Commentary: Oil Palm Boom and Farm Household Diets in the Tropics

Editorial: Impacts of Tropical Landscape Change on Human Diet and Local Food Systems

“…He finds that oil palm adopters consumed more diverse foods at a household level than non-adopters and that they were less likely to be undernourished or to be micronutrient inadequate. This shows the potential positive effects of some land use changes; however, as Sibhatu himself (Sibhatu, 2020) and others have noted (Nurhasan et al, 2020), these findings may be very specific to the sample here in which both adopters and non-adopters of oil palm primarily cultivated plantation cash crops as opposed to food crops (Purwestri et al, 2019).…”

Response: Commentary: Oil Palm Boom and Farm Household Diets in the Tropics

“…I also suggest that future studies should test and validate my findings with data from other regions and using different estimation techniques (p. 12). Thus, Nurhasan et al (2020) appear to misrepresent the overall goals of my paper based on a narrow selection of quoted statements and disregarding crucial ones. Selective quoting a few remarks and ignoring other crucial ones within a given article is problematic and misleading for readers.…”

“…Selective quoting a few remarks and ignoring other crucial ones within a given article is problematic and misleading for readers. Nurhasan et al (2020) also claim that my study "overlooks the great diversity of non-oil palm adopters, including smallholders who were not previously engaged in any commercial plantation farming and households with customary (rather than formal) land rights, who practice diverse traditional food crop production systems across Indonesia." However, as illustrated in Table 2 and explained in the Methodology section (p. 6) of my paper, on average more than 57% of the land owned by the sample respondents is actually under customary land rights.…”

“…I thank Nurhasan et al (2020) for their interest and comments on my recent paper, "Oil Palm Boom and Farm Household Diets in the Tropics (Sibhatu, 2019)." However, Nurhasan et al (2020) selectively highlight some statements and disregard other crucial ones, misrepresent some of what I do, and misunderstand the approaches I use to evaluate technology adoption that is commonly used in the agricultural economics literature and the dietary measurements typically used in the context of developing countries. I address their comments below.…”

“…And I fully agree that providing improved rural infrastructure and markets, extension services, off-farm work, and a range of alternative technologies are crucial to enhance rural households' welfare, not only in Indonesia but also worldwide. Nurhasan et al (2020) also argue that my study should have considered "the risk of overnutrition" simply based on the quantities of calories consumed at the household level. I agree that obesity and non-communicable diseases associated with overnutrition are now global pandemics, while undernutrition and related infectious disease are still widespread problems (Demmler et al, 2017;Swinburn et al, 2019).…”