Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in Africa: Getting it right from the start

The RSPO Africa Roadshow is raising awareness on sustainability in the oil palm sector in Africa and helping create an enabling environment for the rapid uptake of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil’s (RSPO) best-practices.

Participants at Proforest's RSPO Roadshow discuss sustainable palm oil practices. Photo by Proforest.

The past half-decade has seen over a million hectares being allocated as concessions for oil palm plantations in West and Central Africa, with more concessions currently being negotiated.  While oil palm development has the potential to contribute to economic development in the region, there is also the risk that plantation establishment could cause significant negative social and environmental impacts. The RSPO has developed a set of guidelines for sustainable oil palm development and new plantings. If implemented, the guidelines can help to minimize the potential negative impacts. While many governments and multinational companies recognize the importance of sustainable palm oil, some national policies reference international best practices, and various concession agreements have mandated that plantations be developed in accordance with RSPO requirements, there is limited understanding by local actors of what this entails and how to go about meeting RSPO requirements.

The RSPO Africa Roadshow is a partnership of organizations[1] that seeks to raise the level of understanding about the RSPO in West and Central Africa, facilitate the development of sustainability tools, and promote sustainable smallholder development. Since the beginning of 2012, the RSPO Africa Roadshow has organized a series of training and capacity building workshops for over one hundred key stakeholders (including all major oil palm growers, government institutions, civil society organizations, and selected local experts) in three priority countries for oil palm development in Africa: Liberia, Gabon and Ghana. The Roadshow events consisted of formal training and capacity-building workshops on sustainable palm oil. After participating in the workshop, Rowena Geddeh of Liberia’s Sustainable Development Institute commented that, “I really understand the RSPO, Free, Prior and Informed Consent concept, and High Conservation Value process now and I feel well equipped to make very informed contributions to any working group dealing with sustainability in the oil palm sector”. The Roadshow has also developed a set of adaptable training materials that can be used in other countries not covered by the first phase of the Roadshow.

Beyond capacity building, the RSPO Roadshow is promoting multi-stakeholder discourse by bringing together the different actors in the oil palm industry. These unique dialogue platforms are affording local actors the opportunity to brainstorm the challenges to sustainability and are equipping them to set local priorities for sustainable oil palm development. The Roadshow has also supported the development of a national interpretation of the High Conservation Value (HCV) toolkit for Liberia. 

The outcomes of these initial RSPO Africa Roadshow activities are already evident. In Gabon, the Roadshow has culminated in the setting up of a National Interpretation Working Group and in Liberia, workshops are being held to discuss the particular issues of smallholders. Meanwhile, the outputs from stakeholder discussions in Ghana are informing follow-up activities by the Sustainable West Africa Palm Program, which is providing direct technical support to growers to assist them in moving toward certification. The project has taken significant steps towards creating an enabling environment for effective uptake of RSPO and HCV requirements in Africa and a second phase of the program will provide in-depth training to develop a pool of regional experts and specialists who can support the expansion of the RSPO in Africa.