Palm oil company Asian Agri has now become 100 percent certified under the Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) scheme following the sustainability certification of two of its business units – PT Indo Sepadan Jaya and PT Rantau Sinar Karsa.
“We are fully committed to sustainable management of palm oil by consistently applying best practices in all of the company’s operational activities, at our plantations or mills. We are also applying the same commitment to the company’s partner farmers,” Bernard Riedo, Asian Agri Director of Sustainability and Stakeholder Relations, said in a company release obtained by The Palm Scribe on Thursday (28/3).
The release said that the two certificates, presented by Director of Annual and Beverage Crops at the Directorate General of Plantation, Irmijati Rachmi Nurbahar to Riedo on the side of the International Conference and Expo – Indonesia Sustainable Palm Oil (ICE-ISPO) in Jakarta on Wednesday (27/3), meant that all companies under Asian Agri are now ISPO certified.
Aziz Hidayat who heads the ISPO Secretariat and was also present at the presentation of the ISPO certificates said that the certification of the two companies brought the number of companies with ISPO certification to 493. ISPO certification had also been received by five cooperatives of smallholders and four cooperatives of scheme oil palm growers. The certifications covered palm oil plantation areas of 4,115,434 hectares, he added.
Asian Agri, which has been in operation since 1979, obtained its first ISPO certificate in 2013, awarded to its business unit PT Indosawit Subur. The company manages 100,000 hectares of palm oil plantations in North Sumatra, Riau and Jambi provinces. It also has a partnership with some 30,000 oil palm growers under a plasma scheme that covers an area of some 60,000 hectares.
Asian Agri says that more than 86 percent of its plantation and 100 percent of its plantations under plasma schemes have received certification from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) while all its plantations, including under its plasma scheme have also been certified by the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC).