The Body Shop – Progress on palm oil in Colombia

Body Shop hopes an initiative in Colombia can lead the way towards more sustainable production

For the past three decades, the fat leaves of African Palm plants could be picked out among the foliage in the mountains of Santa Marta, Colombia. And as plantations go, they don’t come much more sustainable than Daabon.

Certified by the Rainforest Alliance, SA8000, Ecocert, the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation and half a dozen other international compliance standards, this organic family-run Colombian company produces palm oil, as well as coffee, bananas and cocoa, to the most exacting social and environmental standards.

In mid-July, Body Shop announced it would start sourcing palm oil from the Daabon estate as part of a worldwide sustainability drive. The UK retailer will buy about 2,000 tonnes of palm oil from Daabon a year – enough for 14.5 million bars of soap.

Body Shop and Daabon are both members of the Malaysia-based Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a multi-stakeholder group that aims to make palm oil supply chains less damaging to precious ecosystems.

Body Shop’s head of global sourcing, Steve Noble, says that, after three years on the roundtable, the company was losing patience with the slow pace of change. “It wasn’t moving as fast as we wanted to,” he says.

So the company decided to press on alone. Noble says he wanted to prove it was possible for a retailer to develop a direct relationship with producers of sustainable palm oil. The company threw money at finding and vetting a supplier, completing a process that normally takes two years in just ten months.

Body Shop hopes its example will form the basis of a global certification scheme for sustainable palm oil. If successful, the scheme will be launched before the end of 2007.
Chief executive Peter Saunders has said he wants the whole industry to be sustainable in the “next two to three years”.

The real challenge for other retailers will not be auditing, however, but finding plantations to audit in the first place. Daabon is a rare exception in Latin America. Elsewhere in Colombia, for example, the palm industry has been linked closely to paramilitary groups (as reported in the July edition of Ethical Corporation).

Another barrier could be the cost of ethical sourcing. Noble admits Body Shop must pay a premium for palm oil from Daabon, although he says this is not passed on to customers.

Legitimate palm manufacturers will certainly be attracted by an audit programme that can prove their sustainability credentials.