Discouraging Rainforest Transformation: An Ex‐ante Policy Impact Analysis

Abstract

Despite extensive efforts made by national and international certification agencies, Indonesian smallholder farmers’ participation in palm oil certification schemes adoption remains low. A fundamental obstacle is the smallholder practice of rainforest transformation into oil palm plantation which is forbidden by the agencies. In this context, we investigate three policies that could lead to a reduction in rainforest deforestation by smallholders: price premium on certified palm oil; the provision of environmental information; contributor recognition. In order to evaluate the influence of the policies ex‐ante, we conduct a social dilemma experiment involving rubber and oil palm smallholders in Jambi Province, Sumatra, Indonesia. The findings indicate that the price premium and provision of context‐specific environmental information could reduce rainforest transformation. However, a statistically significant effect of contributor recognition was not found.

The Dynamics of The Role Oil Palm Smallholders in Implementing ISPO Certification: Looking Back to Moving Forward

“…Of the 100 articles indexed by Scopus, they can be grouped into 3 clusters which can be identified by color node each keyword. Cluster 1 is symbolized in red and includes terms related to studies with keywords Farmer [1][2][3][4][5][6], Standard [7][8][9][10], Impact [11][12][13] , Access [14], ISPO [15][16][17][18][19] it can be interpreted that the studies on the cluster referred to one and the other study keywords often intersect and tend to have links, for example research with studies on financial and benefits certification on one the articles in the study cover a lot of discussion related to the keywords impact, farmer and standards Cluster 2, which is symbolized in yellow, consists of studies that tend to lead to one keyword, namely RSPO certification [20][21][22][23][24][25][26], Cluster 3, which is symbolized in blue, consists of Oil Palm studies [27,28], Deforestation, Plantation, Biodiversity and Cluster 4 which is symbolized in green consists of MSPO certification studies, Industry, Independent Smallholder, Implementation. From the visualization of the network visualization, there is an interesting thing, namely that there is a high link to the study with the keywords of sustainable oil palm plantation certification namely ISPO, RSPO, and MSPO during the period from 2006 to 2023…”

Oil palm cultivation, household welfare, and exposure to economic risk in the Indonesian small farm sector

“…This major land-use change has various implications for sustainable development (Qaim et al, 2020). Apart from environmental problems, social issues and land conflicts between palm oil companies and local communities have been reported (Abood et al, 2015;Clough et al, 2016;Drescher et al, 2016;Santika et al, 2019;Sarwosri et al, 2020).…”