Certifying sustainability in oil palm cultivation Marcel Djama, CIRAD and MOISA, University of Montpellier, France and Universiti Putra Malaysia, Malaysia

Established in response to the resolutions of the 1992 Rio Summit on Sustainable Development, sustainability standards have become a key instrument in the regulation of agricultural value chains.

In 2015, the Ecolabel Index database listed more than 450 certification programmes or ecolabels (Lemeilleur and Balineau, 2016), compared to fewer than 50 prior to 1990. These mechanisms have skyrocketed over the last 20 years, and the agricultural, food and forestry sectors are by far some of the most active ones in this respect (Marx and Wouters, 2015).