In May of last year, when we helped residents of Long Urun file a complaint with Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO), the community had already been watching its forests cleared for palm oil production for more than a year. After trying everything they could think of to stop the forest destruction, including letters, petitions and blockades against the plantation’s operations, a formal complaint was the next best chance to prevent the complete loss of the trees they relied on.
But more than six months passed before their complaint was meaningfully processed. In that time, forest was cleared at a breakneck pace — including areas of key importance for the community that cannot be replaced. The clearing stopped only when public campaigning led palm oil buyers to pressure the processing mill, and the mill in turn pressured the plantation. While MSPO did eventually suspend Urun Plantations’ certification, the complaint process did not stop the deforestation, the communities did.
This is not an isolated case. MSPO’s own website lists targets of 20 working days to review a complaint and 90 working days to investigate it, and in our experience complaints regularly run past those targets. Even a complaint that meets every target can take nearly six months from filing to decision, far too long when a forest is being cleared in real time.
MSPO runs Malaysia’s mandatory national palm oil certification scheme. Its current complaints procedure, in place since 2020, has no way to flag a complaint as urgent and no way to protect forest or land while an investigation runs, in the way a court injunction could while a case is awaiting trial, for example. It also lets MSPO close a complaint if the complainant does not answer a request for more information within 20 working days, a short window for remote communities who often don’t have reliable, or any, internet.
The good news is that MSPO is revising how it handles complaints. At MSPO’s invitation, we submitted written recommendations in August of this year, drawing on our work with Indigenous communities in Sarawak like Long Urun who bring complaints against certified plantations and mills. MSPO has since published a draft of its new procedure for public comment, open until October 15, 2026.
As it stands, the draft does not close the gaps that allow irreversible harm to communities and forests while complaints are pending. It still gives MSPO no way to halt clearing during an investigation, and it cuts the time communities have to answer requests for information from 20 working days to three weeks. Our updated submission sets out how to close those gaps, and we hope MSPO adopts these recommendations in the final version.
The consultation itself shows how hard it is for affected communities to take part. The draft and its annexes run to more than 100 pages, MSPO has allowed two weeks for comment, and comments must be submitted through an online portal. Few of the communities most affected by palm oil have the internet access or the legal support to respond to a document of that size in that time. A process meant to hear from affected communities should be designed so they can take part.
Here are our main recommendations:
1. Sort every complaint by risk on arrival
Within five working days of receiving a complaint, MSPO should assign it to one of four risk tiers, before any investigation begins. Tier 1 covers imminent, irreversible harm: active clearing, deforestation above 30 hectares, destruction of primary forest or High Conservation Value areas, violence or threats against community members, and operations with no FPIC process at all. Tier 2 covers serious harm such as a badly flawed FPIC process, peat or riverbank buffer violations, forced or child labor, and repeat complaints against the same operator. The lower tiers handle routine and administrative cases. A complaint that meets any single Tier 1 test should be considered high-risk, and only a documented decision approved in writing by a senior officer should move it down. A structured risk categorization system like this would prevent case-by-case discretion from downgrading the worst cases.
2. Stop the clearing while the investigation runs
A Tier 1 classification should trigger a written stop-work notification to the company and its certification body within 48 hours, with no further sign-off. The company gets five working days to show the criteria are not met, MSPO gets five to respond, and work resumes only with MSPO’s written clearance. Like a court injunction, the hold is temporary and reversible. The international palm oil body RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) has done this before: in 2017 it halted seven subsidiaries of Goodhope Asia Holdings within weeks of a complaint.
As a national scheme, MSPO can also send each notice directly to the Forestry Department and land authorities, a channel that international schemes lack. For Tier 2 complaints, a preliminary assessment within 15 working days should decide whether the case moves up to Tier 1.
3. Set deadlines and meet them
Tier 1 complaints should be acknowledged within two working days and investigated within 45, with updates to the complainant every two weeks — a minimum requirement when dealing with high-risk cases. Tier 2 and Tier 3 investigations should close within 60 and 90 working days. MSPO should explain any extension in writing before the deadline passes, and extensions beyond 50 percent should need the complainant’s agreement.
4. Keep complaints moving when companies sue
Companies in Malaysia’s certification sector have sued complainants and used litigation to stall complaints for years while operations continued. MSPO should state plainly that a lawsuit against a complainant does not pause or affect a complaint, and tell complainants so in writing when they file. Communities should not have to choose between defending themselves in court and keeping their complaint alive.
5. Keep land rights complaints in scope
The draft excludes complaints about land ownership unless they are directly relevant to MSPO’s standards. For Indigenous communities, a customary land dispute is often the substance of the complaint, and it should stay in-scope.
6. Separate the judges from the promoters
MSPO both promotes its certification and rules on complaints against the companies it certifies. That is a built-in conflict, however well-intentioned the staff. The unit that decides complaints should operate separately from the staff who promote the scheme, and decisions on Tier 1 and Tier 2 complaints should include at least one independent outside expert. Everyone involved in a decision should publish a conflict-of-interest declaration. When a company is ordered to fix a problem, a certification body other than the one that audited the operation in the first place should check that the fix was made.
7. Let communities see the evidence
Under the draft, companies are told the allegations against them and can respond, but complainants have no matching right. Communities should see the investigation report and the company’s response, and be able to reply before a decision.
8. Don’t silence complainants
The draft’s confidentiality rules could stop a community from speaking publicly or raising its case with buyers while a complaint is pending. In our case, that pressure is what stopped the clearing. MSPO should protect personal and genuinely sensitive information, and publish its decisions.
9. Make filing possible for remote communities
The communities facing the worst harm often have the hardest time filing complaints. Many live far from towns without reliable internet, and few have dealt with a formal complaints system before. MSPO should publish plain guidance in Bahasa Malaysia and in the Indigenous languages spoken in major palm oil areas, and appoint a liaison to help communities prepare their complaints.
In Tier 1 cases, MSPO should also accept complaints made orally, with its own staff writing up the record. Waiting for a formal written submission can delay a stop-work notice by weeks, and in a forest being actively cleared, weeks matter.
10. Act without waiting for a complaint
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a body that oversees international certification of timber products, can open a case against a producer based on satellite data, NGO investigations, or media reports. MSPO should have the same power and should feed satellite alerts from Global Forest Watch and JAXA ALOS, platforms Malaysian civil society already uses, into its routine monitoring.
11. Repair the damage
Every upheld Tier 1 and Tier 2 complaint should require a remedy plan agreed with the affected community, and any suspension should stay in place until the company carries it out. Correcting practices going forward does nothing for forests already lost, and affected communities deserve to see meaningful efforts by the companies who have harmed them, to remedy their losses.
12. Publish the numbers
MSPO should publish an annual report showing how many complaints it received, how they were categorized, how long each tier took to process, what the outcomes were, and how many stop-work notices it issued and lifted. Public numbers would let communities, buyers, investors, and civil society groups see whether the system is working.
What comes next
For Long Urun, these changes would have made a real difference. A complaint about active clearing of primary forest would have been classed as Tier 1 the week it arrived, and a stop-work notice could have reached the plantation within days rather than months. The community would not have had to wait six months for forest clearing to stop, or rely on a public campaign and buyer pressure to do the job the complaints system was meant to do. The trees that were lost in that time cannot be brought back, but the next community to file a complaint with MSPO should not face the same wait. MSPO has the chance to build a system that protects forests while a complaint is investigated, and we urge it to take that chance.
MSPO’s public comment period closes October 15, 2026. If your organization works with communities affected by palm oil, we encourage you to submit comments here. You can read our full submission here.