Six steps to tackle exploitation in Indonesia’s palm oil smallholder scheme (commentary)

By Tom Walker When the palm oil industry began growing rapidly in Indonesia in the 1980s, the government developed a scheme aimed at ensuring communities would benefit. To gain subsidized funding, companies routinely promised communities as much as 80% of their plantations, in plots known as “plasma.” By 2007, the principle was baked into law, with companies required to provide a fifth of any new plantation as plasma. But many villagers never saw the benefits of this system. An investigation by Mongabay, the BBC and The Gecko Project found that companies failed to provide potentially hundreds …

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