By Jake Ellis Aurora
Palm oil has had ‘an almost linear rise’ from the 1990s to 2000s, emerging as a ‘sustainable’ product primarily because it can provide higher yields when compared to other vegetable oils. This sustainability claim has been led chiefly by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) along with other organisations. But this begs the question, sustainability for whom and on what terms?
Colombia is the largest producer of palm oil in Latin America, ranking 4th in the world in 2025/26. With Colombian palm oil exports surging 44% in just one year the claims of sustainability paint palm oil cultivation in Colombia as a progressive movement. However, this blog post explores the paradox of ‘sustainable’ palm oil in Colombia being implicated in one of the worst cases of continuing indigenous displacement in the continent. The RSPO, as a non-profit private-sector organisation and the largest palm oil sustainability certifier in Colombia, is complicit in perpetuating environmental colonialism by engaging in greenwashing. In doing so, the RSPO renders the human cost of cultivation invisible. This has created a legal vacuum that has failed indigenous communities, farmers and consumers in separate ways.
Historical Context: Why Mapiripan Still Matters Today
On the 15th of July 1997, approximately 100 members of a Colombian right-wing paramilitary group (the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia) entered Mapiripan, Meta in Colombia where they used chainsaws and machetes to murder and torture local civilians. In the aftermath of the 5-day ordeal the US State Department estimated at least 30 civilians were killed (although some estimates suggest up to 77 died).
Symbolic of the civil war in Colombia, the massacre was multi-causal and was underlined by drug-trafficking and political motivations. But for this case study on Colombian palm oil cultivation, the outcome of this event is most important. After the massacre, many indigenous people were displaced. Six years after the massacre, the state had still not established the security necessary for the indigenous population to return, and in 2005 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found Colombia liable for its failure to facilitate repatriation.
Taking advantage of the massacre and its displacement, palm oil companies moved into Mapiripan, with similar stories across the country. This resulted in the prosecution of 19 palm oil companies for colluding with paramilitaries to forcibly displace indigenous residents. So Mapiripan is relevant today not because the massacre was recent, but because its consequences are. Continued displacement has never been remedied, the RSPO’s certification regime lauds and therefore legitimises land dispossession as ‘sustainable’. Mapiripan is not an isolated case. Instead, the use of paramilitary violence to clear land which is subsequently exploited by palm oil companies has become widespread across Colombia, continuing to this day.
Defining ‘Sustainability’ and the Paradox of Sustainable Palm Oil
Defining sustainability has been a challenge since the Brundtland Commission advanced the concept in 1987, with no universally agreed definition emerging since. The Commission defined sustainability as ‘seek[ing] to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future.’ Since then, the legal and academic debate has both criticised and praised the concept’s vagueness, with the balance between economic development and environmental sustainability also being a source of debate. This tension between the economic and environmental elements of sustainability epitomises the terrain in which ‘sustainable’ palm oil should be interrogated.
Professor Lyla Mehta recognises how sustainability as a concept has colonial roots that need to be uncovered before we apply it. Mehta identifies sustainability’s emphasis on ‘exploitative’ economic value, as opposed to ‘cultural and indigenous values’ to land, as a form of colonial bias. This in turn permeates through the RSPO’s certification regime where sustainability, and regional laws, are focused on economic, as opposed to cultural and indigenous sustainability. Only once sustainability incorporates historical, indigenous and cultural connections to land can we move toward an understanding of how the concept of sustainability should operate in Colombian palm oil.
Environmental Colonialism as an Environmental Injustice
Environmental practices benefit different stakeholders differently. What protects an Afrocolombian farmer may fail to protect a Mapiripan worker and so on. As academics Robert Figeroa and Claudia Mills point out, there are two different lenses through which to view environmental justice: participatory and distributive. In this case study, participatory justice requires us to interrogate who is included (and excluded) in labelling palm oil practices as ‘sustainable’. In contrast, distributive justice directs us to look at how and who the burdens and benefits are distributed between. Here that includes indigenous people, workers, paramilitaries, the Colombian state, and even palm oil companies and consumers.
This blog post does not view these two dimensions as being in tension with one another. Instead, they underly the role and purpose of environmental colonialism. Here, environmental colonialism (aka green colonialism) is the key environmental injustice that will be used to analyse the sustainability of Colombian palm oil cultivation:
‘“Green colonialism” can be defined as the extension of the colonial relations of plunder and dispossession (as well as the dehumanisation of the other) in the era of the so-called green transition. Green colonialism pushes costs onto peripheral countries and communities and prioritises the energy and environmental needs (such as water) of one region of the world over another.’
In Colombian palm oil, environmental colonialism operates through the very language of ‘sustainability’. Western consumers and corporations define what ‘sustainable’ palm oil means while the local communities bear the distributive burdens of palm oil production. Including the fear of paramilitary violence, the legal burden of land repossession and the climate consequences. These same local communities are excluded from defining sustainability entirely and are instead propagandised by the RSPO to legitimise its certification regime. Indeed, even those local communities featured on the RSPO’s website praise the economic sustainability and benefits of palm oil, with no mention of its cultural impact. In this sense, environmental colonialism allows sustainability to function as a greenwashing tool. It uses the economic benefits of palm oil to silence the cultural harms (like land dispossession) suffered by indigenous communities in Colombia.
The Legal Landscape of Greenwashing
Greenwashing has a broad definition, manifesting in different ways. But the definition focused on in this blog and recognised by the UN, is the ‘emphasizing [of] a single environmental attribute while ignoring other impacts.’ Promoting palm oil’s economic sustainability due to its ease of cultivation, while excluding discussion as to how the land was acquired, falls squarely within this definition. It is also the mechanism that environmental colonialism operates through in practice. Here the law both permits and allows for the silencing of the human cost behind sustainability claims. This is best seen through two responses: one regional and one private.
EU “Greenwashing Directive”: Missing the Point
70% of Colombian palm oil exports flow directly into Europe. In June 2025 the Green Claims Directive was withdrawn by the EU due to objections of member states like Italy because of the impact it would have on small businesses. It was expected to have a particularly large impact in Latin America where there is an absence of greenwashing legislation. However, in response to recent consumer pressure, the EU introduced the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive in its place, which is set to be implemented by 27 September 2026. On its face the new Directive goes further than previous directives. Article 1(1)(q) defines a sustainability label as covering ‘environment or social characteristics, or both’. Article 1(1)(r) also captures how certification schemes must be monitored by an independent third party. In many ways this represents a move towards greenwashing accountability, with these new rules theoreticallycapturing certifiers like the RSPO. However, it does not reach the harms that matter most in Colombia.
The RSPO’s response to the Directive is particularly revealing. Rather than treating the new framework as a constraint to their current practices, the RSPO assessed its scheme against the criteria and concluded that it complies with the requirements. The RSPO concludes that their labels ‘should continue to be allowed on the EU market.’ Ironically, it advised members to avoid the word ‘sustainable’ on packaging, not because their practices are unsustainable, but to ‘reduce the risk of non-compliance.’ The RSPO’s response to the Directive showcases how this is treated as a rebranding exercise, rather than providing legal accountability. Additionally, the Directive contains no formal pre-approval process for sustainability labels, instead national authorities will assess legality ‘only after the law comes into application.’ Paradoxically, a private certifier with no international mandate can self-certify its compliance with a framework designed to scrutinise it.
The RSPO Has No Clothes!
One of the deeper problems with the Directive is what it omits. The framework interrogates whether environmental claims are scientifically accurate, but it does not explore how the land producing the certified product was acquired. The lack of disclosure requirements silences these local communities a second time, this time through the law’s omission.
RSPO Criterion 4.3 pays lip service to the principle of ‘free, prior and informed consent’ before land is used or seized from indigenous communities. This principle has been codified in Articles 10 and 32 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), ILO Convention No. 169 Articles, 6, 7 and 15 and by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Saramaka People v Suriname. Colombia, as a signatory to both the UNDRIP and ILO Convention No. 169, means that it has a positive obligation to see the enforcement of these provisions. Yet this exposes another problem, separate from the conceptual issue of omission in the EU Directive. As indigenous legal scholar Sharon Venne argues, the ILO Convention No. 169 itself replaces consent with consultation and treats cultural ties to land as interchangeable with economic compensation for land. Therefore, the RSPO’s invocation of the Convention’s ‘free, prior and informed consent’ standard does not escape the critique of environmental colonialism. Rather, it deepens it by focusing on the same ‘exploitative’ emphasis on economic value as ‘sustainability’.
An Uncertain Future
This case study on Colombian palm oil cultivation exposes structural failures at every level of the legal order. UNDRIP and ILO Convention No. 169 provide the normative basis for the rights of those indigenous people being displaced, yet they are unenforceable against the RSPO. The RSPO can therefore engage in ‘window dressing’ with little to no consequences. The EU Directive covers sustainability claims including ‘social characteristics’ per Article 1(1)(q). But the RSPO’s response shows this is a hollow promise as disclosure land acquisition is not part of the Euro-centric understanding of ‘sustainability’. Worse yet, the RSPO’s interpretation of these standards in Criterion 4.3, like many international agreements ‘adopted’ by private organisations, is completely self-assessed ‘without meaningful State oversight’. The law here functions to aggravate the injustice felt by dispossession. By excluding land dispossession from being legally relevant to ‘sustainability’ claims it makes the injustice, and what local people know to be true, invisible for a second time. What unites all these failures is the underlying invisibility that Mehta identifies as central to sustainability’s colonial roots. Its emphasis on economic value over cultural and indigenous connections to the land that communities like those in Mapiripan embody. The law does not just fail but actively aggravates this failure by excluding land dispossession from what ‘sustainability’ means. First, by the paramilitary violence that cleared their land and physically silenced their voice. And again, by the RSPO logo on a European supermarket shelf.
Jake holds a First-Class LLB (Hons) from the University of Southampton, where he currently works as a Research Assistant at the Law School.