Madam Nisa and her fourteen hectares of land
Palm Oil is one of the World’s most popular ingredients. Used in many everyday products, from chocolate to cosmetics, global demand for this fast growing crop has increased explosively since the nineteen nineties.
But, while fuelling economies, the palm oil revolution has had a devastating impact on tropical forests: On Borneo, one of the most biodiversity rich places on Earth, the palm oil industry is responsible for at least 39 percent of forest loss between 2000 and 2018.
Madam Nisa, 47, is a pioneer. Together with 75 other oil palm smallholders in Sabah, Borneo, she is introducing new and more sustainable ways to grow and harvest her crop.
Improved yield
At only 13 hectares, Nisa’s palm oil plantation is a microscopic spec in an ocean of industrially sized estates, some of which have their own villages, grocery stores and even kindergartens.
By recycling palm waste as compost, replacing chemical fertiliser with biodynamic material and planting other crops between the oil palm, Nisa and her smallholder colleagues are able to produce a higher and healthier yield.
“We used to get 6-8 metric tonnes per month. Now it is as much as 12,” she says.
A vital role for smallholders
Madam Nisa is one of Malaysia’s more than 300.000 smallholders that are playing a vital role in the country’s palm oil industry.
With the help of the Preferred by Nature’s partner, local NGO Wild Asia, Madam Nisa has turned her 13 hectares of land into a laboratory for sustainable palm oil production:
"This is our primary income. After this we have been introduced to other plantation projects such as ginger, mushrooms and pineapple. We started two months ago and soon we can start harvesting. The mushrooms are already giving us good revenue," said Madam Nisa.
"This has increased our revenue. So we are very grateful for the support we have received."
Key impacts
- Improved biodiversity
- Healthier soil
- Less deforestation
- Improved livelihoods for smallholders
- Transparent supply chains
Start small. Learn. Scale
Designed by local NGO Wild Asia, this smallholder programme aims to repair some of the damage caused by the palm oil boom that took off in the eighties and decimated the remains of Borneo’s heavily logged forests. But can smallholders like Madam Nisa really make a difference?
Founder and Director of Wild Asia, Dr. Reza Azmi believes so:
Our bio-approach was always meant to find the easiest way to start, and it was always about starting small. The idea of working with smallholders was completely natural. It is the principle of what we are doing. Start small. Learn from it. And eventually people will realise this is the right way of doing it said Reza Asmi.
The knowledge gained from trials on smallholder plantations can be scaled up on much larger estates:
"It is giving us data. It is telling us if there is a correlation between yield and soil improvement. Is there ecosystem changes in terms of rates of water infiltration, are we finding changes in micro-biodiversity. This is the kind of information we have been collecting for the last 3-5 years, and the validation brings us closer to informing the industry, so this is another part of our strategy for scaling up,"
Dr. Reza Azmi, Wild Asia
Some of the techniques developed by Wild Asia are now being tested on a large estate in the area. Meanwhile, Madam Nisa has no doubts about the benefits of producing palm oil in a more sustainable way:
"It has taken a lot of effort, but in the end it has become a very profitable business to sustain my family," she said.
Facts
- Indonesia and Malaysia produce about 85% of the world’s palm oil, used in everything from soaps, and lipstick to pizza and biodiesel.
- Palm oil is an efficient crop. Globally, palm oil supplies 40% of the world’s vegetable oil demand on just under 6% of the land used to produce all vegetable oils.
- Millions of smallholder farmers depend on producing palm oil for their livelihoods.
- Palm oil was responsible for 35% of forest loss in the Indonesian part of Borneo, and 46% on the Malaysian side between 2000 and 2018.
- Borneo lost 6.3 million hectares of forest cover between 2000 and 2018.
- Palm oil companies accounted for about 2.4 million hectares of the loss while pulpwood firms accounted for 461,319 hectares.
- This does not include plantations farmed by smallholders, who account for 40% of palm oil production globally.
- The country’s total area planted with oil palm amounted to about 5.8 million hectares (14 million acres) by 2018.
- The palm oil industry was responsible for at least 39% of forest loss on the biodiversity-rich island of Borneo between 2000 and 2018.
Source: Reuters, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), WWF
Photos courtesy of Preferred by Nature / Kristian Buus
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