In a recent review publication (Sheil et al, 2009), CIFOR raised the key question: Is oil palm a valuable route to sustainable development or a costly road to environmental ruin?

This question illustrates how local productions are tightly connected to more global socio-economic and environmental issues in the context of global changes. Global changes are here defined as a whole constraint system resulting from the recent and assumed future evolution of the global production conditions and factors. Among these factors are the world population growth and consumptions, the depletion of natural resources and the increasing energy prices, the growing public awareness and claims on product quality and environment conservation. The components of these changes are numerous and the complexity of the resulting constraint system is as much linked to the variety of these components as to the fact that they are inter-connected.

The global oil palm demand is driven by countries such as China, India and Pakistan, which combine demographic growth with a notable improvement of living standards. Thus it is anticipated that production of palm oil will have to double before 2050 (Corley, 2009). Moreover, oil palm production systems will have to cope with stagnating productivity, increasing production costs, the scarcity of environmentally suitable new land and the need to fulfill growing expectations from the importing countries regarding environmental performances and product quality (Yew, 2009).

In essence, sustainable production systems should be able to adapt to global changes, since they are defined to ensure that the production potential for future generations is not compromised by current practices. However, in the facts code of practices toward sustainability mostly provide guidelines of best practices according to current knowledge to tend toward a sustainable production. There cannot be any integrative methodology to assess the effectiveness of sustainability and most impact assessment methods focus on specific impact categories and rather assess potential impacts. Nevertheless guidelines, such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil Principles & Criteria (RSPO P&Cs of 2007) provide a global and harmonized framework reflecting the global issues and subsequent constraints. At the local scale, complementary knowledge and a more accurate impact assessment are necessary in order to analyze how the cropping systems are influenced by the global changes and to better ensure that recommended practices can lead to sustainable productions. Therefore the present SPOP research project aims at providing knowledge-based solutions to contribute to this analysis and ensure the sustainability framework of palm oil sector, while reinforcing existing initiatives for sustainable palm oil production, such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Within this frame, the focus of the project is on the oil palm plantations, i.e. the primary system productions upstream the commodity chain, and on the modeling of the impacts of such systems at the territorial scale, meaning a landscape scale taking into account the social ecological dimension of the system; it would be the province scale in Indonesia, or district in Cameroon for instance.   

A huge increase in the demand for oils and fats

Palm oil which is extracted from the fruits of a palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq) is an agricultural commodity of increasing importance in the oils and fat sector and in the global agro industry. With an annual production exceeding 50 million tons in 2010, it is the first source of vegetable oil in the world, now far ahead of soybean.

The expansion of oil palm cultivated areas has been outstanding during the past decades and it reaches nowadays 15 million ha in the inter-tropical region. In the two countries which now concentrate 80% of the global production (Indonesia and Malaysia) this growth has been amazingly rapid: indeed, between 1960 and 2009, agricultural land dedicated to oil palm plantations grew from 43,000 ha to > 4 million ha in Malaysia and from 70,000 ha to > 5,3 millions ha in Indonesia (Omont, 2010). In terms of annual growth rate, the recorded numbers were 100,000 ha per year during the 80s and these numbers doubled during the following decade (200,000 ha/yr in the 90s) then reached 500,000 ha/yr during the 2000 decade (Teoh, 2010). A sizeable increase in planted areas and oil production is also recorded in other tropical countries from South-East Asia (Thailand, The Philippines), Oceania (Papua-New-Guinea), Latin America (Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador) and Africa (Nigeria, Côte-d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Ghana, Benin).

This spectacular increase in production is driven by a very high demand in vegetable oil especially for food uses. Due to global population growth, the consumption of fat per capita has more than doubled between 1975 and 2009, growing from 11 to 24.7 kg/yr (Oil World Annual online, 2010). This trend will follow the predicted increase in both population rates and living standards in the coming decades. 

Palm oil production is also driven by non-food uses, including oleo chemicals (cosmetics and soaps) which accounts for roughly 19% of total production, and more recently for biofuel uses. Indeed, recent predictions about the putative use of palm oil for the production of biofuels have had an incentive effect on the extension of cultivated areas and they influence the global palm oil trade. Such forecasts are driving speculative behaviors and massive purchases of land in zones previously covered with tropical forests, especially in Africa, thus opening new frontiers for the expansion of oil palm cultivation.

Oil palm expansion faces global changes and multiple constraints

The tremendous growth of oil palm plantations was concomitant with severe damage to the environment and especially great lost of natural forests, which was denounced by various NGOs early in the 90s. The uncontrolled expansion of large scale oil palm plantations is still driving deforestation especially in SE Asia, inducing important losses in biodiversity and the destruction of fragile biotopes and endangering emblematic species like the orangutans. In some places, the expansion of plantations on new territories has negative effects on global climate change, because the forest cover is burned or plantations are established on peat soils which are important carbon sinks (Reinhard et al., 2007; Wicke et al., 2008; Germer & Sauerborn, 2008; Sheil et al., 2009).

There are also controversies about the social consequences of oil palm expansion: cases of force of forced eviction of local communities have been reported and several issues related to the labour environment of estates employees (salaries, health and safety), land use (food crops vs cash crop) and food security in rural families.

However, oil palm cultivation is undoubtedly driving economic growth and rural development in many poor tropical countries as it provides a steady and secure income for millions of farmers and plantation employees. Today, one hectare of oil palm can provide an average net annual income of ca 2,000 USD per year in Indonesia (Jacquemard, pers. com.).

The biology of the oil palm is quite exceptional and it provides outstanding agronomical characteristics to the plant compared to other sources of vegetable oil. Under favorable agro-ecological conditions, oil palms can produce an average 6 tonnes of oil per ha, a yield which is 7 to 10 times higher than its main competitors (soybean or rapeseed). The exploitation of oil palm does not require intensive pesticide spraying, and environmental concerns are mainly focusing on fertilizers management and the recycling of effluents from oil extraction mills.

The net environmental and social impacts of oil palm depend on where and how it is developed. Problems arise when strong economic incentives for expansion are superimposed on a governance framework that has weak capacity for guiding the development of new oil palm plantations onto areas where the environmental and social impacts are minimized (WBG, 2011).

RSPO delivers only a part of the answer

In the aim of providing solutions to these controversial issues, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was created in 2004 as a business-to-business initiative bringing together NGOs and private stakeholders under a voluntary certification scheme. The idea underlying this international initiative was to associate producers, transformers, traders, food industry members, distributors and social and environmental NGOs in the generation of a consensus about the conditions of sustainable production of palm oil. The first expected output was the definition of accepted norms for agricultural, environmental and social good practices and consequently the generation of a shared certification process. It was achieved by the publication in 2007 of RSPO Principles and Criteria which are now going through the process of “national interpretation” to be adapted to the national legal framework in each producing country and be reinforced in the near future.

The forces and weaknesses of the RSPO initiative are related to its business-to-business origin and intrinsic nature. Indeed, the Roundtable has been very efficient in installing and formalizing a difficult multi-stakeholders dialogue and its success in terms of registered members (>500 to date) speaks for itself. Today, 40% of the production actors of the palm oil commodity chain are RSPO members. Maintaining the structure itself and keeping it attractive is a very hard job which consumes most of human and financial resources devoted to RSPO (Djama & Daviron, 2010). Other observers came to the same conclusion and they listed several issues which need to be addressed in order to reinforce the beneficial impacts of RSPO on the sector (Sheil et al., 2009; Laurance et al., 2010). Major issues are: i) a lack of strong stand on peat lands, deforestation and greenhouse gas issues, ii) a, insufficient control of criteria compliance and iii) an insufficient balanced representation of stakeholders and share of benefits. It is thus clear that both basic and operational knowledge is now needed in order to properly address most of these issues. We, as researchers, still have to refine the scientific basis of P&Cs on the one hand and to monitor and anticipate the social, environmental and agricultural impact of their strict application on the other hand.

The rationale of the present SPOP project relies on the need to build up integrative research strategies which are not only able to overcome technological bottlenecks (this is undertaken for more than 50 years by various research institutions) but also to integrate predicted advances in an environmental and social context. One must bear in mind that there is no international centre devoted to oil palm research, as it is the case for many other crops. Research activities have always been scattered among national/international research agencies and in private/public institutions, in a context of fierce competition. Undoubtedly RSPO has opened a new window for international co-operation in research, based on the urgent need for all stakeholders to tackle global challenges with a shared and commonly accepted strategy.

References

Corley, RHV., (2009). Where do all the fertilizers go? The Planter, 85 (6): 133-147

Djama, M., Daviron B. (2010) Managerial rationality and power reconfiguration in the multi-stakeholder initiatives for agricultural commodities: the case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), paper presented at the 5th Organization Studies Workshop “Social Movements, civil societies and corporations”. 26-28 May 2010 Margaux (France).

Germer, J., & Sauerborn., J.  2008. Estimation of the impact of oil palm plantation establishment on greenhouse gas balance. Environment, Development and Sustainability 10 (6) 697-716.

Laurance, W. F., Koh L.P., Butler R., Sodhi N.S., Bradshaw C.J.A., Neidel J.D. Consunji H., Mateo Vega J. (2010) Improving the Performance of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil for Nature Conservation, Conservation Biology, Volume 24 N° 2, 377-381

Omont H., 2010. Contributions de la production d'huile de palme au développement durable. Problématique générale, controverses. Ol. Corps Gras Li. 17 (6), 362-367.

Reinhard, G., Rettenmaier, N., Gärtner, S., Pastowski, A. (2007) Rain forest for Biodiesel? Ecological effects of using palm oil as a source of energy. WWF Germany, 50p.

Sheil, D.; Casson, A.; Meijaard, E.; van Noordwjik, M.; Gaskell, J.; Sunderland-Groves, J.; Wertz, K.; Kanninen, M (2009) The impacts and opportunities of oil palm in Southeast Asia. What do we know and what do we need to know? Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) Bogor, Indonesia CIFOR Occasional Paper. 67p

Teoh, C. H. (2010) Key Sustainability Issues in the Palm Oil Sector: A Discussion Paper for Multi-Stakeholders Consultations, Report commissioned by the World Bank Group, The World Bank and the International Finance Corporation, Washington, DC

WBG-World Bank Group (2011) The World Bank Group Framework and IFC Strategy for Engagement in the Palm Oil Sector International Finance Corporation, Washington DC.

Wicke, B., Dornburg, V., Junginger, M., Faaij, A. (2008) Different palm oil production systems for energy purposes and their greenhouse gas implications. Biomass and Bioenergy, 32(12), p.1322-1337.

Yew A.T. (2009) The Life Cycle Approach for Sustainable development of the Oil Palm Industry. MPOB Journal of Palm Oil Developments 51, Malaysia, 5p.