My Beautiful Forest Trust

The Tropical Forest Trust

Just before lunchtime on March 25, 1999, the fax machine started to rumble. I was in my London office, where I worked for Australian forestry consulting company FORTECH.

I’d been brokering the launch of a new non-profit to support the wooden garden furniture industry to extricate itself from the shame of driving forest destruction and human rights abuses in Cambodia.

The whole industry had been put on notice a year earlier, in March 1998, just as consumers were heading excitedly to stores across Europe to buy the latest, seriously inexpensive, beautifully designed, wonderfully durable, tropical hardwood furniture. UK NGO Global Witness had shared findings from its investigation into the booming sector with the press and fellow NGOs. They reported that the wood used by mass producing factories in Vietnam had arrived on trucks over the Annamite mountain range that forms the border with Cambodia and that it had effectively been ripped out of the forests there, leading to terrible environmental destruction and human rights abuses against indigenous ‘Montagnard’ community members. Campaigning NGOs across Europe, concerned for the forests and the people affected, launched big, seriously disruptive campaigns against retailers who were selling the furniture. The press picked up the story and before long, the hugely profitable industry was panicking. Hard questions were asked of suppliers.

I’d been working on this issue with UK retailer B&Q since December 1995. At that time, B&Q sourced its wooden garden furniture from a factory in Ho Chi Minh City, and had been told the wood used in the production came from Ma Da State Forest Enterprise (SFE), not far from the city. An auditor from FSC accredited SGS had travelled to the forest to pre-assess the potential for it to achieve FSC certification. A thumbs up report gave the green light for a full assessment and by virtue of my previous experience in Vietnam (see ‘About Me’) and the fact that I was a forester, I was asked to join the team as the technical forest expert.

I’d been surprised that the mission was even progressing (my first experience of auditing going wrong). I’d been to Ma Da SFE and there wasn’t much forest there, certainly not of the volume or scale that could meet B&Q’s supplier’s wood needs. The whole forest had been sprayed with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, killing most of the large, natural forest trees there. After the war, Vietnamese foresters had replanted the deforested land with Acacia and Teak but they were tiny and struggling to survive on the poisoned soil.

We found that the forest wasn’t supplying the wood for B&Q’s supplier. There was a sawmill at Ma Da though, and it was working manically away cutting huge, magnificent, cylindrical tropical forest logs that had come from elsewhere. It was this wood that was being trucked to HCM City and other factories in Vietnam. Where had the logs come from? There, on the river bank was our answer. Huge barges, hauled downriver from neighbouring Cambodia, carried log after precious log.

I reported this to B&Q who were understandably unimpressed with the news. We knew that timber harvesting in Cambodia was done by the military with no concern for the forests. Remnants of the Khmer Rouge were involved too, keeping themselves financed through illegal timber sales. B&Q’s excitement at potentially being the first retailer in the world to offer FSC certified garden furniture evaporated to worrying about being linked to human rights abuses and forest destruction. Not great.

Plans were made during 1996 to move procurement elsewhere but I suggested an alternative course. The factory in HCM City employed thousands of people and B&Q was by far their biggest customer. If they cancelled their order, those workers would be in trouble. Why not, I suggested, find a more ethical timber source and support the factory to buy wood from there? My previous travels through Vietnam had taken me through the Central Highlands and while none of the forest management there was FSC certified, it wasn’t bad, and with some assistance and willingness to change on the part of the forest managers, it could achieve FSC, or so I believed.

B&Q liked the idea so we worked together to find the forest. That journey took many twists and turns (something for a book that’s yet to be written rather than to describe in detail here), but as the garden furniture campaign broke across Europe in early April, 1998, I was working deep in the forests of Kon Plong SFE in Vietnam, supported by B&Q and the World Bank, to assess the forest managers’ capacities to reach FSC. I had a colleague from WWF Vietnam with me and through that connection, word gradually got out that I was working on this. As the media across Europe, and particularly the UK, hunted for more on this story, people suggested they speak to me. I was roped in as the industry apologist on a lunch-time TV show in London, only to disappoint everyone, the watching NGO community most of all who wanted blood, by telling the interviewer that the NGOs were right, the industry should move to FSC, and that I was working on a way to help make that happen.

More discussions unfolded over the next months and, in partnership with Boje Bendtzen, the Danish owner of ScanCom, the world’s largest supplier of the shamed furniture, and his six major retail customers, we decided that we’d set up a non-profit, the Tropical Forest Trust, or TFT, to support the industry to exclude illegal wood and move 100% to FSC wood.

Finally, on that quiet March 1999 day in London, I found myself receiving signed TFT membership application forms from the seven companies. Their engagement required a total investment of $800,000 in the first year to help us drive work to exclude illegal wood from their supply chains, replace it with FSC wood, and communicate broadly around the process.

To this point in the global wood sector, no one had ever taken such a leap. There were concerns about the environmental and social impacts in forests and communities around the world, but until we launched TFT, that concern had manifested itself as companies attending meetings and conferences for some hand-wringing and general pointing to their suppliers as the culprits. No one had taken responsibility to acknowledge their role in the forest destruction and for sure no one had ever invested such significant amounts of cash into seeking to address it.

An extraordinary achievement all on its own.

The Rest of the Story…summarised.

TFT did transform the garden furniture sector. Once ScanCom got going, other furniture suppliers had to follow and within a few short years, the entire Vietnamese industry had flipped to supplying FSC certified furniture.

Off to the Congo

In 2004, I was invited to work in the Republic of Congo with Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB), the Congo Basin’s largest forest industry complex. We’d helped a small forest in Peninsula Malaysia achieve FSC certification in 2002 (our first!) and by 2006, we’d supported CIB’s Pokola concession to achieve FSC too, the first such certificate in the Congo Basin. By 2009, CIB’s entire forest area had been certified and another 5 million hectares of forest across the Congo Basin, managed by other companies, had been inspired to follow. With CIB and World Bank support, we’d together launched the first ever Pygmy language community radio station to give a voice to the 9,000 semi-nomadic Mbendjele community members who lived in the CIB concessions.

There was more work to get more forests certified elsewhere - in Laos, Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia - and to exclude illegal wood from global timber supply chains. We secured a large grant from the European Commission for the Timber Trade Action Plan project that saw us working in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cameron, Gabon, Brazil and China to get illegally harvested wood out of European timber industry supply chains.

Perhum Perhutani - No more guns

In 2003, in Indonesia, we started working with the State-owned Teak Corporation, Perhum Perhutani, who managed more than 2 million hectares of land on the densely populated island of Java. The company had taken control of the Teak plantations established by the Dutch colonial government when Indonesia gained independence in 1965 but in doing so, also inherited the large number of conflicts with communities who had had their land appropriated by the Dutch. Perhutani Rangers carried guns, mostly semi-automatic weapons, to protect themselves against community loggers, but often conflicts became violent and community members were shot and sometimes killed. Despite this, Perhutani had gained FSC certification of six of its plantation Districts, much to the dismay of NGOs working for community rights. Eventually, the certificates were revoked, though oddly, not because people were being killed, another certification blooper, and Perhutani asked our help to get them back.

Our position was simple - that wouldn’t be possible while the Rangers carried guns - so a program was devised and implemented around community benefit sharing. It took six years, but eventually, in 2009, more than 4000 guns were locked away in secure arsenals and no one has been shot or killed since.

The Pivot to other commodities and climate change

In December 2006, Lord Nicholas Stern published his review of the economical impacts of climate change, highlighting the huge role that deforestation for agricultural commodities had on driving greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). Second only to the energy sector, he reported that deforestation accounted for 18% of human-induced GHGs.

The main drivers were forest clearance for palm oil in Indonesia and for cattle and soy in the Brazilian Amazon. Mining played a role here and there, as did the timber industry, but the major drivers were palm oil, soy and beef.

This news struck me hard.

Here we were working with an interesting model to get downstream supply chain actors to take responsibility for and invest in environmental and social improvements in their upstream supply chain partners’ operations, yet we weren’t touching the main game: deforestation that was driving climate change, biodiversity loss, human rights abuses and community conflict. We were playing around, not insignificantly, in the timber sector. OK, we were having an impact, but if we didn’t get our arms around deforestation for agricultural commodities, we were effectively fiddling while Rome burned.

In 2007, we began our pivot into palm oil.

By March 2010, we’d done a lot of investigation and been told by the palm oil sector to ‘go away’, sometimes in harsher terms. They challenged us, telling us we were foresters and asking, “What do you know about palm oil?” They’d missed the point that there’s was a supply chain issue and we knew a thing or two about how to solve those and that the palm oil industry’s main problems were deforestation, labour issues and community conflict, things we knew a fair bit about from our work to date and things you didn’t need to be a palm oil tech person to understand or solve.

Supporting Greenpeace and Nestlé to change the landscape

On March 17th, 2010, Greenpeace launched a global campaign targeting Nestlé for its use of palm oil sourced from plantations alleged to have been established through deforestation of High Conservation Value forest. Its now famous, 1-minute Kit Kat video went viral and Nestlé were in a serious bind.

Nestlé went into denial and threatened legal action. The company’s Facebook page was overrun and the person responsible for it was relieved from duty as stresses rose. Things went from bad to worse as Greenpeace disrupted Nestlé’s AGM in Lausanne, Switzerland, and two high-level meetings between the Nestlé and Greenpeace teams went nowhere.

Things were well stuck. By early May, there was no progress.

Living 45 minutes from Nestlé HQ meant that I knew some people who worked in senior positions in the company. Through them, I offered to speak to those in Nestlé grappling with the campaign to suggest a course of action that could help them move forward. Meetings were hurriedly arranged, discussions unfolded, phone mediations between Nestlé and Greenpeace ensued. I drafted the world’s first ever No Deforestation commitment that was agreed between the two parties over the phone and confirmed at a Paris meeting. On May 17th, 2010, two short months after the campaign began, Nestlé launched its No Deforestation/Responsible Sourcing Guidelines and the natural resources procurement world was forever changed.

Golden Agri Resources says YES

Greenpeace’s campaign against Nestlé was founded on their field investigations in Indonesia that had revealed that the country’s largest palm oil company, Golden Agri Resources (GAR), had been clearing High Conservation Value Forest as part of its plantation development activities. GAR denied this but the day after the campaign launched, Nestlé cut all its direct orders for palm oil from GAR.

A week after the Nestlé No Deforestation announcement, TFT’s team and Nestlé’s palm oil procurement lead in Singapore met with representatives from the big Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil companies, GAR among them, to explain the No De policy and what it would mean going forward. Of all the companies, GAR was the most outspoken in support of the new development and committed itself to regaining Nestlé’s trust by becoming the first supplier to fully implement the new policy. There was the issue that Greenpeace’s campaign against GAR was still raging, in part because like Nestlé before, GAR hadn’t responded well.

By September 1st, 2010, after much discussion between GAR’s leadership and TFT, GAR became our first palm oil plantation company member. A long mediation process ensued that had me spending a long time in hotel meeting rooms with GAR and Greenpeace representatives, but on Feb 9th, 2011, GAR announced the world’s first palm oil company Forest Conservation/No Deforestation Policy. Another massive breakthrough.

Asia Pulp & Paper Get Interested

Asia Pulp & Paper (APP) are GAR’s sister company, both being part of the Sinar Mas group. APP was also being attacked by Greenpeace as part of a concerted campaign involving myriad other NGOs including WWF that had been running for close to 20 years because of APP’s long history of clearing incredibly important natural forest in Sumatra for pulpwood plantations.

Toward the end of 2010, as our mediation work with GAR progressed, APP’s leadership noticed that the Greenpeace campaign against GAR had gone quiet. They were intrigued to learn how GAR had managed this. GAR shared news about the mediation and the support we were providing at TFT. On January 21st, 2011, I met APP’s leadership with my two senior TFT Indonesia colleagues. APP wanted to understand if TFT could similarly help them move forward with Greenpeace. The meeting didn’t go well. The leadership team and I didn’t hit it off and my contention that all they needed to do was implement a No Deforestation commitment similar to Nestlé’s was not well received.

GAR announced its policy with much acclaim and hope for a better outcome for Indonesia’s forests in February and it was in March, 2011 that APP called me back. Therein followed a series of meetings and discussions but by August, 2011, I broke off the process because I felt that we weren’t making any progress whatsoever. There were threats of recriminations and much unhappiness and my sense, sadly, was that the possibility that TFT could support APP to find a way forward was lost.

APP goes for it!

To my surprise, at the end of January, 2012, APP called me back. They wanted to explore how I could help them. After a serious discussion around what we could and couldn’t do, we agreed that TFT would support APP to move forward to find a way out of the impasse it had reached with NGOs that was costing it significant business and no end of stress, not to mention the ongoing forest clearance.

A long, winding road of meetings and negotiations followed with so many twists, turns and intricacies; too long to describe here. Never though did I sense that APP’s leadership waivered, even as the scale of the task before them became clearer. In December, 2012, we reached a key breakthrough when the company committed to ending forest clearance operations in all of its own and its suppliers’ concessions. Two months of discussion and mediation with Greenpeace later and on February 5th, 2013, APP announced its own Forest Conservation/No Deforestation Policy which included a permanent end of forest clearance across its entire supply base comprising around 2 million hectares of forest.

Smoke in Wilmar’s eyes

APP’s announcement caught people’s attention. Some NGOs, like WWF, didn’t believe the company was serious and carried on giving them a good kicking. There were minor policy breaches, as had been expected but within 6 months, the policy was holding, studies were unfolding and the company was moving forward.

Like so many years before, 2013 was notable for the extreme fire season across Indonesia that saw smallholder farmers burning vast swathes of forest and peatland to establish palm oil plantations. As so often happens, smog enveloped much of the region, including Singapore where air quality dropped to dangerous levels.

Glen Horowitz, working at the time for Washington D.C. based Climate Advisors, spoke to Bloomberg TV in Hong Kong and directly accused the world’s largest palm oil company, Wilmar International, of causing the fires and in turn the smog that was choking so many.

Wilmar’s leadership was less than impressed. Wilmar has its own substantial plantation estate but had long prohibited the use of burning to clear land. It pointed this out in its rebuttal of Glenn’s accusations but Glenn quickly fired back that it wasn’t burning on Wilmar’s plantations he was referencing. The issue, as he saw it, was that Wilmar trades more than 40% of the world’s palm oil, so by not demanding No Deforestation from its entire supply base, they were effectively incentivising the burning. That didn’t land well with Wilmar’s co-Founder, Chairman and CEO, Kuok Khoon Hong.

Mr Kuok called Glenn and there was a tense conversation, but the two did click as Mr Kuok understood that Glenn was committed to positive developments for the planet and wasn’t merely attacking the palm oil industry and Wilmar for the sake of a sound bite. Mr Kuok invited Glenn to visit him in Singapore to discuss what might be done.

That meeting went well and Glenn asked me if TFT could support him and Wilmar to find a path forward. A number of subsequent meetings unfolded but things moved forward quickly. By the end of September, I’d drafted Wilmar a No Deforestation, No Exploitation and No Peatland Development Policy, the first of what are now commonly known as NDPE Policies, that went further than any policy, in any sector, had ever gone. It committed Wilmar to excluding deforestation across its entire palm oil business, including all of its 3rd party suppliers. There were tense moments as Wilmar’s palm oil industry peers heard what was unfolding and lobbied hard to convince Mr Kuok to stay with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) process. It looked like the whole initiative would fail until finally, on December 5th, 2013, Mr Kuok did sign off the policy and it was announced to the world very late that evening in Singapore.

Nathanael Johnson, from GRIST in the US, subsequently interviewed Glenn, I and Jeremy Goon from Wilmar who, as Wilmar’s Sustainability leader, had been intimately involved in the process. Nate wrote up an article that described in great detail how everything had unfolded, almost collapsed, but was finally rescued when I sent Mr Kuok a thoughtful email with the below Michael Leunig cartoon, called, ‘At the Top,’ to help him see things differently.

Here’s a link to Nate’s article.

The Wilmar announcement was a massive breakthrough.

When Nestlé announced the world’s first No Deforestation commitment, I had anticipated that other companies would follow suit. They didn’t. Likewise, when GAR announced their commitment, I thought that the palm oil industry would quickly follow as had happened with ScanCom and again with CIB. That didn’t happen either primarily because the industry, with support from WWF, held together under the RSPO banner.

WWF had proclaimed, year after year, that if you were an RSPO member, you were a sustainability hero. With such plaudits, and without having to change your procurement significantly, why go down a No Deforestation path that required significant change?

When APP crossed over, this caught a lot of attention but when Wilmar moved, the whole palm oil industry had no option but to follow.

In 2014, company after company announced their own No Deforestation commitment, always based on the same 5 principles that had underpinned Nestlé’s first ever commitment in May 2010 - legal compliance, protecting communities, protecting High Conservation Value Forest, protecting High Carbon Stock forest and no peatland development.

Today, close to 900 companies have NDPE Policies and large areas of forest, with the support of government enforced laws and regulations, have been protected. Still, for sure, there are companies who pay mere lip service to their NDPE commitments and yes, there is still deforestation for agricultural commodities, but the push that started with Nestlé back in 2010, has had a major impact on forest conservation the world over.

Leaving TFT, pivoting to people

With Wilmar’s announcement, there was much work required to support the team there to implement their policy. That more operational work unfolded during 2014 and over time, Wilmar grew its team to manage the process fully themselves. Likewise APP, GAR and others grew their internal teams and capacities to lead the work themselves. TFT’s work became more operational. We became known as the supply chain technical specialists and no one knew or understood the work I’d done in the dark meeting and Board rooms of so many companies to support the leaders to find a way forward.

My work has always been done in the shadows so there’s never been any big press release to reveal the nature of those conversations. The NGO campaigns were critical to create awareness and raise tension levels but alone, they weren’t delivering the changes needed. Both sides needed a mediator, a ‘transition whisperer’ and that’s the role I took, behind the scenes.

Wilmar completed for me what I describe as ‘The Big 7.’ These are the seven big transitions I helped make a reality. These are the cases described above: ScanCom in the garden furniture sector, CIB in Congo Basin forestry, Perhutani in the Indonesian Teak industry, Nestlé with palm oil and pulp and paper, GAR with palm oil, APP with pulp and paper, and finally Wilmar in the palm oil industry.

There were so many other smaller and medium sized projects along the way as well. Other TFT leaders supported other TFT members too, many of the world’s major brands among them.

All this had taken its toll on my health. As well as all the long haul flying to lead the mediations, I was travelling to visit TFT teams around the world. I was big time burnt out having been on the road more or less since 1993 when I left Tasmania to work in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

And the work TFT was doing was so operational in support of our members, that my role as a mediator drifted away.

During 2014, I’d already reorganised TFT’s internal structures so that our six Directors were running the business. I was looking to bigger horizons. As part of an interview in March 2014, Australian journalist Michael Bachelard had asked me whether I thought these NDPEs would save any forest. I responded that I believed they would in the short-term because I’d sat in those rooms over such a long period with the company leaders and I knew they were serious. So it has been proven as all the companies have invested hundreds of millions, if not billions, combined, to change their procurement and operational practices to protect forest.

Michael captured something of the essence of my work in his subsequent profile article, titled, “Stopping the chainsaws: Determined Australian forester Scott Poynton is employing unusual methods in his crusade to get the world's loggers to clean up their act.” You can read the article here.

My concern was in the medium to longer term. I told Michael that I was worried that while we were effectively protecting the forests from bulldozers, we would only see them destroyed by pests and disease attacks and by fires created because of climate change.

Sadly, this has proven to be the case.

It was then that I started the real pivot to focusing my work on people. I have learned so many lessons through my firsthand experience supporting leaders and teams. I believe that if we can inspire people to take their own credible climate action, we might make a difference.

At the end of 2015, I stepped aside as TFT CEO. At that point, we had more than 260 people working on more than 20 commodities in 48 countries, affecting the environmental and social attributes of more than $1 trillion in supply chain transactions.

From January 1st, 2016 to May 31st, 2019, I transitioned in a new leadership team. My last day with TFT, May 31st, 2019, was marked by the death of my most wonderful supporter, Hilary Thompson, one of our Directors, who left us that day after a long battle with cancer. I departed the organisation I’d founded more than 20 years earlier with quite some sadness, but also much excitement for new beginnings.

In early 2019, TFT changed its name to Earthworm Foundation and the organisation continues to flourish and impact supply chains the world over. I’m proud of the work it is doing.

At the time, and even still, people were amazed that I could walk away from ‘my baby’ as they put it. I saw it differently. I wasn’t walking away, I was setting it free to flourish. Founders can stay too long in their organisations. So often, organisations need a refresh, a change. Like an adolescent, TFT needed to fly and flourish on its own and I needed to take the lessons I’d learned from all those meetings and mediation processes, all those Big 7 and other smaller cases, and apply them to a bigger canvas.

My love of forests and the natural world remains unbound. But if I’m to truly make as big an impact as possible, I need to play a bigger role to create a bigger impact on climate change. It really is as simple as that.

In October, 2019, I founded a new company, a different way Limited, to support transitions and help people be the best they can be. In January 2021, I founded The Pond Foundation, with its My Carbon Zero program aimed at changing how the world acts on climate change.

The TFT spirit continues within me as I encounter new frontiers.