Felda Global Ventures Holdings Berhad (FGV) and Lembaga Felda (The FELDA Group), has requested for an immediate withdrawal of Roundtable Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) Principles and Criteria (P&C) certificates of its 58 mills located throughout Malaysia, today.

The Group remains a member of RSPO and continues its commitment to RSPO Principles and Criteria.

This exercise does NOT affect FELDA Group’s RSPO Supply Chain Certification System (SCCS) certificate of its kernel crushing plants and downstream refineries.

Group President and Chief Executive Officer, Dato’ Zakaria Arshad said, “We voluntarily withdraw from RSPO P&C certificates to address the sustainability issues in our supply chain. We remain committed to RSPO Principles and Criteria.

This exercise only affects the upstream mills and does not affect FGV’s RSPO Supply Chain Certification System (SCCS) certificate of our kernel crushing plants and downstream refineries. The withdrawal of the certification will affect less than 1% of FGV’s revenues.This exercise allows a more inclusive certification between commercially managed plantations by Felda Global Ventures Holdings Berhad and FELDA smallholders.”

Under the recertification time-bound plan, we will progressively recertify our mills within three-years. The smallholders will immensely benefit from the best sustainable plantation practices programme.  Being part of FELDA Group, FGV will be relentless in paving the way for the smallholders to come together on this sustainability journey as FGV’s supply base includes 102,100 smallholders’ plantations under the Felda Settlers Scheme.

“Based on the recent developments in the sustainability arena, we foresee some potential risks in our supply chain. Therefore we intend to make some structural changes in our RSPO certification approach and also review certain policies,” he said.

An early signatory to the RSPO and a member of the Executive Council since 2004, Felda Group is the first in the world to lead the smallholder organisation to achieve the RSPO certification, for its 15 estates in 2010.

For more details of the report, please contact FGV Corporate Communications.