RSPO Group Certification Standards for Outgrowers Calling for nomination of Task Force members

RSPO Group Certification Standard (2016) was endorsed by the RSPO Board of Governors (BoG) in March 2016 to facilitate certification of any FFB producers without a mill, through a Group Manager. These includes both smallholders (those owns land up to 50ha) as well as outgrowers (owns land more than 50 ha) without mill.

A threshold was set that the current Group Certification Document, with specific reference to Section 3, will only be applicable for smallholders. The outgrower (who individually owns more than 50 ha of land) can be certified under the Group Certification using the same mechanism described in Section 2 of the document, but must demonstrate compliance to the full P&C requirement.

In endorsing the Group Standard, the RSPO Board of Governors (BoG) has requested RSPO Secretariat to study the requirements made on the outgrowers, specifically to assess the level of capacity and resources of these categories in meeting the P&C requirements. In its meeting in November 2016, the RSPO BoG, has approved the formation of a Task Force to carry out such study with aim at producing a specific guidance for outgrower. 

The composition of the Taskforce is envisaged as follow:

Following best practices, the RSPO Secretariat is now calling for nomination of representation from the each stakeholder constituencies. The functions of the Task Force member is expected as follow:

• Participate in the discussion through physical or online meeting as well as email discussion on relevant subject
• To represent their constituency interest in all the discussion while taking into consideration the position of other constituencies
• To carry out consultation within and provide updates to their constituencies on specific issue
• To support, advocate and monitor relevancy of decision made by the Task Force within their constituency

If you would like to join the task force (TF) or would like to nominate another to be part of the TF, kindly contact Salahudin Yaacob ([email protected]) or Julia Majail ([email protected]) for further information. The terms of reference can be downloaded below. The call for participation closes on 13 January 2017.