Exploring yield gaps in smallholder oil palm production systems in eastern Sumatra, Indonesia

By M. Euler, M. Hoffmann, Zakky Fathoni, S. Schwarze. 2016

128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) has become the most important oil crop throughout the world. The growing palm oil production was mainly based on the expansion of cultivated area into forest areas, causing serious environmental and social concerns. Increasing yields on existing plantations is a potential pathway to reduce the undesired ecological impacts of oil palm agriculture while enhancing its social benefits. Although oil palm production is still dominated by large private estates, smallholder farmers are increasingly engaging in its cultivation. While there is some evidence that smallholders' palm oil yields show large variations and are often far below plantation standards, empirical studies on their agronomic performance are scarce. Based on crop modeling analysis and farm household survey data from Sumatra, Indonesia, this paper quantifies smallholder yield gaps relative to exploitable yield levels and analyses smallholders' production constraints. Results show that oil palm smallholdings offer a tremendous potential for future yield increases, because they obtain, on average, only around 50% of the cumulative exploitable yield over a 20year plantation life cycle. In particular, we find yield gaps to be largest during the most productive phase of oil palm. Our results indicate that farmers do not adapt their labor and fertilizer inputs to the higher resource demand of the palm. In general, significant determinants of yield gaps are management practices such as fertilizer dosage, length of harvesting intervals and plant mortality. Supported smallholders perform relatively better compared to independent farmers. In summary, our study shows that there is large potential to increase productivity of smallholder oil palm systems in Sumatra. In order to exploit this opportunity, farmers' awareness about the changing management requirements of oil palm over the plantation life cycle needs to be enhanced.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56947921818c17e29b1ecd6bc737405780415a55

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. M. Qaim
3. I. Grass
4. Hermanto Siregar
5. G. Schoneveld

In Ecology

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. I. Grass
3. M. Qaim
4. Hermanto Siregar

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. I. Grass
3. M. Qaim
4. Hermanto Siregar
5. Marije Schaafsma
6. Benis N. Egoh
7. G. Schoneveld

Citations in the corpus

• Towards sustainable palm oil production: The positive and negative impacts on ecosystem services and human wellbeing (2021, background): “Counterarguments include that smallholders, who contribute close to 50% of the palm oil traded worldwide (Mutsaers, 2019), have lower production yields (Euler et al., 2016) and therefore use more land to produce the same volume of palm oil than agro-industrial oil palm plantations.”
• Unpacking Indonesia's independent oil palm smallholders : An actor-disaggregated approach to identifying environmental and social performance challenges (2017, background): “DJP, 2015) or as a dichotomy of company-assisted and independent smallholders (e.g. Brandi et al., 2015; Euler et al., 2016; Lee et al., 2013), development policies often fail to adequately account for the wide range of actors they represent and issues they face.”
• Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom (2020, methodology): “Sustainable inclusion of smallholders in palm oil requires secure land titles, access to credit, and technical support while accounting for the existing heterogeneity (Bennett et al. 2019, Euler et al. 2016b, Jelsma et al. 2017, Schoneveld et al. 2019).”