In December 2018 Switzerland concluded a free trade agreement with Indonesia. One contentious point in the negotiations was whether palm oil should be exempted from tariff reductions. In the end, Switzerland succeeded in ensuring that palm oil produced "sustainably" is given greater preferential treatment than palm oil produced "non-sustainably". The Council of States has now instructed the Federal Council to examine whether palm oil imported under this label actually meets the criteria of sustainable production in social and ecological terms.
Palm oil production is currently being expanded at an ever-increasing rate, and both its expansion and the resulting social and environmental impacts have triggered a major debate. This debate covers not only the conditions of production in the producing countries, but also the role of the global food industry, which is largely based in Switzerland and has made palm oil the most important and almost ubiquitous source of vegetable fats in finished products. Nestlé is the world's largest purchaser of palm oil alongside Unilever.
We are taking the political debate on palm oil as an impulse to establish an interdisciplinary and interfaculty research platform, which is aimed at conducting research and teaching on this topic with the goal of providing fact-based foundations for a future Swiss foreign trade policy that favours sustainable production.
Our project investigates the governance structures of palm oil production and trade at transnational, national and local level. The liberal free trade regime at the global level contrasts with authoritarian governance structures at the national and local levels. Specifically, we want to examine the structural contradiction between the tendency towards extensive liberalization of trade in palm oil within the framework of free trade agreements on the one hand and the emergence of oligarchic land ownership and government structures in the producing countries on the other. Thus, we want to analyse the currently observable transformations in terms of land ownership, access to common-pool resources, production systems, food sovereignty, labour rights, social capital and political participation in the producing countries and relate them to the control of global value chains by a few multinational actors. From a historical perspective, the current development of the palm oil value chain is a system that began in the plantation economy of the colonial era and is now reasserting itself vehemently with a few strategic cash crops such as soya, coffee, cocoa and palm oil, thereby shaping the political structures in the producing countries.
