The RSPO Roundtable 2025 in Kuala Lumpur marked a pivotal moment for the industry, celebrating 20 years of RSPO and launching bold initiatives around traceability, smallholder inclusion, and digital transformation. Held from 3–5 November 2025, RT2025 convened over 1,000 delegates from more than 40 countries under the theme “Building the Next 20: Sustainability in Action” The event commemorated RSPO’s two-decade journey, highlighting achievements in certification, deforestation reduction, and stakeholder engagement.

Trust, Technology, Transformation: These three pillars shaped the agenda, with sessions focused on rebuilding consumer trust, leveraging digital tools for traceability, and transforming supply chains for resilience.

The Key Outcomes

• Digital Traceability Push: RSPO unveiled plans to expand its digital traceability systems, aiming for full visibility from plantation to product by 2030. Blockchain pilots and satellite monitoring were showcased.
• Smallholder Inclusion: Panels emphasized the need to rethink incentives for smallholders. Proforest and others advocated for inclusive market mechanisms and simplified compliance pathways.
• EUDR Readiness: With the EU Deforestation Regulation looming, RT2025 featured workshops on aligning RSPO standards with EUDR requirements, especially around geolocation data and risk assessments.

Attending the conference has highlighted many opportunities to develop the RSPO Supply Certification Standard further within NQA and ensure that the team have firsthand information to support this. This was further supported by the MPOC field trip.

The Malaysian Palm Oil Council Field Trip November 2025

MPOC is part of the Malaysian government scheme to improve the sustainability of palm oil. This field trip is designed to showcase palm plantations smallholders and mills in the Malaysian state of Pahang . Its purpose to highlight the positive changes in the palm oil industry. Malaysia is the second largest producer of palm oil and exports palm oil all over the world.

The visit centred around a plantation and mill owned by Felda which is a social - business organisation that supports the Global Agenda for Sustainable development

goals. It was established by the government of Malaysia to overcome the issues of poverty in the 1950s through new land settlements. It now supports 317 smallholder schemes. They support smallholders by helping with the best seedlings, training, logistics and helping support the workers by ensuring a living income.

Great focus is given to producing the best seedlings to ensure higher yielding trees which makes palm oil more sustainable. Best farming practices have been developed to limit the use of fertilizers and promote natural pest controls such as the use of Barn Owls to catch rats. The number one pest in the plantation.

The second part of our trip has centred around biodiversity, indigenous communities and carbon. The vision is holistic ensuring the plantation owners, local communities, NGOs and government are coming together to protect the remaining forests, plant wildlife corridors and consider carbon capture. The carbon focus was of interest to those on the tour due to scope 3 commitments.

The Malaysian people are very proud of the journey to sustainable palm oil and their passion and enthusiasm was impressive. Palm oil certification is playing a major role and not just RSPO but ISO standards too. The trip has been uplifting in a world that can be quite negative.