MESSAGE FROM THE CEO

It is an honour to be meeting with the RSPO global partnership once again in Kuala Lumpur for the 22nd General Assembly (GA22). Since gathering last year, RSPO has charted meaningful progress, aligned with our vision to make palm oil sustainable. Our collaboration across borders has been critical to building solutions for a more sustainable and inclusive sector.

Our strong momentum continues year after year, as we deepen our engagement with key markets and emerging regions. As of July 2025, RSPO membership reached a new milestone, counting 6,188 members across 105 countries and territories. The adoption of the 2024 Principles and Criteria (P&C) and Independent Smallholder (ISH) Standards, as well as the ongoing review of the companion Supply Chain Certification Standard, affirm our shared dedication to keep raising the bar to ensure that sustainable palm oil production, sourcing and trade remains environmentally and socially responsible.

During the year, we stepped up in our digital transformation journey with the launch of prisma by RSPO, the latest generation of RSPO's evolving IT systems. prisma was designed to support RSPO Members in strengthening market and regulatory compliance through enhanced data credibility, transparency, and end-to-end traceability – responding to the emerging legislative frameworks around the world.

Looking to the future – recognising that the sustainable palm sector is at a turning point as expectations around transparency and trust continue to grow, we are also driven by a renewed sense of urgency to deliver meaningful change. Following RT2025, one of the key items on our agenda at this year’s Assembly is a resolution to amend the RSPO Statutes in line with the implementation of RSPO’s new governance structure. This represents a landmark in our ongoing commitment to good governance, following an extensive review process initiated in 2023. This resolution could potentially reshape the way RSPO is governed, ensuring our organisation remains responsive to real-world challenges and representative of our diverse global membership.

I encourage each of you to reflect on RSPO’s journey so far – our milestones as much as our critical challenges – and act purposefully and in synergy, to ensure that what we’ve built over the past two decades only becomes stronger with each passing year.

I remain grateful and inspired by the dedication of our global kinship, and wish for a successful GA22!

Joseph JD D’Cruz
Chief Executive Officer, RSPO

MESSAGE FROM THE CO-CHAIRS

Dear Fellow Members,

We are pleased to welcome you to the 21st RSPO General Assembly (GA21) in Bangkok, Thailand, culminating an eventful year celebrating RSPO’s 20th anniversary. Inspired by the “Land of Smiles”, we strive to embody the warmth and welcoming spirit of our country hosts as we graciously invite you to engage in this year’s assembly.

Recently, RSPO’s membership surpassed 6,000 members worldwide, marking a new milestone that highlights the vitality and expanding influence of our global partnership. It is astounding to grasp such phenomenal growth in just two decades, knowing how we started out with about 200 members and 16 countries during our inaugural meeting in 2004. As we chart our course ahead, our strength in numbers can only be harnessed if we are firmly rooted in our founding values and principles, to carry out our mandate of meaningful transformation of the global palm oil industry.

Foremost in the GA21 agenda is the adoption of the revised RSPO Principles and Criteria (P&C) and Independent Smallholder (ISH) Standard. We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the stakeholders involved for seeing through this review cycle and regional consultations with utmost professionalism, despite the long and gruelling process. We recognise the collaborative efforts in ensuring that the RSPO Standards are up to speed with emergent environmental and social challenges and thus remain relevant, robust and effective in addressing the most critical sustainability concerns. Our Standards are the bedrock of our organisation, and while the challenges in overseeing their evolution intensify at each review cycle, it pushes RSPO and the greater palm oil industry towards better stewardship, aligned with the latest innovations and broader global sustainability goals.

On the innovation front, we are very proud of the successful development of RSPO’s new trade and compliance system prisma (Palm Resource Information and Sustainability Management), which will be officially launched in December, with the full audit model set to be operational in mid-2025. prisma is poised to be a transformative moment for the palm oil industry, as it is built to streamline and optimise information and supply chain efficiency by standardising audit reports, providing a seamless framework for RSPO Members to be in sync with global sustainability demands.

We must continue the momentum of the past 20 years as we now look towards building the next 20 by scaling up our capacity, knowledge and expertise, amidst such a challenging moment for the world already reeling from the impacts of the climate emergency.

Our strong and collective action is needed to mobilise an ambitious future strategy that will prioritise a more proactive approach to risk management, heightened smallholder support, and new enabling services including modular standards, sustainability data custodianship and robust advisory services.

We count on the continued commitment and support of all our Members and partners to build this exciting next chapter for RSPO. Here’s to a successful and fruitful GA21!

Anne Rosenbarger, Co-chairperson
Jose Roberto Montenegro Baide, Co-chairperson
Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil