When the Room Goes Quiet: My Reflections on RSPO’s Roundtable Conference on Sustainable Palm Oil (RT2025)

By: Latt Omar | Youth Council President, REGENERASI

I did not grow up thinking about palm oil. For most of my life, it was background noise, something Malaysian, something economic, something my country apparently depended on but rarely explained. It wasn’t until I joined REGENERASI, a Malaysian youth-led NGO championing sustainable palm oil, that I began to understand what I had been missing. So when I was invited to represent REGENERASI at RT2025, the RSPO’s annual Roundtable Conference on Sustainable Palm Oil held at the Shangri-La Kuala Lumpur in November 2025, I walked in equal parts prepared and humbled.

The conference theme, Building the Next 20: Sustainability in Action, set the stage for three days of frank, sometimes uncomfortable, and genuinely energising conversations. But nothing prepared me for the moment that would define the entire experience.

“I came to palm oil not through science or agriculture but through an NGO and a growing sense that most Malaysians, myself included until recently, have been sleeping on something extraordinary.”

During the opening address, Datuk Mohamad Helmy Othman Basha, then Group Managing Director of SD Guthrie Berhad, said something that made the ballroom go still. He acknowledged the industry’s progress, but made it clear that acknowledgement alone was not enough. He called it out. He pointed to a pattern that many in the room knew but few said aloud: when anti-palm oil sentiment surges in certain markets, driven often by rival interests rather than science, some industry partners quietly step aside. They stay silent when the narrative turns hostile. They do it to be politically correct, while the people who bear the real cost, the smallholders and millions whose livelihoods are tied to this crop, are left to fight alone.

It was a refreshing kind of honesty, the kind that sets a tone. Palm oil is after all the world’s most productive oil crop, requiring only 0.26 hectares of land to produce one tonne of oil, while soybean, sunflower and rapeseed require 2.22, 2 and 1.52 hectares respectively to produce the same.^¹ Despite occupying just 0.5% of the world’s agricultural land, oil palm produces more than 36% of global vegetable edible oils.^² The science is not ambiguous. What is apparently ambiguous is whether those who profit from it will stand by it when it matters.

Beyond the mainstage, I moved through panels and booths, picking up what I could from each. The real gems, though, were the YOUth@RT2025 sessions. Each day, we gathered separately as youth delegates for focused discussions. Panels of industry experts and researchers would present first, then the floor opened up entirely for our questions and perspectives. It sounds simple, but it was rare. There were no adults steering us toward comfortable answers. Questions about navigating generational resistance to technology, about making the smallholder life appealing to a generation raised on career options, about earning genuine influence rather than just a seat in the room, were all met with honest, sometimes sobering, responses.

As the official youth partner for YOUth@RT2025, REGENERASI’s media team was on the ground capturing these conversations, interviewing youth delegates from across the world as well as key industry figures including RSPO CEO Joseph D’Cruz. That content went straight to our social media platforms, extending the reach of these conversations beyond the Shangri-La ballroom and into the feeds of young Malaysians who had no idea this world existed. That, to me, is what collaboration with RSPO made possible: not just a seat at the table, but a microphone pointed outward.

What gave me genuine hope was the final session on the last day. Rather than merely wrapping up with applause and a group photo, the room turned to a harder question: what’s next? I think about conferences the way I think about training. You invest resources, you transfer knowledge, you build awareness, but the return only compounds if there is a plan for what comes after. Succession. A reason to keep going. RT2025 created a formal space for youth for the first time in its history, and in doing so raised a standard that future editions must now meet.

Walking out of the Shangri-La on that final afternoon, I was quiet. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I was sitting with a question I could not shake. Of everyone in that room, I was perhaps the least credentialed. I came to palm oil not through science or agriculture but through an NGO and a growing sense that most Malaysians, myself included until recently, have been sleeping on something extraordinary. Palm oil is not just a commodity. It is a crop whose potential has not been fully realised, a miracle of productivity that feeds, fuels and sustains more of the world than most people know. The experts in that room are working hard to defend and develop it. But I kept wondering: outside the labs, the boardrooms and the conference halls, what can the average Malaysian do? And how do we bring this conversation home?

References

^¹ Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC). The Oil Palm Tree. Retrieved from https://archive.mpoc.org.my/the-oil-palm-tree/

^² Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB). (2025). The Malaysian Oil Palm Industry Performance. Retrieved from https://prestasisawit.mpob.gov.my/en/palmnews/news/37510

About the author: Latt Omar is the Youth Council President of REGENERASI. To get in touch, email [email protected]