General Assembly 19-2B

Background:

Independent smallholders play an important role in the transformation of sustainable palm oil standards. There are over 7 million independent smallholders around the globe, with Indonesian and Malaysian independent smallholders contributing 45% of their national productions.

Since RSPO’s independent smallholder standards came into force in 2013, there has been no significant growth in the number of independent smallholders pursuing RSPO certification. Globally, 25,000 independent smallholders have been RSPO-certified up to 2022.

RSPO has made significant efforts to accelerate independent smallholder inclusion in the system, such as providing a simple standard known as the Stepwise Approach, a programme fund to support independent smallholders through RSSF, and the Academy for independent smallholders. In addition, encouragement for independent smallholder’s accelerated certification is specifically mentioned in Indicator 5.1.8 under Principle 5 (Support Smallholder Inclusion) of P&C 2018. However, this was also unable to encourage their inclusion in RSPO certification on a large scale.

This is, in part, due to the lack of Governments’ involvement in RSPO certification scheme, despite the fact that RISS 2019 outlines that one of the important requirements for pursuing RSPO certification is to meet legal aspects, such as land legality, independent smallholder organisational legality, and environment management legality.

Evidently, RSPO already has a designed approach known as the Jurisdictional Approach (JA) to encourage local Governments’ engagement in accelerating RSPO certification. In 2018, JA was included in the RSPO Theory of Change (ToC) as a key strategy to achieve RSPO’s vision of ‘Making the Sustainable Palm Oil the Norm’. However, this approach seems to have lost impetus and needs a measurable plan and resources to accelerate its implementation.