InfoSAWIT, JAKARTA - Deputy II President Staff Office, Abetnego Tarigan said that deforestation issue still becomes the serious issue in palm oil sectors both directly and indirectly. The efforts to minimize emission level in national scale that reached up to 200 million tons within details, 4 million tons in every region, keep running.
The high vulnerability tends to be found in the regions where the citizens’ occupations are sensitive to climate change, such as, the farmers or smallholders.
Tarigan thought, the 2021 study managed Indonesia in the 97 of 181 countries that got climate change impact by considering the combination of politic, geography and social as a quite dynamic country.
“Trade sector in the past two years encouraged each commodity to be sustainably produced, including by considering social and environmental aspects,” he said when inaugurating the third national workshop of sustainable palm oil that InfoSAWIT monitored in the midst of January 2024.
New policies were even published namely that regulated commodities that could deliver impacts for ecosystem. Many international scale forums now promote positive management concept which is the public policies in trade to confirm the environmental and natural conservation.
Though deforestation showed the decreasing level from 2000 to 2023, it needs to notice the expansion. The main factor of deforestation derived from commodity sectors. It went up to 653 thousand hectares per year (2015 - 2016), namely from pulp and paper, palm oil plantation, and mining.
That is why Tarigan continued, the Government of Indonesia keeps doing the best to solve deforestation issue, realizing palm oil as sustainable commodity by publishing Rencana Aksi Nasional Kelapa Sawit Berkelanjutan (RAN KSB), improving Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO), solving palm oil plantations in forest regions, and escalating smallholders’ plantation productivity, including implementing smallholders replanting program (SRP). These are parts of the governance strategies.
By realizing that issues and challenges ahead namely in legal aspects to get SRP, the government keeps being committed to solve the issues. But it needs to emphasize that palm oil sector improvement has something to do with 11 government’s policies which are being implemented. (T2)
