First Quarter Results

Three months have passed, how did I do? First of all it has been a joy to dive into a complex subject like Sustainable Palm Oil. It touches food security, poverty, human rights, deforestation, economic development, biodiversity and other topics. I have found LinkedIn and Twitter useful to keep me up-to-date with the latest developments. YouTube, as always, provided amazing documentaries that also forced me to look at my own unsustainable consumption. For more in-depth knowledge I completed four interesting courses.

Courses completed
Forests and Livelihoods in Developing Countries by the University of British Columbia helped me understand the different ways in which people depend on forests for timber and non-timber forest products such as bush-meat, fruits, vegetables and rattan.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided a course on Global Postharvest Loss Prevention: Fundamentals, Technologies, and Actors. It taught me about food security and how much food is lost between farm and fork.
Back to the future was a series of lectures from Utrecht University and WWF. The most interesting thing I learned is how stories define our notion of reality.
Introduction to Sustainable Development by Columbia University ... Wow! What a convincing way to show people that we have crossed planetary boundaries. It relates to a quote I later heard at a conference on Sustainable Supply Chain Management: "We are the first generation to feel the effects of climate change and the last that will be able to do anything about it".
Growing our Future Food: Crops by Wageningen University was very interesting but I was not able to find the time to complete it. I did watch most video's. It helped me get a better understanding of the yield gap: the difference between potential and actual production.

Fruit and Vegetable Market, picture by Emeraldhorticulture, Creative Commons

What next?
I have started with the Coursera course How green is that product? Introduction to Life Cycle environmental Assessment. After completing this course I will be better equipped to decide if Palm Oil should be used for Biodiesel.
EdX Course The Ethics of Eating will help me understand the social and environmental impact of consuming processed food that contains Palm Oil. Under which conditions would it be preferred over animal fats or other vegetable oils?
The third series of courses and workshops will show me how palm oil is used in The Netherlands. In April I will attend a meeting on how the Dutch food industry will achieve its goal of 100% sustainable palm oil by the end of 2015. In June I will participate in a 4-day workshop on food & feed safety.

I regret not having found more time to study, but for the next three months I will find extra time. Very excited about above courses, and if possible I will take on more.

Cognitive Dissonance

Palm oil is used for cosmetics and biodiesel, but mostly for food. Demand for food will rise when population jumps from 7 billion now, to 9 billion in 2050. Can we feed these people without converting more forests to farmland? These last few months I have watched many videos on food production and sustainable development. And now I can no longer accept the unsustainable ways in which I aggravate the problem by consuming too much food and fossil energy.

Footprints
My Malaysian in-laws live in a small village surrounded by oil palm plantations. The nearest city is one hour away by car and they go there only a few times a year. They have never been outside of peninsular Malaysia and have never been on a plane. Work and local markets are within 10 km and they use a moped to get there. They do not purchase processed food from supermarkets and buy fresh, locally produced food in small quantities. Leftovers are fed to neighbourhood chickens and cats. The rest is recycled by an army of ants. In a month, maybe one garbage bag of inorganic waste is produced. Hardly anything is thrown. We got them a new refrigerator years ago and they still keep the old one to store books and old news papers...

Ours is too big
Together with my wife and four-year-old daughter I use too many resources. Our footprint is 7.9 hectares, even bigger than the Dutch average of 6.3 and more than three times the global average. We throw a lot of food that has gone bad because of poor planning. Even beef. We produce one full garbage bag of inorganic waste per week, excluding plastics, paper and glass which we separate. I do not know the source of the electricity we use, probably Dutch gas or French nuclear. In 2014 we used 3108 kWh of it. Less than the years before, but still more than the Dutch average. We also used 1345 m3 gas for heating and cooking, and 85 m3 water for washing, flushing, cooking, drinking and gardening. Last year we travelled 100.000 km by plane and 20.000 km by car. We buy more toys, clothes and electronic devices than we need.

It was not always like this
My parents did not raise me this way. They cooked enough food and little was wasted. Meat came in small portions and not every day. Holidays were spent camping somewhere in Europe. I was 21 years old when I took the plane for the first time. As a student I did not own a car and lived in dorm rooms that ranged in size from 8 to 14 m2. TV, washing machine and refrigerator were shared with other students. But then I graduated and got a job. Income rose, I met my wife, we bought a house, had a baby, got a car. Time became scarce and money was no longer limiting our options. My daughter was two months old when she was on her first flight to Malaysia. This all happened gradually but over the years the cognitive dissonance grew. Until now I was able to soften it with symbolic choices like driving a hybrid car, occasionally buying fair-trade food and sorting waste. But this hardly helps.

How to do better?
Last month we started to reduce the amount of meat and fish in our diet. Four days a week we now stick to a vegetarian diet and limit animal products to dairy and eggs. We rely on HelloFresh to provide us with healthy vegetarian food that is easy to cook and tastes good. I became a more conscious food consumer: less processed and more fresh and organic, chicken over beef, local and seasonal over import. Next month, solar panels which will cover my electricity use. Next week I will start a Coursera course: 'Introduction to Life Cycle Environmental Assessment'. I need to improve my knowledge to make better choices.

My goal: by the end of this year my footprint will be lower than the global average. I will probably need to cheat a bit by offsetting my fuel consumption with CO2 compensation plans. We still want to visit the in-laws in Malaysia, and Dutch homes still require heating - despite last year being the warmest in recorded history.

Closed-loop beef production in my in-laws' garden

Post Harvest Loss during storage of Empty Palm Fruit Bunches

Introduction
Higher demand for Palm Oil will be covered by higher yields per hectare, reduction of post harvest loss or increase of hectares. The latter will likely happen at the expense of rain forests and indigenous communities, so it is worth having a look at the first two. Oil Palm fruits are harvested by cutting the fruit bunch of the tree. This Fresh Fruit Bunch is then transported to the mill for threshing and processing into Crude Palm Oil. During threshing, the fruits are separated from the stalks and fibres using steam and water. The fruits are then further processed into Crude Palm Oil. The Empty Fruit Bunches, though, still contain plenty of value which is lost when not managed properly.

Symptoms of Post Harvest Loss
Empty Fruit Bunches (EFB) piled on the side of the road are symptoms of Post Harvest Loss. The EFBs still contain some oil, but also mineral nutrients. As one study shows, most potassium, magnesium and boron are washed away by rainwater within two weeks [1]. These nutrients are needed as input at the Palm Oil plantation as a substitute for fertilisers that need to be bought on the market. The EFBs eventually return to the plantation, either fresh, burnt or composted.

Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas / CC-BY-SA-3.0

Causes of the symptoms
Temporary storage may be required because spreading operations at the plantation are not organised appropriately or because there is no equipment to efficiently remove the EFBs from the mill back to the plantation. Mechanical spreading may not be possible when rain has made the soil too soft for the machines. Millers should be made aware of the potential loss that improper storage causes. If storage cannot be avoided, at least it should be in such a way that rainwater would not take off with valuable nutrients.

Extension strategy
I would look for Best Practices from smallholders and millers that optimise return flows that minimise need for storage. Also I would find Best Practices for safe storage where needed. Storage solutions should be low cost. Large industrial mills are able to collect rainwater and process it to retrieve nutrients. This solution is not available for small mills. To implement solutions I would work with local government, NGOs, cooperations of smallholders and millers. Cooperations and villagers could use a train-the-trainer system where ambassador farmers could showcase the solutions in a way that other smallholders could easily copy. One of the communication channels could be Youtube. Best Practices can be explained using video in the native language. For translation services I would source the network of academic linguists that have done fieldwork in that area and know which speakers speak a language variety that is most commonly accepted.

[1] STUDY OF MINERAL NUTRIENT LOSSES FROM OIL PALM EMPTY FRUIT BUNCHES DURING TEMPORARY STORAGE
http://palmoilis.mpob.gov.my/publications/joprv16n1-sloan.pdf

Barn Owl Management

It takes a lot of time, money and energy to produce palm oil. You first need to plant oil palm seedlings, and nurture them for 3 to 4 years before they start to produce. Optimise soil, water and nutrient levels. Prune the trees, manage the undergrowth and remove sick trees. Check for leaf eating caterpillars and deal with them when there are too many. Finally the time has come to harvest the fruits. But as the Fresh Fruit Bunches wait for transportation to the mill, who shows up to collect? Rattus tiomanicus, also known as the Malayan field rat.

Problem
Research from Universiti Putra Malaysia estimates that rats can cause a loss of 5% of total oil production by damaging the trees and eating the fruits. Serious rat infestation can cost plantations owners more than USD 300 per hectare per year. Even humans are not safe as rats carry diseases such as Leptospirosis. One of the ways of controlling rat populations is by using poisoned bait. Though effective, poison has its price. Financially, but also ecologically as the poison moves up the food chain.

Solution
An article in the New Straits Times "Ruling the roost in estates" describes how Sime Darby, one of the world's largest producers of palm oil, has been dealing with rats. Since the 1980s, Sime Darby has enlisted Barn Owls to help catch the rats on its plantations. The owls are given a warm welcome with special nest boxes and plenty of food. An estimated 21.000 barn owls now inhabit peninsular Malaysia. According to Sime Darby's head of research and development “A barn owl eats an average of one rat per day. A family that comprises two adults and two baby birds could consume 1,200 rats per year.” Thus reducing rat control costs by 30 to 40 percent.

Barn Owl (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

To train your owl
Barn owls have become so important to palm oil plantations that research has been done to find out which pesticides can be used without harming the owls. The research itself not being very harmless to owls. When natural migration is not sufficient, owls are introduced by humans, as detailed in one Reuters article. Indonesian palm oil producer BW Plantation (BWPT) claims owls now save the firm about USD 300.000 per year. "We have an owl trainer who takes care of our owls, starting from the egg until they mature and are then released into the field," said Kelik Irwantono, corporate secretary at BWPT.

Palm Oil plantations are competing with tropical forests in Malaysia and Indonesia and often winning. Where forests have already disappeared, at least make sure that crop yields are maximised and Post-Harvest Loss is reduced. That way production can increase and provide income to millions of people, without further destroying high value conservation areas.

Seven sectors

Palm Oil has many stakeholders and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil lists seven sectors where most of its members fit in. Stakeholders not listed are governments, consumers, journalists, researchers and competitors. Here are all seven with quotes from some of their members.

Plantation companies

Felda: "Nutritional content is also fixed in the soil via the planting of leguminous cover crops to fix the nitrogen from the air into the soil, thus reducing the need for nitrogenous inorganic fertiliser. For this reason, blanket spraying of weed killer is not practiced on Felda plantations, and spraying, when necessary, is restricted to the immediate circle around the palm tree."

Sime Darby: "The Plantation Division is a major employer in Malaysia and employs a significant number of foreign workers. Through our commitment towards being an employer of choice, we ensure that equal opportunities exist for all and do not tolerate discrimination on any grounds."

Processors and traders

Wilmar: "Recognising that illegal logging and poaching activities continue to threaten these treasured coves, Wilmar works assiduously to protect its tracts of conservation areas. One such effort is our Ranger Programme in certain plantations, where Rangers empowered with full police power and authority undertake daily patrols targeting at illegal logging and hunting activities. We also have biodiversity and conservation managers as well as a primatologist to develop and implement conservation management plans. The management plans serve to maintain and enhance biodiversity values of the protected areas within our oil palm plantations."
AAK (Aarhus): "Due to its position as an intermediary in the palm oil supply chain, AAK is fully dependent on the availability of supply of physical, segregated sustainable palm oil and, to some extent, on demand from customers. Customer requirements define the kind of palm oil delivered by AAK."

Consumer goods manufacturers

Unilever: "We have decided, as part of our 2013 strategic review of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, to play a leading role in helping to drive deforestation out of commodity supply chains. We will do this by leveraging our purchasing scale as the world’s biggest multinational consumer goods buyer of palm oil and our convening capabilities as one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Turning our vision into reality relies on the creation of a market for sustainably-cultivated palm oil."
Ferrero: "To Ferrero, traceability is critical to drive change and to deliver strong sustainability targets. It allows us to assess practices on the ground in order to help suppliers make any improvements needed to meet our Charter. On the basis of the traceability achieved through certification, our teams, together with TFT, have worked towards mapping our entire palm oil supply chain, including listing all mills and their supplying plantations we buy from. This work has enabled us to reach 92% traceability to plantation today."

Unilever, WWF, Nutella, Rabobank, ABN AMRO

Retailers

Ahold: "While in the past, we have offset all palm oil used in our own brand products through purchasing GreenPalm certificates, we are now trying to encourage our suppliers to move to segregated certified sustainable palm oil so that we can be assured that the certified oil is actually used in our products. This effort is not yet reflected in this report, as we cannot yet directly link the amount of segregated palm oil to products with 100% accuracy. Currently, therefore, 100% of our estimated palm oil use (in 2013, 4,000 tons) is offset using GreenPalm certificates.
Walmart: "In Walmart U.S., we’ve successfully transitioned 25 percent of our private brands to sustainable palm, and we’re committed to scaling that approach across all private brands where palm oil is an ingredient. To date, 27 percent of palm oil used in our private-label products globally is sustainably sourced, driven largely by the 100 percent RSPO-certified palm secured by our Asda business in the U.K."

Financial institutions

ABN AMRO: "A prospective client recently approached us to open a business account. (...) We made [RSPO] membership a precondition for opening the account. The client agreed and has undertaken to move toward purchasing on a 100% RSPO-certified basis. We will see to it that this actually happens, as we think it is very important that all parties in the palm oil chain live up to their responsibilities."
Rabobank: "We accept that some clients are more advanced than others, as long as clients are able to show significant progress in implementing environmentally and socially responsible management practices and responsible purchasing. If we have reason to believe the client does not comply with the abovementioned conditions or shows insufficient progress in integrating sustainability measures in daily operations, we will engage with the client to achieve the desired improvements within an arranged time frame."

Environmental NGOs

WWF: "A concrete example of challenges faced by the palm oil industry and community is about their ability to share understanding on sustainable palm oil and practices in realising the concept with their fellow medium to relatively small-scale plantation companies and smallholders. The fact is that until now mostly major and/ or big companies that take the lead in embracing RSPO, the concept and better management practices."
RAN: "After a year of negotiations, Kellogg’s joined industry leaders Nestle, Unilever and Ferrero by releasing a strengthened palm oil purchasing commitment. This was followed by announcements by Mars, Nissin Foods, Dunkin Donuts, and Con Agra — all major players in the palm oil marketplace.
Missing from this list is PepsiCo — one of the biggest purchasers of palm oil in the US. But RAN is continuing the fight, with an aggressive social media and “brand jamming” campaign to pressure PepsiCo to do the right thing."

Social NGOs

Oxfam: "High potential for land efficiency exist in the more centralised models where the company holds responsibility for development and management of the plantations and has access to farm inputs (high quality seedlings) and agronomic knowledge. These models, however, take land away from community members and leave them in the role of workers, not enabling them to be active as investors in the improvement and continuity of their farms."
ILO: "ILO Baseline survey found more than 400 children (boys and girls) working in palm oil plantation sector, owned by state as well as private companies in at least four sub districts in Central Lampung District, Lampung. Similar to other children working in plantation, they are exposed to several hazards and most of them are drop out from school."

Planning Q1 - Shoshin

Shoshin
The concept of Shoshin in Zen Buddhism means 'beginner's mind'. 'It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would' (Wikipedia). Even though I am a beginner, it does not come easy for me to have a beginner's mind. When reading about a conspiracy theory involving palm oil, my mind wanted to reject every word that was written. It was difficult to keep an open mind when brainwash attempts were made by repeating arguments and exclamation marks after every other sentence. But maybe I should try harder to keep an open mind. Without abandoning critical thinking.

Stakeholder analysis
The conspiracy theory consists of a compilation of social media postings titled 'Environmental Fraud: How palm oil turned the tables on green groups & their shadowy funders'. The theory claims that green NGO's are paid by the European Commission to attack palm oil in order to protect the EU's own edible oilseed industries. What the theory tells me is that the information I can find online and in books is often subjective. Journalists want to sell a good story, NGO's need to keep their donations going, companies fear for their reputation while trying to make a profit, politicians want to keep their voters happy. Most serious stakeholders present themselves at the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil. But I also want to listen to stakeholders that make outrageous claims and pose the wildest conspiracy theories.

January, February and March
Three online courses will help me get a basic understanding of forests, food, and indigenous people. I have started the first one: 'Forests and Livelihoods in Developing Countries'. So far so good. Two more will follow later this month and will run parallel until March. So before zooming in to palm oil, first let's have a look at the big picture.

	5-1	12-1	19-1	26-1	2-2	9-2	16-2	23-2	2-3	9-3	16-3	23-3	30-3
Forests and Livelihoods in Developing Countries (Edx)	4	4	4	4	3	3
Growing our Future Food: Crops (EdX)				4	5	6	7	8	8
Reconciliation Through Indigenous Education (EdX)				2	2	2	2	2	2
Studium Generale: Back to the Future					3	3	3	3	3	3	3	3
Stakeholder analysis	4	4	4							4	4	4	4

Forests and Livelihoods

Growing our Future Food

Expert enough

Malcolm Gladwell showed us that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Unfortunately I only have about 600 hours I can spend this year, so I need to play with numbers a bit. What if it takes me 10,000 hours to become an expert on Sustainable Commodities. But only 4000 hours to become an expert on Sustainable Agro Food Commodities. Maybe 2000 hours for Sustainable Tropical Commodities. And only 1000 hours to reach my goal of becoming a Sustainable Palm Oil Expert.

Expert Enough 

Still more hours than I am probably able to spend without risking my health, my marriage or my day job. So I was happy to find an article written by Corbett Barr from Expert Enough called "5 Simple Principles for Becoming an Expert". Here they are:

1 Realize expert is a relative term

2 Learn from books and experience

3 Focus

4 Get outside help

5 Make mistakes

I will not become the world's leading expert in one year time. But I would be satisfied to become the leading expert at my company, my charities, my political party and my supply chains. If I work hard enough, surely that must be feasible to accomplish by the end of this year? 

Focus

One of my many weaknesses is my lack of focus. I love to start new things, then get distracted and then start something else. My 2014 Jungle Hike was a project where I experimented with focus and I still have a lot to learn. Even when browsing the Internet to find out about becoming an Expert, I got distracted. YouTube offers some interesting interviews with Malcolm Gladwell. I got so distracted that I ordered three of his books. I am amazed how he manages to write all these books and also have a very impressive acting career.

Blink

Bang

Starting up a project: Sustainable Palm Oil Expert

Out of 6500 languages that were spoken at the start of the 21st century, half are expected to be extinct by the year 2100. Languages die when speakers stop transmitting them to the next generation. When parents decide that their children have a better future speaking the dominant language. Language loss goes hand in hand with loss of culture, identity and traditional ecological knowledge.

Deforestation

The speakers of most endangered languages depend on the forest to meet their needs. Tropical forests especially are language hotspots. Ethnologue lists 731 languages for Indonesia, 234 for Brazil, 219 for Congo, 505 for Nigeria and 832 for Papua New Guinea. These are also countries where forest disappears to make room for agriculture, logging and mining. When the forest is gone, and the land privatised, what becomes of the indigenous people? Lose the forest, lose the livelihood, lose the culture? Forced urbanisation and assimilation?

Sustainable agriculture

As the world population increases to 9 billion by 2050, can we feed all these mouths without cutting down more forests? Where and how will we grow soy, rice, cassava and oil palms? Since I visit Malaysia every year, it seems easiest for me to focus on the latter.

My goal for 2015

Starting today, I want to study everything there is to know about sustainable palm oil. Please join me on my learning curve as I collect all the pieces of the puzzle, read all that is written and seek to understand what motivates all stakeholders. I hardly know anything today, but on December 31st 2015 I will be an Expert on sustainable palm oil.