"Monitoring palm oil industry to protect people and planet" - Interview with Marcus Colchester (FPP) by Maggie Jaruzel Potter, Mott Foundation

Excerpt from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation website:

"Marcus Colchester is director of the Forest Peoples Programme (FPP), a non-governmental organization (NGO) in the United Kingdom that supports the rights of those who live in forests and depend upon them for their livelihoods. FPP staff members help people secure their rights, control their land and decide their future. Mott Foundation Communications Officer Maggie Jaruzel Potter conducted a phone interview with Colchester about the organization’s work, which is supported through the International Finance for Sustainability focus area of Mott’s Environment program. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Maggie Jaruzel Potter (JP): How did FPP initially get involved in monitoring public lending for the palm oil sector?

Marcus Colchester (MC): We were assisting Sawit Watch, an Indonesian NGO, by providing legal and technical advice. We had a history of working to safeguard human rights and had been advising Sawit Watch in the development of the standards for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. I was on the Criteria Working Group that elaborated on the global standards for the sector.

Earlier, we had done an investigation, which led to a book called Promised Land: Palm Oil and Land Acquisition in Indonesia. For that book, we researched how companies were able to get hold of the land of indigenous people and take over their forests. We came across a case about a Wilmar International subsidiary taking over land in West Sumatra without consent from the affected communities.

Friends of the Earth-Holland had started looking at some other Wilmar subsidiaries, which were not only grabbing land from communities without consent, but also clearing land before they had the right permits and before they had the environmental impact assessments completed. An extremely well-documented case was coming out and we spotted that the IFC [International Finance Corporation, the private sector investment arm of the World Bank] was about … to make a loan to Wilmar called a “credit guarantee,” so FPP wrote to the IFC and said, “You shouldn’t make this loan because of all these violations.”

Read the rest of the article on the Mott Foundation website