CLAIMS by western banks and supermarkets to be taking a tough line on landowners who trash Asia's rainforests are little more than "greenwash", according to a report on oil palm plantations in the region.
Since 2004, food manufacturers and supermarkets have signed up to the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) standards, promising to report annually on how much of the palm oil in their products has been grown sustainably. Yet "despite the publicity surrounding the standards, there is little apparent urgency in their application", the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), in Bogor, Indonesia, says in its report, The Impacts and Opportunities of Oil Palm in Southeast Asia.
The report concludes that there is an urgent need for legal and political reform to ensure that efforts to make palm oil sustainable are not "hijacked by vested interests".
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