InfoSAWIT, JAKARTA - It is a dilemma for stakeholders to develop palm oil production sustainably. The biggest issues are the numbers (of cash) to spent in improving sustainable principles and criteria. This happens because the best and sustainable cultivation practices would be different from the implementation
It needs to implement sustainable principles and criteria to realize agricultural system that is oriented to have balancing economic, social, and ecology sectors. In addition, the existence would be responded by implementing sustainability standards on Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
Though there is no significantly difference in sustainable principles and criteria implementation, ISPO and RSPO still face many challenges. Palm oil plantations have provided employments, escalated people’s welfare, empowered smallholders to realize sustainable palm oil practices. But there are challenges still.
Smallholders’ empowerment has many classic issues. Smallholders’ palm oil plantations develop together with companies’ ones in one region.
Smallholders’ plantations tend to develop sporadically. They develop around companies’ plantations. This was the reason that smallholders’ plantations got wider in Indonesia until now.
The smallholders successfully develop because of partnership (plasma) with the plantation companies. They still depend on selling fresh fruit bunch (FFB) to mills of plantation companies around.
That is why there are big issues to control smallholders’ palm oil plantations to be developed, to implement sustainable and best practices. Everything mostly starts from seeds to plant.
Many fake seeds sold in the society always raise issues for smallholders’ plantations. It is easy to guess that their plantation productivity tends to be in small numbers or much lower than what companies produced.
One initiation of this issue would be anticipated by the Government of Indonesia through smallholders replanting program (SRP) which the fund is from Palm Oil Plantation Fund Management Agency (PFMA) though the fund distribution is still low in number too.
