Blogs: Environment

Price Outlook Conference (POC) held annually in Kuala Lumpur is where the entire palm oil industry decamps for a week of discussions about future price outlooks, and increasingly sustainability.

Golden Agri-Resources (GAR) is a regular participant in this industry leading event, and this year, in a first for the company, we invited buyers to a sustainability seminar titled “Sustaining Growth, Delivering Value”.

The POC brings together buyers and sellers of palm oil and its derivatives from Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, many of whom see palm oil as a set of numbers on a trading screen. The seminar aimed to bring the commodity to life and highlight GAR’s on-going sustainability programmes, informing buyers of our sustainability journey towards 2020 and beyond.

Hosted by Paul Hickman, Head of Global Vegetable Oil and Oilseeds, buyers were walked through GAR’s Social and Environmental Policy by Anita Neville and Ian Suwarganda, from the Corporate Communications and Sustainability Relations Directorate.

As Paul described at the end of the seminar, GAR may take time to decide to move on something but when it decides it moves fast. This is true in terms of sustainability where GAR has been at the forefront of some key industry innovations including the piloting of the High Carbon Stock approach which has recently been adopted, with some adaptions, as the internationally recognised methodology for identifying forests for conservation.

Supply chain traceability is an understandably hot topic in the palm sector and Daniel Prakarsa, Head of Downstream Sustainability Implementation, rounded off the seminar with a detailed account of his team’s efforts to engage third-party suppliers towards adopting sustainable practices.

GAR remains committed to its own sustainability journey and to helping other suppliers meet the standards we have set within our GSEP. We also think there is a real role for buyers of palm oil to play in supporting investments in the field, through project partnerships, like the smallholder mapping initiative we are developing together with Neste and local NGO SPKS.

Overview of GAR’s sustainability presentation can be found here.

To keep up to date with GAR’s sustainability efforts, subscribe to our Monthly Sustainability Update.