Achieving Palm Oil Sustainability Under Contract: Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and Family Farmers in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

This paper examines how local institutions and family farming labor relations shift and reconfigure in response to The Roundtable on Sustainable Oil Palm (RSPO) certification in Brazil where demanding state regulations exist in a context of uneven enforcement. We use the concept of politics and practice of grounding to explore the Contract Farming (CF) model of Agropalma, the first palm oil export company in Brazil certified with RSPO. Our analysis reveals how the grounding of RSPO's requirement of compliance with applicable domestic laws emerged as a particular point of tension, especially as a result of the CF mechanism. First, despite Agropalma's initial active role in title facilitation, certification made it more difficult for producers to join the CF scheme due to the lack of property titles and their inability to comply with the nominally strict Brazilian environmental regulations. Second, compliance with Brazilian labor protection broke traditional patterns of involving all family members in crop management, and clashes between the company and its outgrowers emerged because of stricter changes in hiring requirements. Our analysis underscores the complex process of reconciling environmental and labor-standard aspirations of Global North certification schemes with the existing legal and enforcement frameworks in the Global South.