There’s been a recent string of interesting reports on the BBC website concerning the palm oil industry in Indonesian Borneo. Palm oil is an extremely cheap source of vegetable oil and a common ingredient in a range of consumer goods such as soap, margarine and biscuits. In Indonesia, the palm industry has rapidly grown to become a pillar of the countries economy; it’s now valued at $7.7 billion and ranks as the nations third largest export earner.

This expansion, not surprisingly, has been associated with a range of negative environmental and social impacts. The draining of ancient peat lands to make way for palm oil has lead to massive amounts of trapped methane and carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere and the pollution running off from plantations can damage water supplies. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is also critical to the industry, identifying the illegal clear-cutting of rainforests to accommodate palm oil plantations as a main driver in the decimation of Orangutan populations in the area. In fact, it appears that some of the large players in the palm oil industry, e.g. Duta Palma Group, are involved in the illegal logging of high conservation lands and deep peat lands (but read their response). Additionally there are several cases of local communities, especially indigenous people, which feel that their land rights are literally bulldozed by oil palm companies.

Sun setting over an abandoned palm oil plantation in Borneo.

Photo: Tom Hermansson Snickars/Azote.se

Some economists, however, want to underscore that there are several positive outcomes to local communities. The fact that nearly half of the 7 million hectares in palm oil cultivation is in the hands of smallholder farmers has led to an apparent emergence of a rural ”palm-oil” middle-class. The BBC reports how a survey carried out by economist John McCarthy of the Australian National University found that villagers with four hectares or more were earning on average $12,000 a year, a second group with 2 hectares were earning much less - $2,000 a year  (but were still enough to provide financial security for themselves and their families) and villagers without palm oil all fell below the poverty line. The argument is that palm oil can be a positive force in lifting a large chunk of the Indonesian population out of poverty, if the system is reformed so as not to favor the few big players (companies such as the Duta Palma Group).

Bundles and trade-offs

In essence, a substantial part of the above discourse boils down to a question of how to manage trade-offs between immediate human needs and the capacity of ecosystems to provide goods and services in the long-term. For example, unexploited rainforest ecosystems are able to support many ecosystem services (e.g. biodiversity preservation, water quality regulation, regional climate and air quality control) at high levels, but not food production. The intensively managed palm oil plantation, however, is able to produce cash crops in abundance (at least in the short run), at the cost of diminishing other ecosystem services. A useful way of assessing these trade-offs, and also visualizing how ecosystem services interact, is to use the concept of ecosystem service bundles.

Ecosystem service undles in three hypothetical land-use scenarios. The level of

each service is indicated along each axis of the bundle. Taken from Foley et al,

Science 309 (2005)

Putting a number on bundles

To date the bundles concept has been mainly used as a heuristic tool, and there is less in the way of studies that quantify “real” bundles of ecosystem services in real landscapes. A team of researchers from Canada and Sweden has done just that and the study, that identifies ecosystems service bundles in a mixed-use landscape that stretches across 137 municipalities in Quebec, has just been published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).  One major finding (but perhaps an unsurprising one) is that landscape “units” maximizing agriculture were found to provide fewer regulating ecosystems services, e.g. carbon sequestration and soil nutrient retention. However, a really neat twist to this story is that some landscape units seem to be able to combine high levels of crop production and a diverse suite of regulating services, implying that severe tradeoffs are not inevitable. The logical step forward in this field of research field would be to examine the policy and management approaches that could explain why trade-offs occur in some cases and not in others. It also raises the question whether similar patterns can be gleaned when carrying out similar studies in other agricultural landscapes of the world – such as in Indonesian Borneo.

Palm plantations and bundles

The problems associated with the palm oil industry are a complex mix of human rights abuses, global markets, and governance failure and ecosystem decline. Clearly they cannot solely be resolved through a better understanding of how different ecosystem services are gained and lost depending on the land-use practice. The primary challenge is to address the elements that prevent an equitable and democratic decision process pertaining to the future trajectory of these tropical landscapes. But the sheer visual power of tools such as the bundles concept in how they present knowledge of tradeoffs associated with different organizations of social-ecological systems could help some way in leading to more informed societal choices about landscape management and planning.