Palm oil: fifteen multinationals accused, and an EU rule already off to a shaky start

According to Reporterre, three Indonesian NGOs, TuK Indonesia, Walhi Kalimantan Tengah and Sawit Watch, revealed on 30 October that they had lodged a complaint against fifteen groups, including Nestlé, Ferrero and L'Oréal, accused of using palm oil linked to deforestation. The EU regulation on deforestation is due to enter into force on 30 December. It will then ban the sale in Europe of cocoa, coffee or palm oil grown on land cleared after 31 December 2020. But on the ground, writes Reporterre, this obligation "seems very badly under way".

What we do not know, at this stage: the detail of the NGOs' complaint, the companies' response, the exact nature of the evidence. These are accusations, not convictions. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The date, first. 31 December 2020 is a very convenient reference point: anything cleared before it is whitewashed by the calendar. As for what was cleared after, it will have to be proven, plot by plot, through supply chains that run through plantations, mills, traders and refiners, before ending up in the jar of chocolate spread or the bottle of shampoo. This opacity is not an accident. It is the service the chain provides: separating the Parisian consumer from the forests of Kalimantan, and the head office from the chainsaw.

This is what ecological Marxism calls the metabolic rift: capital runs an exchange with the land that exhausts it, then shifts the costs elsewhere. The Gazette notes put it this way: accumulation demands an ever-growing flow of energy and materials, and the bill lands on ecosystems and on the populations who have emitted the least. Here, the tropical forest pays in trees, local communities in land and air, and shareholders collect in margins. Marx and Engels already discussed deforestation among the effects of this relationship, recalls John Bellamy Foster in Marx's Ecology in Historical Perspective. A century and a half later, it is labelled a "supply chain risk".

We will be told that the groups targeted have "zero deforestation" pledges. Granted. Pledges are voluntary, drafted by those they bind, and corrected by those who promote them. A regulation, by contrast, is a public text with sanctions. That it is Indonesian NGOs, and not the authorities, sounding the alarm two months before the deadline says a great deal about the real capacity for oversight.

The lesson is political. Deforestation imported through labelling or through consumer goodwill is not going to be stopped, least of all by a shopper already sold enough guilt in the breakfast aisle. It is stopped by public compulsion, traceability verified by independent third parties, and planning that does not leave producers and local communities at the mercy of price swings. On 30 December we will learn whether Europe truly bans, or merely asks politely.