Children’s Rights in the Indonesian Oil Palm Industry: Improving Company Respect for the Rights of the Child

Abstract

Although companies have many direct and indirect impacts on the lives of children, discussion of the responsibility of business to respect the rights of children has primarily focused on child labor. Using UNICEF’s Children’s Rights and Business Principles as a framework for our analysis, we considered the activities of oil palm plantation companies operating in Indonesia. Our data come from key informant interviews and reflection on two programs established to promote respect for children’s rights in the Indonesian palm oil industry: one by Pusat Kajian Perlindungan Anak (PKPA) (Center for Child Study and Protection); and one by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in conjunction with UNICEF. We considered: how plantation company activities impacted children’s lives; how companies demonstrated respect for children’s rights; and how observance of children’s rights can be improved. We discuss four problematic issues: getting company commitments to children’s rights into policy and practice; having a strong business case for respecting human rights and children’s rights; contradictory objectives within companies; and complexities around children in the workplace. We argue that a children’s rights based approach should be applied to the activities of all organizations. This children’s rights lens is needed to overcome the invisibility of children in society and industry, and to address the root causes of human rights harms. We note that respecting children’s rights will likely contribute to getting a social license to operate and grow.

Community engagement, public participation and social impact assessment

“…Achieving meaningful participation requires providing adequate notice, ensuring access to information, assistance to enable adequate participation, ample opportunities for public comment, facilitating access to public hearings, opportunities for alternative dispute resolution, early and ongoing participation, deliberativeness, using learning-oriented approaches, and being fair and open (IFC, 2014;AccountAbility, 2015;Sinclair & Diduck, 2017;UNESCAP, 2018;Kvam, 2019;Sinclair et al, 2021). Other current considerations include: the human right to participate and 'rights-based approaches' (Götzmann, 2019;UNESCAP, 2019); the right of children to participate (United Nations, 1989;Collins, 2019;Collins et al, 2021;Pasaribu & Vanclay, 2021);and social inclusion, vulnerability, and diversity (De'Arman, 2020;Vanclay, 2020;Lightbody & Escobar, 2021).…”

Handbook of Social Impact Assessment and Management

“…The expansion of oil palm plantations over the past 15 years has been controversial. Oil palm plantations are usually developed by converting agricultural land or forest into plantations, resulting in a reallocation of land and resources, leading to extreme changes in vegetation and local ecosystems, the resettlement and displacement of local communities, loss of traditional livelihoods, conflict between companies and local communities, exploitative labour relations, and concerns about child labour (Colchester & Chao, 2011;Meijaard & Sheil, 2019;Pasaribu & Vanclay, 2021).…”

“…Community members who decided not to join the plantation, or did not have enough land to surrender to the company as part of land-sharing arrangements, inevitably are not selected for the jobs on offer, and thus they are effectively discriminated against. Farmers producing other commodities can find that their crops are deleteriously affected by the rat and pest plagues that oil palm brings, and Indigenous cultural leaders can find their traditional authority being eroded as an influx of cash leads to rapid changes in spending and values (Gillespie, 2010(Gillespie, , 2012McCarthy et al, 2012;Pasaribu & Vanclay, 2021). Increasingly, plantation-related conflict is seen at the intra-community level, where neighbours disagree over the benefits of oil palm for the community at large.…”

Smallholders in agro-industrial production: Lessons for rural development from a comparative analysis of Ghana’s and Indonesia’s oil palm sectors

“…The lack of a strong legal framework to govern the land resources and little effective environmental and social regulation frequently meant that the interests of the strongest actors-often private companies supported by different levels of government-prevailed, resulting in breaches of contracts, the violation of community rights, and illegal land clearances (Levang et al, 2016). In addition the oil palm sector has been criticized for its working conditions, including precarious wages and the use of child labor (ILO, undated;Li, 2015;Pasaribu and Vanclay, 2021).…”