Indonesia mengekspor $19.7 miliar minyak kelapa sawit mentah pada tahun 2011. Sumber Foto: Beth Gingold/WRI
Indonesia exported $19.7 billion of crude palm oil in 2011. Photo Credit: Beth Gingold/WRI

This post originally appeared in the Jakarta Post.

Palm oil is on a lot of people’s minds. In Indonesia, the industry is booming, with $19.7 billion of crude palm oil exports in 2011. But expanding oil palm plantations have taken their toll on remaining forests and other natural habitats in tropical regions and led to conflict over land with local people.

The world’s top scientists are also raising concerns. According to a recent study in Nature Climate Change, from 1990 to 2010, 90 percent of lands converted to oil palm plantations in Kalimantan were forested.

There need not, however, be a trade-off between palm oil, forests, and communities. It is possible to grow more crops--including oil palm--while keeping forests and cutting rural poverty.

Support for Sustainable Palm Oil Production

In order to do so, companies and investors must lead by supporting sustainable production on land that has already been cleared, while also ensuring that local people benefit and consent to new plantations. Global markets and the governments of major producer countries should give stronger support to such efforts.

It was therefore encouraging to see that last week in Singapore, at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) 10th annual meeting, the UK government and 14 major industry associations pledged to buy only certified sustainable palm oil by 2015. Big buyers like the British Retail Consortium, Food and Drink Federation, and Seed Crushers and Oil Processors Association have all signed on.

And the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has indicated that emissions associated with deforestation could keep Indonesian palm oil from meeting U.S. renewable biofuel standards.

2 New Mapping Applications

WRI launched two new online mapping applications designed to help the palm oil industry grow while avoiding deforestation. These free tools enable palm oil producers, buyers, investors, and government agencies to easily identify and evaluate locations in Indonesia where they can develop plantations on already-degraded land rather than on currently forested areas.

The RSPO, which manages a voluntary market standard against which production can be certified, requires new plantations to obtain free, prior, and informed consent of any affected local communities and avoid loss of biodiversity-rich forests. It also excludes plantations that have resulted in recent forest clearing. Major international buyers and traders--such as Walmart, Unilever and Nestlé--as well as mainstream environmental groups like the World Wildlife Fund, endorse the approach.

Using Already-Degraded Lands

This market-driven strategy helps to bolster efforts by the Indonesian government.

Further government involvement is essential in making the shift to responsible investment more attractive and less burdened by excessive red tape and slow approvals processes. For example, when approving “land swaps” that allow companies to exchange prospective plantation sites within forests for already-cleared or degraded land nearby.

New research by the global environment and development think tank, the World Resources Institute (WRI), highlights the opportunity that is being missed to expand production onto already-deforested land in order to spare forests.

WRI has published a method enabling rapid identification of already-deforested land that could be suitable for sustainable oil palm cultivation.

The method and a suite of online applications launched at the RSPO meeting last week enable planners, investors, and communities to quickly find land where oil palm can be grown without contributing to forest clearing and burning.

Use of these applications must be combined with field visits and community consultations to ensure local community land and resource rights are respected.

WRI’s tools suggest that more than 14 million hectares of land in Kalimantan may be suitable for sustainable palm oil production. Not all of these hectares should necessarily become plantations; local people may not want particular tracts to go into oil palm.But the scale of potential is significant. For comparison, experts have predicted a total of 3 to 7 million hectares of oil palm cultivation expansion in all of Indonesia by 2020.

These numbers suggest that palm oil production targets could be met without clearing another hectare of forest or draining more peatland.

The Future of Oil Palm Development

Oil palm is a remarkable crop. It creates much-needed employment and opportunities for smallholder farmers in some of the poorest and most remote rural regions. Financial returns for larger investors have also been outstanding and seem likely to remain buoyant as demand grows.

But in order for Indonesian palm oil to maintain global market access, community consent and land-use planning to reduce forest clearing will need to become the norm. The resulting expansion in sustainable palm oil production would be a huge boost to the Indonesian economy and would set an example for the rest of the world of how to grow a nation’s economy while also conserving its forest and reducing poverty.