When agricultural commodities in developing countries experience an economic boom, they offer potential pathways out of poverty while creating environmental and social problems. While recent research provides insights into the governance of international supply chains, it provides less analysis of the local production networks creating critical problems. Indonesia is now the world's largest exporter of crude palm oil. This paper analyses processes of oil palm development in three oil palm districts. It considers how policy models, regime interests, and agribusiness strategies shape local production networks, generate local outcomes, and affect the possibilities of tackling issues associated with this boom.

The large environmental impacts associated with agro‐industrial development in Indonesia are both striking and increasingly important, especially with increased demand for biofuels and the rapid extension of oil palm plantations. Recently, Indonesia has also seen a series of transformations in the regulatory regime for pollution control with decentralization and a shift towards new environmental policy instruments. This article considers the effectiveness of these new approaches, including the widely influential International Organization for Standardizations (ISO) 14001 series for environmental management systems and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification system. Despite the turn towards these new governance approaches, the underlying problems that have undermined bureaucratic regulation in the past continue to haunt attempts to make the sector more sustainable. Efforts to mitigate the increasingly large‐scale pollution associated with agro‐industrial development will need to be better crafted and combined to suit the characteristics of the industry concerned and to address the wider socio‐economic and political realities within which problems are embedded and where any policy tool must be applied.

Given the multiple problems presented by food policy, food security presents a complex dilemma for policy-makers. This paper examines the contradictions presented by competing food security, food selfsufficiency and food sovereignty framings, the challenge of policymaking across multiple levels amidst competing agendas of agricultural commodity production and production for selfprovisioning populations, and the need to balance economic development with sustainable food production. From an analysis of rice, palm oil and sugar cases in Indonesia, we conclude that the conflicted nature of food policy needs to be understood in terms of the way specific material and ideational, actor-specific and structural factors working across scale shape outcomes in a highly uneven fashion. We find that this produces a policy field highly resistant to single analytical approaches, opening up the wide range of internally conflicting, related policy questions encompassed by food security-related policy.

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Abstract. 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.