The commitments that the government and corporates adopted in Indonesia were shocked by the publication of European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) that has been running per 16 May 2023. It is the follow up from European Parliament resolution in 2017 about palm oil and rain forest – deforestation.
The government and palm oil industries thought EUDR is discriminative policy to palm oil because by EUDR, the continent bans every company that is registered in European countries to get product imports from the areas where deforestation happened after 31 December 2020.
Meanwhile for the developing countries, such as Indonesia, still delivers chances to expand palm oil plantations that derived from forest and land-use change. That is why Indonesia and other producing countries are trying to get this case to World Trade Organization (WTO).
On the other hand, the commitments in the global level, including EUDR and how moderate to improve palm oil governance in Indonesia, cannot be hidden as the focus to civil organizations in many countries including in Indonesia itself. The goal is about to test the implementation of the corporate and government’s commitments where their initiative operational got support from many countries in the world, including, Europe and America.
In the practices, it is not naïve that many people thought of palm oil industries negatively. This would be delivering the profits for soyoil, rapeseed, and sunflower oil producers because it implicates to the weak competition of palm oil from Indonesia in vegetable oil markets globally. (*)
