Unpacking Indonesia's independent oil palm smallholders : An actor-disaggregated approach to identifying environmental and social performance challenges

By I. Jelsma, G. Schoneveld, A. Zoomers, A. V. Westen. 2017

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Processes of globalization have generated new opportunities for smallholders to participate in profitable global agro-commodity markets. This participation however is increasingly being shaped by differentiated capabilities to comply with emerging public and private quality and safety standards. The dynamics within Indonesia’s oil palm sector illustrate well the types of competitive challenges smallholders face in their integration into global agro-commodity chains. Because of public concern over the poor social and environmental performance of the sector, many governments, companies and consumers are attempting to clean up the value chain through self-regulatory commitments, certification and public regulation. As a result, many of Indonesia’s oil palm smallholders face compliance barriers due to informality and poor production practices, and threaten to become alienated from formal markets, which could in turn lead to a bifurcation of the oil palm sector. Recognizing that many oil palm smallholders lack compliance capacity, myriad public and private actors have begun designing initiatives to address compliance barriers and enhance smallholder competitiveness. However, failure to properly account for the heterogeneity of the smallholder oil palm sector will undermine the effectiveness and scalability of such initiatives. By developing a typology of independent smallholder oil palm farmers in Rokan Hulu district, Riau province, this article reveals the wide diversity of actors that compose Indonesia’s smallholder oil palm economy, the types of compliance barriers they face and the sustainable development challenges they pose. In doing so, this article illustrates how global agro-commodity chains can drive agrarian differentiation and offer new insights into the complex dynamics of agricultural frontier expansion.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Ecology, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e460d12824cae553a3bbe90b81d43cc048d3a91e

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
5. B. Okarda
6. P. Pacheco
7. H. Komarudin

In Strategy and Management

1. Kibrom T. Sibhatu
2. P. Yatim
3. B. Okarda
4. P. Pacheco
5. M. Qaim
6. H. Komarudin

Citations in the corpus

• Prioritization of sustainability indicators for promoting the circular economy: The case of developing countries (2019, background): “still relatively low, especially small stakeholders, which accounted for 38% [138] and 40% [139] of the ownership of oil palm cultivation in Indonesia and Malaysia respectively.”
• Certification, good agricultural practice and smallholder heterogeneity: Differentiated pathways for resolving compliance gaps in the Indonesian oil palm sector (2019, background): “Because ISPO in practice is largely focused on formalizing and registering smallholdings (Jelsma et al., 2017), should ISPO succeed in achieving compliance at scale, oil palm smallholders will become increasingly visible for (future) regulatory purpose.”
• Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom (2020, background): “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).”