The European Union’s plan to prohibit crude palm oil (CPO) as a raw material for biofuel will affect about 16 million people, including small oil palm plantations and laborers, according to the Indonesia Oil Palm Labor Union Network (Japbusi).

The organization’s executive secretary, Nursanna Marpaung, further claimed that the EU’s policy would cause a large number of people to lose their jobs and trigger social and economic tension in many parts of the country.

“The EU should not only think about deforestation but also the people who will suffer [because of its policy],” Nursanna said when speaking at a discussion in Jakarta on Tuesday.

The EU’s plan to phase out crude palm oil from biofuel by 2030 through the delegated act EU Directive 2018/2001, a derivative of its Renewable Energy Directive II (RED II).

The bloc has argued that palm oil production had a high risk of causing deforestation,

Indonesia, as the largest producer of the commodity, said the policy was discriminative because other vegetable oils – like soybean, rapeseed or sunflower oils – that were produced in EU countries and the United States are more excessive in land use.

Nursanna said about 3.78 million people worked in oil palm plantations, including 2 million farmers. Many more people are involved in the commodity’s supply chains, as well as CPO factories and other manufacturing industries that use CPO as their raw material.

“We support the government in its fight against the discriminative treatment of palm oil by Europe. The government should do more because it relates to the fate of millions of people who rely on palm oil for their livelihood, including some 2 million Japbusi members,” Nursanna added as quoted by kontan.co.id. (bbn)