The future of the palm oil industry—and the region’s forests—depends on how millions of smallholders manage their land. Eco-Business interviewed farmers in Thailand and Malaysia to understand what sustainable agriculture means to them.
It is farmers with the smallest plots of lands who could have the biggest impact on the future of the palm oil trade, the world’s most consumed, and controversial edible oil.
Defined as farmers with 50 hectares or less of land, smallholders produce 40 per cent of the US$66 billion industry’s oil, but only 14.5 per cent of the world’s sustainable palm oil. The potential for smallholders to grow palm oil in ways that avoid the issues that have given the industry a bad reputation while earning a decent living is huge.
Pornsiri Raknukul, who runs a farm of 16 hectares in Krabi province, Southern Thailand, is one of 160,000 palm oil smallholders who run farms certified as sustainable by industry association Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
This means that she has committed to farming according to the principles set out by RSPO, which include avoiding environmentally destructive practices such as burning forests to expand plantations. These principles and knowhow have helped Pornsiri to more than double the productivity of her palm oil plots.
Through a series of interviews with farmers on the ground, Eco-Business explores how smallholders within and outside the RSPO ecosystem are changing the narrative on sustainable palm oil.
From bank manager to palm oil farm owner in Thailand
A few years ago, Pornsiri decided that something had to be done about the declining yields of her oil palm plots, which had been managed by subcontractors. The burden of working while caring for her family, even as her health deteriorated, had become too much.
So she decided to leave her job as a bank manager, and work on the farm full-time so she could manage the plots herself.
Now, her life is busy but uncomplicated, she says. She makes breakfast for her family, sends her children to school, and then drives her pickup truck to her oil palm plots two kilometres away.
From 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., she not only manages her oil palm plots, but weeds, fertilises and harvests the fresh fruit bunches.
After her farm duties, she buys groceries at the local markets to prepare for dinner, and visits her mother.
It is five years since Pornsiri joined RSPO’s Smallholders Working Group,, and her approach to farming has changed completely. RSPO certification would ordinarily be too expensive for most small farmers, but RSPO helps smallholders with funding towards certification, access to better seeds, fertiliser, knowhow and markets.
“I sometimes regret not having tended to the farm myself in the past. Now I fully understand the importance of farm management, and how best to spend my time since joining the Working Group,” she says.
Since applying sustainable practices, such as using the right sort of fertiliser in the right quantities at the right times, and cutting out the use of herbicides for weed control (she now weeds manually), the yield of Pornsiri’s oil palm plots has increased from 12 tonnes per hectare per year to 31.25 tonnes.
She says that keeping up with RSPO standards, which are reviewed every five years,is the hardest thing about sustainable palm oil farming. But it’s worth it, she says. “I’m determined to make it work.”
The price premium for sustainable palm oil is a challenge, Pornsiri notes. Certified palm oil, which makes up around 19 per cent of the market globally, is roughly twice the price of the regular variety, so it’s harder to find customers. But she says that since the market price is out of her control, “I try not to worry about it,” she says.
“If we can manage our plantations well, they will sustain us over the long term. I’m teaching my son and other relatives how to manage a palm oil plantation in a sustainable way, so my legacy will continue,” she says.
Given the extra effort required to manage a farm sustainably, would she ever consider reverting to the practices of old; burning land to clear it, and using harmful chemicals to fertilise the soil and kill weeds? No way.