Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries. New research points to a more sustainable path forward through engagement with small-scale producers.

Nearly ubiquitous in products ranging from cookies to cosmetics, palm oil represents a bedeviling double-edged sword. Widespread cultivation of oil palm trees has been both an economic boon and an environmental disaster for tropical developing-world countries, contributing to large-scale habitat loss, among other impacts. New Stanford-led research points the way to a middle ground of sustainable development through engagement with an often overlooked segment of the supply chain (read related overview and research brief).

"The oil palm sector is working to achieve zero-deforestation supply chains in response to consumer-driven and regulatory pressures, but they won’t be successful until we find effective ways to include small-scale producers in sustainability strategies,” said Elsa Ordway, lead author of a Jan. 10 Nature Communications paper that examines the role of proliferating informal oil palm mills in African deforestation. Ordway, a postdoctoral fellow at The Harvard University Center for the Environment, did the research while a graduate student in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.

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An oil palm plantation in Cameroon (Image credit: Elsa Ordway)

Using remote sensing tools, Ordway and her colleagues mapped deforestation due to oil palm expansion in Southwest Cameroon, a top producing region in Africa’s third largest palm oil producing country (read about related Stanford research). Contrary to a widely publicized narrative of deforestation driven by industrial-scale expansion, the researchers found most oil palm expansion and associated deforestation occurred outside large, company-owned concessions, and that expansion and forest clearing by small-scale, non-industrial producers was more likely near low-yielding informal mills, scattered throughout the region. This is strong evidence that oil palm production gains in Cameroon are coming from extensification instead of intensification.

Possible solutions for reversing the extensification trend include improving crop and processing yields by using more high-yielding seed types, replanting old plantations, and upgrading and mechanizing milling technologies, among other approaches. To prevent intensification efforts from inciting further deforestation, they will need to be accompanied by complementary natural resource policies that include sustainability incentives for smallholders.

In Indonesia, where a large percentage of the world’s oil palm-related forest clearing has occurred, a similar focus on independent, smallholder producers could yield major benefits for both poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, according to a Jan. 4 Ambio study led by Rosamond Naylor, the William Wrigley Professor in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies(Naylor coauthored the Cameroon study led by Ordway).

Using field surveys and government data, Naylor and her colleagues analyzed the role of small producers in economic development and environmental damage through land clearing. Their research focused on how changes in legal instruments and government policies during the past two decades, including the abandonment of revenue-sharing agreements between district and central governments and conflicting land title authority among local, regional and central authorities, have fueled rapid oil palm growth and forest clearing in Indonesia.

They found that Indonesia’s shift toward decentralized governance since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 has simultaneously encouraged economic development through the expansion of smallholder oil palm producers (by far the fastest growing subsector of the industry since decentralization began), reduced rural poverty, and driven ecologically destructive practices such as oil palm encroachment into more than 80 percent of the country’s Tesso Nilo National Park.

A worker in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, loads palm fruit for transport to a factory that will process it into palm oil (Image credit: Joann de Zegher)

Shorenstein APARC's annual overview of the Center's 2017-18 activities  is now available to download. 

Feature sections look at the Center's seminars, conferences, and other activities in response to the North Korean crisis, research and events related to China's past, present, and future, and several Center research initiatives focused on technology and the changing workforce.

The overview highlights recent and ongoing Center research on Japan's economic policies, innovation in Asia, population aging and chronic disease in Asia, and talent flows in the knowledge economy, plus news about Shorenstein APARC's education and policy activities, publications, and more.

This editorial was originally carried by Asia Times on June 13, 2018, and reposted with permission.

Bedecked with skyscrapers, Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur is a high-rise city. In that lofty context, the headquarters of the People’s Justice Party (PKR) are down to earth.

They occupy one in a row of nondescript low-rise buildings unfashionably far from downtown. Even the lettered number of the floor that includes the PKR leader’s office is anomalous: 3A.

As if the “A” stood for Anwar—Anwar Ibrahim, the head of the PKR. As if, years ago, the builder had presciently inserted the “A” floor, predicting correctly that the trials and incarcerations of Malaysia’s most famous political prisoner would end years later, on May 9, 2018, in a historic, peaceful, electoral ouster of Prime Minister Najib Razak and his inter-communal National Front, or Barisan Nasional (BN).

Included in the defeated coalition was its leading member party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), which had been returned to power in every general election held in Malaya/Malaysia since 1959.

This writer has known Anwar since the 1980s. In November 2014 at Stanford University, I joined him and my colleagues Larry Diamond and Frank Fukuyama on a panel to discuss Islam and democracy, with specific reference to Malaysia. Anwar was on his way back to Kuala Lumpur.

He and we knew he was almost certain to be detained again on politically motivated charges of sodomy, a crime under Malaysian law. He could have gone into exile. He did not. He went home to face his accusers in the ruling UMNO party.

He was jailed three months later, in February 2015, and was not released until more than three years later still, on May 16, 2018, not coincidentally a week after Malaysians had voted his four-party “Alliance for Hope”, or Pakatan Harapan (PH), coalition into office.

Promptly at the new government’s request, Malaysia’s king issued a pardon amounting to an exoneration that covered not only Anwar’s latest detention, but an earlier political jailing from 1999 to 2004 on the same sodomy charge.

On June 6, 2018 I visited Anwar at his office. He was in fine spirits. Had he chosen not to fly back to Malaysia after speaking at Stanford in 2014, had he opted for exile instead, he would not have been able to stage a martyr’s comeback into his country’s political life. “Out of sight, out of mind” applies to politicians as well as lovers.

Now Anwar is very much in sight, out of jail, and leading the PKR, the main party in the Alliance of Hope that ousted Najib’s National Front including UMNO.

The words “I’M BACK” appear next to his photograph on a poster in the elevator to his office. But the man upon whom Anwar’s immediate political future depends is also back.

The blunt, decisive, nonagenarian Mahathir Mohamad, who led the PH’s winning campaign against the incumbent BN, has reassumed the prime ministership that he held for 22 years from 1981 to 2003.

Prior to the May 2018 election, Mahathir apparently agreed that if the PH won, he would, as prime minister, free Anwar and eventually cede the position to him. Already the world’s oldest head of state, Mahathir will be 93 in July. In August, Anwar will be 71.

The gap of more than two decades between them suggests that time is on Anwar’s side. Or is it? Could history repeat itself? After all, it was Mahathir as prime minister who, in 1998, blocked his then-deputy Anwar’s ascent to the top slot. Mahathir fired him and, in effect, hounded him into prison.

The reason? In 1997-98, while the Asian financial crisis raged, Anwar as finance minister argued for relatively liberal, International Monetary Fund-friendly economic reform and opposed the corruption associated with Mahathir’s rule. Mahathir disagreed. He responded to the crisis along more or less state-nationalist lines, and he resented what he thought was Anwar’s premature ambition to replace him.

There are no visible signs of such acrimony between the two men today. They are indebted to each other. Technically, Anwar owes his freedom to Mahathir. But politically, without Anwar’s iconic status and popularity, the PH might not have won the lower-house majority that enabled Mahathir, as prime minister, to obtain his former rival’s release.

The good news is that Najib’s massively corrupt and incrementally despotic nine-year rule is over. The cautionary news is that Malaysian democracy is not yet fully secured, given the uncertainties and contingencies that could affect its future.

As for my having met Anwar on floor 3A, the “A” does not of course stand for Anwar. The elevator rises directly from 3A to 5 for a different reason. In spoken Mandarin, “four” sounds like the word for “death.” Only the tones differ. Whoever built the building, knowing that superstitious Chinese occupants would shun a numerically fatal fourth floor, called it “3A” instead.

Will the ruse fool the devil? Will renascent Malaysian democracy survive? Bandwagoning is already underway, as venal officials and executives who benefited from Najib’s kleptocratic ways seek political safety by ingratiating themselves with the new government, potentially weakening its ability to clean house.

Nor were reformers necessarily encouraged when Mahathir chose his long-time ally Daim Zainuddin to head a Council of Eminent Persons to advise the new government. Daim both preceded and succeeded Anwar as minister of finance during Mahathir’s long and controversial earlier reign as prime minister.

Also concerning in this context was the June 8, 2018 decision by the Council’s head of media and communications to resign from the position because it prevented him from speaking freely. A veteran journalist, he had been criticized for reporting in his blog that the Najib administration had allocated public funds for the royal family’s expenses in 2017-18 far in excess of the amount allowed by law.

Anwar himself felt obliged to warn against disrespecting the country’s basically symbolic and constitutional monarchy—an arrangement whereby the national kingship in effect rotates every five years among the ceremonial rulers of Malaysia’s nine states.

In Anwar’s plausible if debatable view, the country’s newborn and vulnerable administration can ill-afford to criticize royals whose symbolic support it may well need in the years ahead.

The newly ruling “Alliance of Hope” for democracy in Malaysia, as it transitions from opposing to governing, will need to navigate skillfully the problematic space between reformist candor and pragmatic restraint.

That dilemma instantiates, on a far-from-whimsical scale, Anwar’s need to protect the democratic freedom of Malaysians to be outspoken in principle, while he works on a floor whose number is unspoken in practice.

Donald K. Emmerson heads the Southeast Asia Program at Stanford University where he is also affiliated with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.