Confectioner has made progress on Fairtrade, but a GreenPalm logo won't keep orang-utans safe in their rainforest habitats
Fred Pearce, guardian.co.uk 20 Aug 09;
They are breaking open the chocolate bars at Auckland zoo in New Zealand this week. The keepers have been running a campaign to get Cadbury to remove palm oil from its chocolate. It's been headline news down there, since Cadbury's recently added the palm oil to make local Dairy Milk "softer".
Zoo staff simply refused to consume or sell bars made with oil grown on former rainforest once occupied by endangered orang-utans in Borneo and Sumatra. On Monday, Cadbury gave in. They grovelled. "We got it wrong... we hope Kiwis will forgive us. I'm really sorry," said local managing director Matthew Oldham. They were going back to cocoa butter, he said.
Of course, this about-face doesn't affect the brand in countries such as Britain, where palm oil is a long-standing ingredient. So Cadbury still looks like a soft target for campaigners.
But there was something else buried in this PR own goal. A continuing greenwash that should have Cadbury hauled over the coals at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a corporate initiative to promote the sustainable production of the world's most ubiquitous food ingredient, of which Cadbury is a founder member.
On Monday, Oldham told New Zealanders that despite the debacle "Cadbury is a responsible business and we purchase certified sustainable palm oil." The company has "independent GreenPalm certification for the palm oil purchased for its Dairy Milk range".
The implication was that the zookeepers were wrong to fuss about Cadbury's palm oil because they bought the right stuff. So who is right?
GreenPalm is a certification system used by the RSPO to encourage the production of sustainable palm oil. But even on the face of it only a small fraction of Cadbury's global chocolate production is so certified. The GreenPalm website this week showed it had obtained certification for 2,800 tonnes of palm oil in the past 11 months out of a total annual consumption of 40,000 tonnes.
But it is much worse than that. Those certificates do not actually mean that any of the palm oil Cadbury buys comes from sustainable sources.
It works like this. If the RSPO's auditors certify a particular palm oil plantation as a sustainable operation, its owners are given certificates equal to the number of tonnes of palm oil being produced there.
The plantation company can then sell the certificates. To anyone. You could buy one if you wanted. The going rate is about $10. Mostly, they are bought by companies that also buy palm oil. So they can publicise the fact.
But the "green" palm oil is not generally kept separate. It usually goes in the same tanker as the oil obtained by destroying orang-utan habitat. So the actual palm oil a certificated company like Cadbury buys could be the same as the stuff everyone else buys.
GreenPalm boss Bob Norman says this arrangement provides an incentive for farmers to grow sustainable palm oil without all the cost of running a separate supply system. So far, 53,000 GreenPalm certificates have been sold, at a profit to the plantation owners of a million dollars.
Fair enough. But, as he admits, what it does not do is ensure that when you or I buy a chocolate bar, or anything else bearing the GreenPalm logo, it contains sustainably produced palm oil. It usually won't.
Some retailers, not surprisingly, avoid the GreenPalm initiative as a potential PR timebomb. But Cadbury is in deeper than that. It makes the link that cannot be made. It told the people of New Zealand that "we purchase certified sustainable palm oil". But they don't. They purchase certificates. Pieces of paper. If their chocolate contains any sustainably produced palm oil it is by chance.
Making such a claim is not just greenwash; it is against the RSPO and Green Palm rules. These state that companies can claim that buying Green Palm certificates "supports the production of RSPO certified sustainable palm oil". But they must not claim their products contain the stuff. Because they can't be sure.
Cadbury came clean to Greenwash on Tuesday. "There was no intention to mislead; we were trying to make it simple to understand," its UK office said. It promised it won't happen again.
This is all a bit of a shame. Cadbury has been doing some good things this year, like turning their top brand Dairy Milk into a Fairtrade product in Britain and Ireland (with more countries to follow, they promise).
I applaud them for that. But sadly it is only the cocoa that is fairly traded. And some of the rest of the gunk in that bar has a long way to go before we can buy it with an easy conscience.
