Healing an Oil Palm Landscape in Indonesia

Since its founding in 2004, the RSPO has developed an ambitious voluntary standard for ‘certified sustainable palm oil’, which now supplies some 19% of the market in globally traded palm oil. Now, through its Jurisdictional Approach, it is also providing a framework by which local governments can apply these same standards to large, medium and small growers that have not yet joined the RSPO. 

In Seruyan, the district government has embraced this approach and started to apply it through a long-term commitment to legal, administrative and practical reform with a focus on resolving the pervasive land conflicts that have flared up between companies and communities. This report summarises some of the results of this effort, which combines local government, NGOs and local companies in an effort to make remedy for past harms. Using this framework, wider landscape remediation is also underway to ensure communities have secure rights and can manage and control conservation areas and establish wildlife corridors connecting isolated orang utan populations cut off by oil palm plantations from those in the protected areas.

What the communities envision is not just a recognition of their rights, much less a return to the past, but a more diversified use of the land, in which their traditional economies and environment can be restored. This will bring not just more secure incomes and village prosperity but also a restoration of rivers, lakes, forests, and wildlife, mixed economies and multiple crops. Moreover, the majority of community members are not outright rejecting the presence of the oil palm companies, they just want them scaled back, more equitable relationships, properly paid and secure jobs, and their share of the plantings established on their lands.