Social and economic characteristics of ISPO certified oil palm smallholders

Abstract

Oil palm plantations contribute to job creation and community welfare. Nevertheless, this commodity is still experiencing business sustainability problems among smallholders in Indonesia Certification Palm Oil (ISPO). This research studies the existing conditions of ISPO certified smallholders and has not been authenticated based on economic and social characteristics. The research was conducted in Batanghari Regency with the use of primary and secondary data. The result showed that the social aspects of smallholders who have ISPO certified are average in the productive age range. However, there are no differences in education at the primary level. As for the number of family members, smallholders who are certified than uncertified have a more significant number of family members. The farming experience of certified smallholders is lower than that of non-certified, related to the age of the crop owned to motivate and carry out sustainable agricultural practices. While from the economic aspect, based on the primary and other search points, the average number for certified is more concentrated with their palm oil cultivation by 73.86 percent than non-certified with diverse business activities. There are variations in the social and economic characteristics of certified and uncertified oil palm farmers. Good agricultural practices following the norms are necessary to ensure the sustainability of oil palm cultivation. In the future, smallholders are expected to encourage improved farming practices and improve their livelihood assets

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…”