they go through the certification door and commit to a lifetime of paying an annual audit fee and all the things that come along with that? Or do we help them to behave appropriately, regardless of the certificate or the piece of paper?
I don’t believe certification systems have developed well for smallholders. You end up with a big gap between the certified and the uncertified, the latter making up the lion’s share of global production. It doesn’t seem to be the right solution. Certification is excellent for many things, but I don’t think it’s the only tool we should use.
Regulation is stepping in to do what certification hasn’t done. We see that with the EUDR and ISPO (Indonesia Sustainable Palm Oil), the country’s national sustainability certification scheme for palm oil. It will become mandatory by 2025. There is no easy answer regarding what’s better, certification or regulation.
I’m looking for a buyer who is prepared to pay the actual cost of commodity production, with all the externalities internalized into the price.
Now, let’s go back to your job. Do you spend your day on sustainability or communications?
In some ways, sustainability is communications. I spend much of my day trying to inspire, negotiate with, convince, and cajole people into doing things they may not want to do. Or to act faster than they feel comfortable with.
Sustainability is also about translating sustainability jargon into business speak. It’s essential to step back and translate external demands so the company can understand, absorb, and make informed decisions. Then, you must translate back out from inside the business to external stakeholders and explain why you’re doing what you’re doing at the pace that you’re doing.
I feel I’m communicating all the time. But it’s probably about 70 per cent on sustainability and 30 per cent on communications.
Before joining GAR, I spent over 20 years working in international environmental NGOs. I’m well-versed and battle-hardened in the campaigning and political world of the environment. I take my responsibility for sustainability seriously.
Judgment should focus on GAR’s actions in the field. What are we delivering? Are we meeting our commitments? If we’re not, are we explaining why we’re not in a legitimate, understandable, and acceptable way?
I’m proud of what GAR is delivering. Could we be faster? Could we do more? Sure, of course. But over the last nine years, we’ve delivered on our commitments to a deforestation-free supply chain and the transformation of our suppliers. We’re working hard on climate change and reducing our carbon emissions. Our CEO is a great advocate for that work, and I’m proud of the part I’ve played in getting him there.
We have previously worked with external NGOs on some environmental or social issues. We collaborated with Greenpeace to develop our approach to high-carbon stock areas. We’ve worked with OFI, Orangutan Foundation International, on orangutan conservation and training our staff on the estates and communities on zero harm to wildlife.
We prefer to work with local groups and organizations rather than international NGOs. We aim to build Indonesia’s local capacity to advocate for its environment and social issues.
Palm oil is the most environmentally sustainable vegetable oil, yielding five times more than sunflowers, six times more than soybeans, and ten times more than coconuts. Why aren’t these statistics reaching the broader public?
Those are just numbers. Numbers lack emotional appeal. It doesn’t matter how productive palm is compared to soy or rapeseed; you lose the argument whenever somebody posts a video of an orangutan in a devastated forest on social media. People regularly post videos from 2013 as if they were happening now. No, it happened ten years ago. It is terrible that it happened, but things have greatly improved in the past ten years.
We must put a human face on palm oil because the stats won’t help us. We’ve done that in a limited way at GAR, given that we don’t have the marketing budgets of a Unilever or a Nestlé. We’ve seen people wake up to the reality that you can produce palm sustainably. Millions of people here in Indonesia rely on the crop, directly and indirectly, for their livelihoods. It can be a force for good.
But it is hard to get people to listen to those good news stories when they are so attuned to the negative.
In the late 1980s, soy was the big bad, but it didn’t last long. The NGOs quickly pivoted to palm, partly because soy fought back, but palm didn’t. It’s a cultural thing. A lot of plantation owners did a Southeast Asian thing and put their heads down, ignored it, and hoped it would go away. And so, in the vacuum created, the only narrative that stood was the NGO narrative. We’re slowly winning. It’s slow because that narrative is so entrenched now.
But we won’t win with those numbers you give, even though I use them all the time. We’ll win it based on human stories with an emotional connection and by delivering on the promises the palm sector has made around decoupling production from deforestation, protecting wildlife, and reducing carbon emissions.
We’ve taken the approach within GAR to ask how we can get into the inboxes of the people who matter the most – customers, our financial backers, and shareholders. We’ve done that. Once we talk to people directly and put facts in front of them, they get on board with the idea that palm can be sustainable.
Taking that to a broad public communication has been more challenging, partly because no one wants to hear it from us. Still, we see some influential journalists finally getting the message.
It can be challenging to combat fake news; how you react depends on whether it is a lie or an interpretation of events. If it’s a straight-up lie, it would depend a bit on where it was published and who was repeating it. But, honestly, it’s like Whack-a-Mole.
You must decide whether it is essential for you to challenge it. Challenging everything would be exhausting and time-consuming and would not give you much. You’d be spending all your time doing that and none of your time establishing your narrative.
When I joined, GAR was in a similar situation, consistently playing defence. We decided to stop reacting to every little thing about ourselves and the palm sector and to take control of our own story. We framed that around the implementation of the GAR Social and Environmental Policy. If it didn’t have a connection to that, we ignored it unless it was an egregious lie. It has stood us in good stead and given us consistency in our narrative, which we underpin with data.
We’ve continued to progress. We report on what we’re doing, how it’s going, and why it’s stalled in some instances. This has built credibility and confidence in the business. Our people know what our narrative is. They know what to talk about if they are challenged. It’s about empowering our employees to feel they can speak up and have pride.
Could you just give an example of what GAR is doing to improve the livelihood of your smallholders?
We employ nearly 100,000 people across Indonesia, most working on farms or in factories. We provide early childcare facilities (BPAs) and medical centres for our plantation workers, funding and running them in buildings on our estates. We have more than 340 early childcare centres, with over 770 carers serving in the region of two and a half thousand children, from babies through to the age of five, after which children in Indonesia move on to primary school.
We are working on how to improve the performance of these early childcare centres. We want to empower the women who run these centres to take over some financial management and improve their skills and abilities to become small business managers.
Many children in our BPAs failed to meet essential developmental milestones, such as the ability to sort from small to large, recognize colours, or stand on one foot – fundamental things. By introducing measures like regular height and weight checks, scaling up our caregivers on some basic educational requirements, and connecting them with our health clinics and volunteer services, we now address maternal and child health-related issues around stunting and malnutrition, a problem in Indonesia. Doing this can fundamentally change the direction of these children’s lives.
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