Community Cooperative as Self-Empowerment: Smallholders Palm Oil Farmers in Kotawaringin Barat, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia

Abstract

This article discusses Tani Subur cooperative, functions as community's selfempowerment in palm oil business. While palm oil business is identical with giant and sometime multinational corporation, in Kotawaringin Barat smallholder farmers succeed to grow the business. They build and operate cooperative to maintain the farmers' assets, help manage cash-flow of the farmers, as well as to build bargaining position to the company and the local government. Driven by the difficulties in individually run artisanal palm oil business, farmers who are mostly transmigrants from Java or Javanese transcendent, formed cooperative to unite voice before the company and the governments to maintain palm oil fruit's price. Further, the cooperative has been an effective place to support farmers gaining RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) certificate that asserted their farming products complied with international standard. Based on field research in 2019, this research identifies palm oil cooperative as a crucial space for farmers' self-empowerment. Indeed, there are still challenges in sustaining the cooperative's function as a bargaining instrument for the farmers. However, so far, palm oil cooperative has been an important tool to support palm oil smallholders to sustain their businesses.