COMMENT | Malaysia’s palm oil persecution complex
COMMENT | The Malaysian palm oil industry wants you to know that it has a problem - and that it’s all someone else’s fault.
That’s the distillation of the country’s palm oil industry messaging in recent months following a slew of highly damaging revelations about human rights abuses on palm oil plantations. The industry complains that it is victim of an amorphous “no palm oil movement” that has fostered unfair public perceptions about the industry’s environmental and human rights impact that has created “a whole generation of citizens who believe palm oil is really bad.”
Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin last month lent some official weight to the palm industry’s persecution complex by bemoaning what he described as a “baseless” anti-palm oil campaign “that does not reflect the sustainability of the world palm oil industry.” It’s a victim narrative that depicts a Malaysian palm oil sector under unprovoked and unjustified attack from a combination of protectionist governments and non-governmental organisations in “the West” with a shared goal of “crippling the palm oil sector.”
What Muhyiddin and Malaysia’s palm oil sector elide in this shared narrative is the undeniable series of high-profile revelations of well-documented human rights abuses in the sector over the past seven months. Those revelations began with the Associated Press (AP) September 2020 exposé alleging major human rights abuses on...
COMMENT | The Malaysian palm oil industry wants you to know that it has a problem - and that it’s all someone else’s fault.
That’s the distillation of the country’s palm oil industry messaging in recent months following a slew of highly damaging revelations about human rights abuses on palm oil plantations. The industry complains that it is victim of an amorphous “no palm oil movement” that has fostered unfair public perceptions about the industry’s environmental and human rights impact that has created “a whole generation of citizens who believe palm oil is really bad.”
Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin last month lent some official weight to the palm industry’s persecution complex by bemoaning what he described as a “baseless” anti-palm oil campaign “that does not reflect the sustainability of the world palm oil industry.” It’s a victim narrative that depicts a Malaysian palm oil sector under unprovoked and unjustified attack from a combination of protectionist governments and non-governmental organisations in “the West” with a shared goal of “crippling the palm oil sector.”
What Muhyiddin and Malaysia’s palm oil sector elide in this shared narrative is the undeniable series of high-profile revelations of well-documented human rights abuses in the sector over the past seven months. Those revelations began with the Associated Press (AP) September 2020 exposé alleging major human rights abuses on Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil plantations including “child labour, outright slavery and allegations of rape.” The Malaysian response? The government declined to comment on the AP report while Nageeb Wahab, chief executive officer of the Malaysian Palm oil Association, dismissed the allegations, stating “All of them are not true.”
That same month, the United States’ Customs and Border Protection (CBP) barred entry of palm oil produced by Malaysia’s FGV Holdings due to widespread and horrific allegations of abuses including “deception, restriction of movement, isolation, physical and sexual violence, intimidation and threats.” In December 2020, CBP imposed similar import restrictions on palm oil produced by Sime Darby Plantation and its subsidiaries due to “forced labour indicators in Sime Darby Plantation’s production process.” The CBP investigation into Sime Darby indicated the existence of abuses on its plantations including “debt bondage, withholding of wages and excessive overtime.”
Those allegations have in turn resulted in the barring of palm oil produced by those two companies from the European, Australian and Japanese supply chains of major international food companies, including General Mills, based on concerns about “the risk to their own reputation if they buy from Sime Darby and FGV.”
Have these developments catalysed both the Malaysian government and the country’s palm oil sector to immediately investigate and remedy the human rights abuses alleged to exist in the palm oil supply chain? Not yet.
Instead, Ahmad Parveez Ghulam Kadir, the director-general of the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, penned an op-ed last month that attributed the CBP action against FGV and Sime Darby to unspecified “misunderstandings about the Malaysian culture and the practice of local planters.” Rather than declaring the necessity of a thorough and impartial probe of those allegations, he issued a vague pledge to “correct the [CBP’s] interpretation of forced and child labour” without elaborating.
That’s not adequate. If Malaysia’s palm oil sector wants to avoid international commercial pariah status, it needs to take seriously all allegations of human rights abuses in its supply chain and take substantive action to stop them. Not least because they compound the sector’s existing reputational damage inflicted by the environmental damage wrought by decades of unsustainable palm oil production.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates oil palm development accounted for 47 percent of deforestation in Malaysia from 1972 to 2015. IUCN further estimated that at least 50 percent of all deforestation between 2005 and 2015 in Borneo - an island shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei - was related to oil palm development. This destruction has driven Bornean orangutans, hornbills, and elephants to the brink of extinction. Between 2015 and 2019, the total gross area planted with oil palm in Malaysia has expanded by over 257,000 hectares - proof that the industry continues to expand its footprint.
The Malaysian government has an important role to play in addressing the palm oil sector’s environmental and human rights deficits. It can start by requiring that palm oil companies - starting with FGV and Sime Darby - adhere to the strict protection of forests, peatlands and human rights which would be aligned with the “No Deforestation, No Peat and No Exploitation (NDPE)” policies that Sime Darby itself has already committed to, and which are becoming best practice within the palm oil industry. And the palm oil sector should embrace NDPE policies to ensure strict compliance with them across their supply chains.
There are indications that Sime Darby has registered that message. The company earlier this month announced the establishment of an “Expert Stakeholder Human Rights Assessment Commission” backed by a third-party evaluator “to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the group’s labour practices across its Malaysian operations.” These initiatives are at the very least a step in the right direction.
The Malaysian government and the country’s palm oil sector have a choice: They can continue to spout specious conspiratorial theories about Malaysian palm oil’s dismal international reputation, or they can take the necessary action to actually improve it. That will take courage, political will and a determination to confront inconvenient truths rather than reflexively deny them.
PHELIM KINE is the senior director for Asia at the environmental campaign organisation Mighty Earth in Washington, DC.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
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