Patrice Levang

Why do farmers prefer oil palm? Lessons learnt from Bungo district, Indonesia

Indonesia has been the world’s largest producer and exporter of palm oil since 2008. This paper discussed the livelihood impacts of oil palm development in Indonesia, based on lessons learnt from Bungo district, in the province of Jambi. The various community-company partnerships that structure the sector are reviewed and the difficulties raised by the joint ventures schemes are discussed. The merits and drawbacks of oil palm as a smallholder crop are then analysed, based on household socio-economic surveys conducted in 2007–2010. The main causes of conflicts between oil palm companies and communities are unclear land tenure, and a recurrent lack of leadership in smallholders’ cooperatives. Under fair partnerships between smallholders and companies, oil palm could become a smallholder friendly crop. The land-use profitability analysis demonstrates the high returns that can be generated by oil palm independent smallholdings, making it highly competitive with rubber, and much more profitable than rice production.

Designer landscapes for sustainable biofuels

Oil palm is one of the most extensively cultivated biodiesel feedstocks worldwide, and expansion of its cultivation poses a significant threat to ecosystems, biodiversity and potentially the global climate. We evaluate the prospects of land sparing and wildlife-friendly farming, two contrasting approaches for reducing the impacts of oil palm agriculture. We draw on concepts from both approaches to suggest more sustainable production systems and argue that landscapes under threat from oil palm expansion need to be designed in recognition of biodiversity, economic and livelihood needs. Specifically, we advocate agroforestry zones between high conservation value areas and intensive oil palm plantations to create a more heterogeneous landscape benefiting both biodiversity and rural communities. Similar principles could apply to biofuel systems elsewhere.

Sumatra’s Rubber Agroforests: Advent, Rise and Fall of a Sustainable Cropping System

Until the end of the nineteenth century primary forests covered nearly all the island of Sumatra. The first valorisation of this natural resource was hunting and gathering activities, followed by and later associated with swidden cultivation of upland rice. The industrial revolution in Europe and North America in the 1950s created increasing demand for rubber. Answering this new market opportunity, farmers introduced rubber seedlings in their swiddens amidst the upland rice. By doing so, they invented a new cropping system, i.e. rubber agroforests. Thanks to the continuously increasing demand for rubber by the developing industry, rubber agroforests spread over Sumatra’s eastern peneplains until the 1990s. Forest conversion to rubber agroforests conserves a high level of forest biodiversity and the agroforests act as a buffer zone around national parks. But with growing demographic pressure, market integration and household monetary needs, agroforests are increasingly endangered. New cropping systems have appeared and challenge agroforests’ dominance in the landscape. Since the mid-twentieth century, rubber monospecific plantations have been competing for land, with an undoubtedly higher profitability than agroforests. More recently, oil palm plantations have spread over the island, quickly becoming the new challenger to rubber agroforestry. Nevertheless, the international community shows more and more interest in forest and biodiversity conservation. Forest cover in Jambi province has nearly disappeared over the past 30xa0years. The only way to save the remnants of forests and agroforests seems to be the creation of market incentives through conservation programs such as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation.

Understanding and Integrating Local Perceptions of Trees and Forests into Incentives for Sustainable Landscape Management

We examine five forested landscapes in Africa (Cameroon, Madagascar, and Tanzania) and Asia (Indonesia and Laos) at different stages of landscape change. In all five areas, forest cover (outside of protected areas) continues to decrease despite local people’s recognition of the importance of forest products and services. After forest conversion, agroforestry systems and fallows provide multiple functions and valued products, and retain significant biodiversity. But there are indications that such land use is transitory, with gradual simplification and loss of complex agroforests and fallows as land use becomes increasingly individualistic and profit driven. In Indonesia and Tanzania, farmers favor monocultures (rubber and oil palm, and sugarcane, respectively) for their high financial returns, with these systems replacing existing complex agroforests. In the study sites in Madagascar and Laos, investments in agroforests and new crops remain rare, despite government attempts to eradicate swidden systems and their multifunctional fallows. We discuss approaches to assessing local values related to landscape cover and associated goods and services. We highlight discrepancies between individual and collective responses in characterizing land use tendencies, and discuss the effects of accessibility on land management. We conclude that a combination of social, economic, and spatially explicit assessment methods is necessary to inform land use planning. Furthermore, any efforts to modify current trends will require clear incentives, such as through carbon finance. We speculate on the nature of such incentive schemes and the possibility of rewarding the provision of ecosystem services at a landscape scale and in a socially equitable manner.

Does gathering really pay? Case studies from forest areas of the East and South regions of Cameroon

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) are frequently considered as providing a major contribution to the livelihoods of forest people as sources of food, feed, medicinal plants, wood fuel, materials for building and crafts and cash. Therefore, logging concessionaires, especially when they exploit species having both timber and non-timber values, are often blamed for jeopardizing forest peoples livelihoods. We have tested this assumption in two logging concessions located in the South and East regions of Cameroon. Contrary to most publications about NTFPs, our case studies (1) focus on actual conflicts and not on potential conflicts of use, (2) favour a holistic approach to the local uses of resources rather than focusing exclusively on NTFPs. Our results show that gathering is mainly destined for home consumption and that its contribution to the monetary income of the households is secondary compared with agricultural commodities, bush meat and timber extraction. However, the perceived importance of gathering by focus groups is much higher than the actual economic contribution to livelihoods obtained through quarterly household surveys. Such discrepancy is probably due to the cultural importance of NTFPs for forest people. The article concludes that NTFP gathering is seldom a source of conflict between concessionaires and communities. Encroachments into concessions for agricultural expansion, massive poaching and illegal logging are the major sources of conflicts, which need to be tackled in priority.

Reframing Community Forestry to Manage the Forest–Farm Interface

At the 2010 Montpellier conference on ‘Taking Stock of Smallholder and Community Forestry: Where do we go from here?’, researchers, policy-makers and practitioners came together to discuss historical trends and future directions for understanding and supporting forest sustainability and local livelihoods in forest-based communities. A consensus arising from these discussions was that there is a need to reframe and broaden approaches to understand forestry practised by smallholders and communities. The paper highlights three key topics from that discussion: (1) the need to reconsider definitions of community forestry, (2) the need to broaden understanding of rights surrounding forest resources and (3) the need to reframe research to focus on management of the forest–farm interface.

Landless Farmers, Sly Opportunists, and Manipulated Voters: The Squatters of the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park (Indonesia)

The Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park in southern Sumatra (Indonesia) has been on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites since 2004. Home to tigers, elephants, and rare Sumatran rhinos, the Park is also home to numerous squatters since the early 1970s. Part of the Park was restored after forcible evictions in the 1980s. However, since the end of General Suhartos authoritarian rule in 1998, the number of squatters has been on the increase. This paper provides for the first time a reliable estimation of the number of people encroaching in the Park and presents a profile of the various kinds of squatters living in and around the Park. It shows that all encroachments are not alike, nor are the squatters. Poor landless migrants side with opportunists taking advantage of weak law enforcement, while local politicians try to build a constituency by backing illegal activities in the Park. As a consequence, any action to salvage the Park will have to take into account the complexity of the political ecology, policy environment, and socio-economic nature of each encroachment.

FARmeRS' peRSpeCTIveS ABOUT AgROFOReSTS CONveRSION TO plANTATIONS IN SUmATRA. leSSONS leARNT FROm BUNgO DISTRICT (JAmBI, INDONeSIA)

ABSTRACT Located on the fringe of the last tropical rainforests of Sumatra, rubber agroforests are known to conserve the main ecological functions of the primary forest, including a large part of its biodiversity. Nowadays these smallholder plantations are under threat. The regular rise of natural rubber and crude palm oil prices has been a major incentive for farmers to convert their agroforests into clonal rubber and oil-palm plantations. However, some areas seem to resist conversion. A multidisciplinary approach combining perception surveys and satellite-image analysis was designed to find out the reasons for these differences. In 12 villages grouped in 3 categories according to their agroforest conversion rate between 1993 and 2005, farmers were queried about the pros and the cons of the major cropping systems, their attitude towards conservation, and how they envisaged the future of their landscape. This method enabled us to elaborate the most likely scenarios of landscape evolution for the coming years.

Local voices call for economic development over forest conservation : trade-offs and policy in Bungo, Sumatra

ABSTRACT Local communities, especially those living in forested areas, are generally presented as innocent victims of global economic policies that benefit the private and public sectors. This paper discusses local stakeholders perception of the government policies and actions, peoples rights, and peoples participation in decision-making, with a focus on land and forest uses. It is based on a perception survey conducted in 2009 in 12 villages of the Bungo district, (Jambi province, Sumatra, indonesia), and semi-directed interviews of representatives of the regional government. The surveys conclude to a good agreement between local people and the different levels of government. Besides, villagers consider that their voice is well taken into account in decision-making processes. And over all, there is a broad consensus among all stakeholders to favour economic development at the expense of forest conservation.

RUBBER AGROFORESTS' PROFITABILITY, THE IMPORTANCE OF SECONDARY PRODUCTS

ABSTRACT Indonesian rubber agroforests—smallholders plantations combining a large number of perennial species—are known to provide a number of environmental services. They produce natural rubber as well as various secondary products for cash or home consumption. We estimated the quantities of the various products, the proportions harvested, consumed by the farmers family or sold, and the cash income generated. Quantities and prices were estimated based on plot surveys and interviews. Economic models of various kinds of agroforest were generated, and the impact of the tree composition on the income was evaluated based on these models. Results show that agroforest products are quite well valued, but that return to land remains low. An enrichment of agroforests in Parkia speciosa Hassk could improve their productivity and help farmers cope with economic crises