In 1848 Dutch botanists planted a cutting of oil palm – a plant native to the forests of western and central Africa – at the Kebun Raya Bogor botanical gardens in Java, modern-day Indonesia. Almost two centuries later, Indonesia and its neighbours are by far the most important global producers of palm oil, the edible vegetable oil produced from the oil palm’s fruit. While Asian oil palm plantations bring in billions of dollars in export revenue each year, Africa is forced to import around half the palm oil it consumes.
Given that the cost of importing palm oil is a drain on foreign currency, many African governments are eager to increase domestic production. Nigeria even resorted to banning palm oil imports in 2001. While it was soon forced to backtrack, Nigerian politicians often call for the prohibition to be reintroduced to protect domestic producers.
But although producing palm oil has delivered an economic boon for south-east Asia, this has come at a heavy price. Palm oil production has been a key driver of deforestation. Indonesia lost 11% of its forest area between 2001 and 2019, and around one-third of this was taken over by oil palm plantations.
Images of forlorn orangutans surveying the loss of their jungle homes are frequently used by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) calling for a consumer boycott of palm oil.
If Africa fails to learn from Asia’s mistakes, homeless gorillas and chimpanzees could become the faces of the next anti-palm oil campaign.
Growing palm oil production
“We are not producing enough to feed ourselves,” says Elikplim Agbitor, head of Africa at the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. The RSPO was established in 2004 by a group of palm oil producers, retailers and NGOs to implement standards for sustainable palm oil production.
Agbitor notes that around 70% of African palm oil is grown by smallholders. Smallholders typically farm plots of less than five hectares, often using older trees that are less productive. Yields are typically around six tonnes per hectare, Agbitor says, compared to more than twenty tonnes on a commercial plantation.
The need to increase production reflects palm oil’s role in food security. Whereas palm oil exported from Asia goes into a vast range of products – including processed foods, cosmetics and biofuels – in Africa, palm oil is used largely as a cooking fuel, as well as a moisturiser.
Although current producers focus overwhelmingly on domestic markets, Agbitor says this could change in the future with multinational companies increasingly acquiring land on the continent.
“Africa is the new frontier for commercial palm oil expansion,” he says, noting there is little land available to expand in Malaysia or Indonesia. With governments also eager to expand production, Agbitor warns of a risk to both conservation and land rights.
“We are trying to do a lot of engagement with governments to make them understand why they would have to expand in a sustainable manner,” he says.
Deforestation dilemma
Florent Robert is head of sustainability, community and partnership at Siat Group, a palm oil company that was once Belgian-owned but is now in Nigerian hands. He says the image of palm oil as a leading culprit behind deforestation does not tell the full story.
Robert notes the risk of deforestation is lower in the more densely populated parts of West Africa. “Ghana and Nigeria don’t have primary forest anymore. They don’t even have too much forested areas anymore,” he says. “The palm oil industry in those countries is not a big driver of deforestation.”
Siat, which is RSPO certified, sets aside around 10% of the land it owns for conservation purposes, Robert tells us. When it seeks to acquire new concessions in Nigeria, it applies for rights to manage land allocated to commodity production, much of which tends to be degraded.
But in other parts of the continent, the nightmare scenario for conservation is that the demand for domestic oil ends up spurring the conversion of ancient rainforest into monoculture oil plantations.
“Palm oil expansion poses a significant threat to rainforest habitats in Cameroon and the wider Congo Basin,” says Imogen Fanning, sustainable business project analyst at the Zoological Society of London. ZSL has a project in Cameroon attempting to ensure that oil is produced sustainably, without destroying forests with high conservation value.
“In Cameroon, the threat lies not in the oil palm species itself, which is native to West Africa, but in the conversion of large areas of forest habitat, especially for industrial concessions and associated infrastructure,” says Fanning.
She argues that the solution as Africa seeks to increase production is to produce the crop more intensively in places where it is already grown.
“The most sustainable way to produce palm oil in Cameroon is not to expand into natural forest, but to improve production on existing cultivated land,” she says.
Boosting yields
Improving productivity and raising yields have multiple benefits, both for the environment and for oil growers themselves. Achieving this on the smallholder plots that dominate African oil growing is easier said than done – but experience shows it is possible. “The yield story has been very intriguing and interesting,” says Lawrence Quarshie, sustainability coordinator at Golden Star Oil Palm Plantations (GSOPP), a social enterprise programme established by mining company Golden Star in Ghana. Quarshie is also the group manager of GSOPP’s partner, the Golden Star Oil Palm Farmers Association (GSOPFA), the first RSPO-certified independent smallholder group in the country.
Quarshie says that GSOPFA was achieving yields of 15 tonnes per hectare before it completed RSPO certification – already far higher than typical levels for smallholder producers. With advice on improved management practices through the RSPO, he reports that yields reached 18 tonnes per hectare in 2022, the year of RSPO certification, then 21 tonnes per hectare in 2023.
As well as the yield improvements, achieved partly through implementation of better agricultural management, farmers are able to get premium prices for certified goods – “which is also going a long way to improve the income and the livelihoods of the smallholder farmers”.
Costs of sustainability
GSOPFA is, however, something of a special case, as it is financially supported by Golden Star, which is now a subsidiary of Chinese mining group Chifeng Gold.
“Without that support, I’m not sure the farmer group would have been able to come this far,” Quarshie acknowledges. He notes that the costs associated with RSPO certification and auditing are prohibitive for individual smallholders.
Even cooperatives, in many cases, would need some sort of external support to be able to pursue this route. “If we really want to scale up sustainability for smallholder farmers, we have to look at building a system that will support them financially to be able to build their capacity to adopt the sustainable practices so that they can improve their yields as well as improve their livelihood,” says Quarshie.
The RSPO is conscious of the challenge. Agbitor reports that 18.4% of the oil produced in Africa is RSPO-certified. While around 10,000 smallholders are producing RSPO-certified products, most of the certified oil produced in the continent is grown by large industrial producers.
The RSPO operates a Smallholder Support Fund, which offers financial support to help smallholders go through the certification process.
Still, more needs to be done to ensure that Africa can meet the challenge of producing the vital commodity without losing its last great wildernesses. Helping smallholders to improve yields without encroaching on forested areas can produce a key win-win. “Support to smallholders goes a long way,” Agbitor says.