JAKARTA — Farm-to-fork traceability has become an increasingly urgent, and often required, component of global supply chains, with a growing number of commodities now trackable all the way back to their source. But for palm oil, one of the most controversial yet widely used commodities today, full traceability from the plantation to supermarket shelves to households remains a challenge due to the complexity of the supply chain. A single ton of palm oil derivative like stearic acid, for instance, used in detergents and cosmetics, is likely to consist of palm oil from hundreds of mills that, in turn, process palm fruit harvested from thousands of plantations. These webs of plantations and mills make it difficult to know whether palm oil is legally sourced and produced from an environmental and social conflict-free area. A new open-access online tool, developed by human rights NGO Inclusive Development International and the University of Chicago Data Science Institute, aims to address this issue. Called PalmWatch, it links 15 major industrial consumers of palm oil, such as Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever, to the ground-level impacts of their palm oil consumption, including deforestation. The homepage of PalmWatch. To identify where these brands are sourcing their palm oil from, PalmWatch scraped individual brands’ most recent online supply chain disclosures and found more than 2,000 mills. The information about these mills is scattered across various websites, with much of the data not standardized, said Dustin Roasa, research director at Inclusive Development International. “PalmWatch puts all brands’ mills disclosure on one database, standardizes…This article was originally published on Mongabay
The post PalmWatch platform pushes for farm-to-fork traceability of palm oil appeared first on EnviroLink Network.