Summary

Environmental, social, and institutional problems associated with the expansion of palm oil, adapted from Hidayat et al. (2018).

Palm oil is a commodity used in the production of food ingredients, non-food consumer products, and biofuels. Most of the world’s palm oil is produced in Indonesia where oil palm cultivation provides a livelihood for over 16 million smallholders and workers. At the same time, oil palm monoculture farming leads to forest and biodiversity loss, enhance climate change and violates indigenous land and human rights. This has been strongly criticized by the European Parliament which banned palm oil imports in 2018, and as a response, Indonesia filed a lawsuit against the EU at the WTO. However, the recent attack war by Russia on Ukraine has resulted in a global food crisis and a paradigm change, where, instead of the EU-Indonesia dispute, attention has turned to global food security. The problem is multifaceted.

This project primarily aims to:

(1) Contextualize the paradigm shift in the palm oil narrative

(2) Understand its effects on the power relations and negotiations among palm oil stakeholders

(3) Analyze the effects on primary producers in Indonesia and more broadly on global food security.

We study documentary, interview, survey and social media data and combine the theories and methods of political science, development economics, regional studies, and political economy (rhetorical analysis, social network analysis, and content analysis).

We disseminate the results in academic and wider audience publications and presentations in three languages (English, Finnish, and Indonesian).

Project summary on KONE foundation website (in Finnish).