Monitoring & Verification

With increased transparency comes increased responsibility to evaluate practices, engage on solutions and verify progress. We monitor for potential land use changes in our supply chain to ensure compliance with Cargill’s Policy on Sustainable Palm Oil.

Satellite and radar technology

To verify practices, we monitor our supply chain using Global Forest Watch Pro, a satellite imagery system that provides alerts on deforestation-related issues within our supply chain. When issues are identified, we engage with our suppliers to develop corrective action plans.

We also collaborate with World Resources Institute to use radar technology to track issues across our supply chain in near-real-time and address concerns in accordance with our grievance procedure. In areas prone to cloud cover, radar can pierce through the clouds and provide data that cannot be obtained using optical sensors alone. Radar systems also are capable of capturing data at night. The addition of radar technology provides more timely and reliable deforestation detection.

We integrate data from both of these satellite and radar monitoring technologies into the Global Forest Watch platform to enable effective monitoring.

Cargill Environmental Compliance Verification Guide

As part of our commitment to working toward a transparent, traceable and sustainable palm supply chain, in 2019, Cargill partnered with nonprofit organization Preferred by Nature, to develop the Cargill Environmental Compliance Verification Guideline. With this initiative, we aim to offer stakeholders more transparency and accountability in the way we deliver on our “No Deforestation, No Development on Peat and No Exploitation of people and indigenous communities” (NDPE) commitments and how we report impact.

NDPE Implementation Framework 

Cargill supports adoption of the Proforest-led NDPE (No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation) Implementation Reporting Framework (IRF) to increase supply chain transparency across the palm oil industry. 

In 2018, Cargill partnered with Proforest and Pepsico to develop and pilot the IRF, which establishes a standard approach for companies to report on progress against NDPE commitments. 

The NDPE IRF is a tool many palm oil companies use as a consistent way to monitor NDPE compliance in the supply chain, to report on progress, and to identify the areas where collaborative action is needed to drive transformation. Cargill publicly discloses its NDPE IRF profiles for all our oil refineries globally.  

Cargill Impact Report 

Current sustainability reporting on our palm oil supply chain can be found in Cargill’s most recent Impact Report. All previous Palm Oil Sustainability Reports can be found here.