Oil Palm Expansion In Indonesia Research Articles

Land-use transformation and conflict: The effects of oil palm expansion in Indonesia

Land-use transformation and conflict: The effects of oil palm expansion in Indonesia

Labor Displacement in Agriculture: Evidence from Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia

Labor Displacement in Agriculture: Evidence from Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia

Analyzing Drivers and Mitigation of Deforestation for Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia, 2000-2020

Analyzing Drivers and Mitigation of Deforestation for Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia, 2000-2020

Biophysical and socioeconomic drivers of oil palm expansion in Indonesia

Indonesia has been the largest supplier of palm oil since 2007, and now supplies around 56% of the global market. While the existing literature has paid serious attention to the diverse impacts of oil palm plantation on socioeconomic factors and the environment, less is known about the joint role of biophysical and socioeconomic factors in shaping the temporal and spatial dynamics of oil palm expansion. This research investigates how the benefits and costs of converting other land use/ land cover (LULC) types to oil palm plantation affects these expansion patterns. We employ a spatial panel modeling approach to assess the contributions of biophysical and socioeconomic driving factors. Our modeling focuses on Sumatra and Kalimantan, two islands which have accounted for more than 90% of oil palm expansion in Indonesia since 1990, with Sumatra holding the majority of the country’s plantations, and Kalimantan having the highest growth rate since 2000. The results show that the expansion in Kalimantan, which has been strongly stimulated by the export value of palm oil products, has occurred in areas with better biophysical suitability and infrastructure accessibility, following the ‘pecking order’ sequence, whereby more productive areas are already occupied by existing agriculture and plantations, and avoiding areas with high environmental values or socioeconomic costs. As demand for palm oil continues to grow, and land resources become more limited, the expansion in Kalimantan will tend towards the dynamics observed in Sumatra, with plantation expanding into remote and fertile areas with high conversion costs or legal barriers. Bare ground seems to have served as a clearing-up tactic to meet the procedural requirements of oil palm plantation for sustainable development. This research facilitates the improved projection of potential areas liable to future expansion, and the development of strategies to manage the leading drivers of LULC in Indonesia.

Estimating the opportunity costs of avoiding oil palm-based deforestation in Indonesia: Implications for REDD+

Reducing emissions due to deforestation is considered a low-cost option for mitigating climate change. However, the recent literature suggests higher opportunity costs because of specific deforestation drivers, which render reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) for mitigating climate change an uncertain, less attractive, and controversial option. Indonesia is one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters. Since 1989, 53.80% of its oil palm expansion has come from forestlands, which has generated a significant amount of carbon emissions. This study uses official data and results from the relevant literature to estimate the costs of oil palm-based deforestation under various scenario assumptions, including different output prices, yields, time horizons, and discount rates. We also calculate the additional cost to preserve a 1-ha forest. We demonstrate that the average opportunity cost from avoiding oil palm-based deforestation is 24.42 USD/tCO2eq in Indonesia, approximately 1.3 times the 2011 EUA carbon price. Additional sums of around 5,466.90–11,042.96 USD/ha should be provided to landowners for the deforestation avoidance caused by oil palm expansion. Special attention should be given to the extensive oil palm expansion in Indonesia and the resulting high opportunity costs for achieving the REDD+ ​target.

PROCESSES OF LAND APPROPRIATION FOR LARGE-SCALE OIL PALM DEVELOPMENT IN WEST KALIMANTAN, INDONESIA/ Processos de aquisição de terra para a produção de óleo de palma em Kapuas Hulu, Indonésia/ Proses pembebasan lahan untuk perkebunan kelapa sawit di Kapuas Hulu, Kalimantan Barat

This study examines the processes of negotiation through which agribusiness investors are gaining access to large areas of land for oil palm plantations within the Kapuas Hulu district of West Kalimantan in Indonesia. Kapuas Hulu is at the forefront of current oil palm expansion in Indonesia, making this a revealing case-study of current practices at Indonesia’s oil palm frontier. In their book, Powers of Exclusion, Hall, Hirsh and Li. (2011) describe the complex interplay of processes that are assembled to effectively exclude some actors from accessing land while privileging others. In Indonesia, these powers are applied to explain how investors access plantation land for a fraction of its market value. This study presents the complexities of institutional interplays among different actors that negotiate land dispossession across three village environments, each at different stages of engagement with the palm oil industry. In Kapuas Hulu, agribusiness corporations often gain land access with the support of customary elites, causing tensions within many Dayak Iban communities. Yet, informal modes of organisation, centred on the traditional longhouse social structures, also collide with the powers of exclusion, to produce sites of resistance. Como citar este artigo:HASUDUNGAN, Albert; NEILSON, Jeff. Processes of land appropriation for large-scale oil palm development in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Revista NERA, v. 23, n. 51, p. 366-389, jan.-abr., 2020

Positive and Negative Impacts of Oil Palm Expansion in Indonesia and the Prospect to Achieve Sustainable Palm Oil

The aim of the study is to deepen understanding the role of palm oil on Indonesian economy, poverty elevation and to investigate the positive and negative impacts of oil palm expansion, due to the burden of GHG emissions; and prospect to be more sustainable palm oil industry. The statistics show that average rural poverty tends to be lower and Gross Regional Product tends to be higher in provinces which have greater levels of oil palm cultivation. Indonesian oil palm will grow from 10.6 in 2013 to 13.7 million ha by 2020. This will release 135.59 million tons of CO2 if nothing is done to mitigate BAU emissions. Unless there are sustained efforts to redirect development and expansion of oil palm, plantation growth will continue to encroach on intact forest and peat land.. In fact Indonesia has large areas of degraded land, an estimated total 19,144,000 ha is available for planting oil palm and other crops. A large-scale expansion program driven by estate companies needs to be accompanied by effective smallholder development program in order to achieve the best outcome for local farmers and avoid the conflicts.

Differential livelihood impacts of oil palm expansion in Indonesia

In this article, the impacts of oil palm adoption on livelihoods of smallholder farm households are analyzed. The study builds on survey data from Sumatra, Indonesia. Treatment-effects and endogenous switching regression models suggest that smallholder households benefit from oil palm adoption on average. Part of the benefit stems from the fact that oil palm requires less labor than rubber, the main alternative crop. This allows oil palm adopters to allocate more labor to off-farm activities and/or to expand their farmland. For households with a low land-to-labor ratio, rubber is typically a more lucrative crop than oil palm. Depending on various social and institutional factors, households’ access to land, labor, and capital varies, contributing to impact heterogeneity. Welfare gains associated with oil palm are more pronounced among households that have formal land titles and access to additional land to expand their farm size during the process of adoption.

Intergenerational displacement in Indonesia’s oil palm plantation zone

This contribution examines the intergenerational effects of oil palm expansion in Indonesia at two scales. First, I use a broad brush and selected examples from different parts of Indonesia to highlight the long-term, intergenerational dynamics of displacement from the land, and the linked problem of displacement from opportunities to find decent work. In the second part I draw on primary data from my research in a plantation zone in West Kalimantan to examine intergenerational dynamics in households and communities tucked around the borders of plantations, where access to residual pockets of land is the key to secure to secure and prosperous futures.

Development narratives, notions of forest crisis, and boom of oil palm plantations in Indonesia

Indonesia experienced massive deforestation in the last decades where rapid oil palm expansion has been considered as one of the main drivers. This article shows that the process of deforestation and the rapid oil palm expansion cannot be viewed in isolation from broader development contexts. Various actors at local, national, and global levels have used development narratives and poverty alleviation through various policies and institutional setting to create spaces and opportunities for oil palm development. These actors also deliberately created the notion of forest crisis by omitting the values of forest environmental services to justify forest conversion into oil palm plantations. These multiple factors shaped the speed and the direction of oil palm expansion in Indonesia. This rapid oil palm expansion in Indonesia has resulted in massive LUCC and serious environmental problems. Given these complexities, a single policy will not be sufficient when it comes to managing the consequences of rapid oil palm expansion in Indonesia.

Isoprene emissions over Asia 1979–2012: impact of climate and land-use changes

Abstract. Due to the scarcity of observational constraints and the rapidly changing environment in East and Southeast Asia, isoprene emissions predicted by models are expected to bear substantial uncertainties. The aim of this study is to improve upon the existing bottom-up estimates, and to investigate the temporal evolution of the fluxes in Asia over 1979–2012. To this purpose, we calculate the hourly emissions at 0.5°×0.5° resolution using the MEGAN–MOHYCAN model driven by ECMWF ERA-Interim climatology. In order to remedy for known biases identified in previous studies, and to improve the simulation of interannual variability and trends in emissions, this study incorporates (i) changes in land use, including the rapid expansion of oil palms, (ii) meteorological variability according to ERA-Interim, (iii) long-term changes in solar radiation (dimming/brightening) constrained by surface network radiation measurements, and (iv) recent experimental evidence that South Asian tropical forests are much weaker isoprene emitters than previously assumed, and on the other hand, that oil palms have a strong isoprene emission capacity. These effects lead to a significant lowering (factor of 2) in the total isoprene fluxes over the studied domain, and to emission reductions reaching a factor of 3.5 in Southeast Asia. The bottom-up annual isoprene emissions for 2005 are estimated at 7.0, 4.8, 8.3, and 2.9 Tg in China, India, Indonesia and Malaysia, respectively. The isoprene flux anomaly over the whole domain and studied period is found to be strongly correlated with the Oceanic Niño Index (r = 0.73), with positive (negative) anomalies related to El Niño (La Niña) years. Changes in temperature and solar radiation are the major drivers of the interannual variability and trends in the emissions, except over semi-arid areas such as northwestern China, Pakistan and Kazakhstan, where soil moisture is by far the main cause of interannual emission changes. In our base simulation, annual positive flux trends of 0.2% and 0.52% throughout the entire period are found in Asia and China, respectively, related to a positive trend in temperature and solar radiation. The impact of oil palm expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia is to enhance the trends over that region, e.g., from 1.17% to 1.5% in 1979–2005 in Malaysia. A negative emission trend is derived in India (−0.4%), owing to the negative trend in solar radiation data associated with the strong dimming effect likely due to increasing aerosol loadings. The bottom-up emissions are compared to field campaign measurements in Borneo and South China and further evaluated against top-down isoprene emission estimates constrained by GOME-2/MetOp-A formaldehyde columns through 2007–2012. The satellite-based estimates appear to support our assumptions, and confirm the lower emission rate in tropical forests of Indonesia and Malaysia. Additional flux measurements are clearly needed to characterize the spatial variability of emission factors better. Finally, a decreasing trend in the inferred top-down Chinese emissions since 2007 is in line with recorded cooling in China after that year, thus suggesting that the satellite HCHO columns are able to capture climate-induced changes in emissions.

The oil palm industry bows to NGO campaigns

AbstractPalm oil has become the key supplier to the global edible oils market. Continued oil palm development should be a good thing as it is the most effective supplier in terms of low land usage, and it brings much needed development to poor tropical developing regions. It provides livelihoods for an estimated 4.5 million people. As a monocrop that has supplanted forest and peat lands in areas with unmatched biodiversity and inhabited by poor indigenous tribes, it has been heavily criticized for its negative environmental and social impacts. Escalating NGO campaigns, particularly from Europe, over the last seven years have seriously reined in the speed and prospects for oil palm expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia. Large corporate growers have acceded to NGO pressures, as these have resulted in high‐key boycotts by the likes of Unilever and Nestle. Many large companies have signed on as members of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature‐initiated, Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil. Multi‐national consumer brands are being persuaded to change their buying policies, with potential global implications. Strategies to ignore or deny problems in oil palm sustainability have not worked well: a handful of NGOs have played David to the palm oil Goliaths of Indonesia and Malaysia. Since mid‐2010, Indonesia's President is trying to make less‐than‐popular policy changes, and the outcomes bear watching.

Geography and Indonesian oil-palm expansion

Koh and Ghazoul (1) model oil-palm expansion in Indonesia under multiple scenarios in which the probability of land cover conversion to oil palm is weighted by land cover qualities such as agricultural productivity and carbon content. Their goal was not a predictive model but rather a “broad model” that would make explicit to decision makers the tradeoffs between oil palm, forests cover, biodiversity, and food production. This model has considerable merit but would be improved if geographic factors such as proximity, scale, and location were considered.

The livelihood impacts of oil palm: smallholders in Indonesia

The biodiversity and climate consequences of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) expansion across South East Asia have received considerable attention. The human side of the issue, highlighted with reports of negative livelihood outcomes and rights abuses by oil palm companies, has also led to controversy. Oil palm related conflicts have been widely documented in Indonesia yet uptake by farmers has also been extensive. An assessment of the livelihood impacts of oil palm development, including sources of conflict, is needed to shed light on the apparent contradiction between these reports and the evident enthusiasm of farmers to join the oil palm craze thereby informing future expansion. We assessed the impact of oil palm development on the economic wellbeing of rural farmers in Indonesia. We found that many smallholders have benefited substantially from the higher returns to land and labour afforded by oil palm but district authorities and smallholder cooperatives play key roles in the realisation of benefits. Conflicts between communities and companies have resulted almost entirely from lack of transparency, the absence of free, prior, and informed consent and unequal benefit sharing, and have been exacerbated by the absence of clear land rights. We make specific recommendations to improve the present situation and foster the establishment of smallholder friendly production regimes. Oil palm expansion in Indonesia is set to continue. If environmental standards can be raised and policy interventions targeted at the broader social impacts of land development this expansion may be achieved to the significant benefit of large numbers of rural smallholders.