Achieving economic, ecological resilience in oil palm subsector

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1 year ago

Oil palm is one of the agricultural value chains that get less attention from the government, leading to yield reduction, importation of the product and economic loss for the country.

During a policy dialogue on the oil palm sector organised by Solidaridad and IDH, stakeholder Xrayed the current challenges faced by the oil palm subsector and made some recommendations to the government on how to tackle the challenges and revamp the subsector.

Kene Onukwube, Programme Manager, Oil Palm Nigeria in Solidaridad, said the subsector has suffered a fracture since the discovery of the fossil fuel in Nigeria, so rather than being one of the major drivers of the economy of Nigeria, the oil palm economy has been relegated to the background.

Solidaridad and IDH are implementing the National Initiative for Sustainable and Climate Smart Oil Palm Smallholders (NI-SCOPS) which is a sustainable trade initiative to the Nigerian government and other stakeholders to meet the commitment under Paris Agreement, the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

They do so by making the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concept of climate smart agriculture operational in six states in the oil palm belt, namely Akwa Ibom, Cross River, Edo, Enugu, Kogi and Ondo.

Local governments are also supported with development and implementation of conservation and development plans, to protect and where necessary, restore critical ecosystem values.

Onukwube said within that concept of social ecological resilience, they are talking about the producers of oil palm, the marketers and all the players in the subsector; what are their positions, their thoughts and interests, how can they influence economic resilience so that their productivity increases amidst challenges of climate change risks that are affecting oil palm.

“So, we want to be able to take those two concepts at the same time while discussing the future of oil palm, which is the basis of the policy dialogue.

“We are looking at the following emerging from the policy dialogue; public sectors actors who are here would be informed, they will be able to take the message back to the policy formulation, implementation directions at their different desks to inform what would guide government interest and positions and of course inform what will help trigger renewed interest in the oil palm economy.

“Private sector actors in their own case, like the Oil Palm Growers Association and others, they should be able to go back to ground truth on whatever are the intended strategies of their different networks and associations to ensure that nobody is playing against the tide.

“So, if the oil palm growers on different umbrella associations are able to position their interventions for their members on a proper and effective policy space, it will guide them to ensure that they are actually contributing to the national goal rather than swimming against the tide by reason of whatever position they have taken”, he said.

The Nigeria Institute for Oil Palm Research (NIFOR) and a few other players were involved in the policy dialogue because of their influence and their importance in the subsector.

The Solidaridad Programme Manager noted that enough cannot be done if the NIFOR doesn’t have the proper perspective from this policy discussion.

After the policy dialogue, the stakeholders would advise the government to be able to understand the investment direction for the country in regional oil palm markets and global oil palm markets, and the anticipated EU deforestation regulation coming up in 2025 that potentially tends to currently de-market oil palm that comes from this part of the world.

“It is on record that the old eastern region grew its economy historical from the oil palm economy. And if that regional economy thrived as much as it did then, we know that oil palm has also become a very important commodity in the West, so put this together plus what is now referred to currently as the South-South geopolitical zone where we have a lot of these commodities. If these three zones of the country team up, it is a bulging economy for the country. We are sure that it will come to address a lot.

“In the North-Central zone like Kogi, Nasarawa and Benue, these are strong oil palm producing states, even as far as Taraba State in the North-East and some parts of Adamawa are producing oil palm, the Southern part of Kaduna produce oil palm,” he noted.

There are potentials in the oil palm subsector that have been overlooked and there is need to revisit it to make the country benefit.

“The empirical data shows that the less attention that is paid to that subsector is reason behind the loss. The less attention in the sense that currently, the largest population of the oil palm we have is mainly aged oil palm plantation so their yield has dropped, they are no longer producing to the optimum and some of them have become spaces where you will find a lot of unsustainable practices.

“So, people just look at it as a plantation that yields at its own time and they can take whatever it brings, no management practices, no policy direction to ensure that results from empirical researches can be applied to these places for optimum yield. These constitute loss in that subsector,” he added

Eniola Fabusoro, Senior Programme Manager, IDH said both IDH and Solidaridad are implementers of the NI-SCOPS programme funded by the Dutch government since 2019.

He said they are trying to draw the government attention to oil palm subsector sustainability, and talk about several things that need to be done.

“We are talking about sustainable production of oil palm, climate smart agriculture, access to finance, regenerative practices, quality improvement, private sector investment, these are all that come into that sustainability.

“We are also looking at opening of market opportunities for all the farmers and ensuing that there is business case for everyone”, he said.

Fabusoro noted that the idea of IDH is such that when there is business case in a particular sector, and without much political intervention, the sector will be sustainable and more, so, what they will need from the government is provision of enabling environment, but trade can blossom by itself and people can engage productively among each once there is business case for everyone.

The immediate past Executive Director of NIFOR, Dr Celestine Ikuenobe said Nigeria currently produce more than what it used to produce before but the issue is that the population has grown and the oil palm produced currently cannot meet the demand in the country.

He said Nigeria today requires over 3 million tons of palm oil annually; in general the country can produce as much as 1.4 million tons of palm oil from all sources.

“In those days we produce enough and we are able to export because the use internally was not as much as it is now, before then there was no noodle industry because they require much palm oil, and you know we produce more soap now that we used to produce in 1960.

“Now, we are not growing at the pace that we are required to. Population has grown tremendously, areas before that were under wild groove are now cut down, they are now cities, so those wild grove palms are no longer available, people are not even harvesting them, but now that we are cultivating plantations, they don’t even have much of cultivated plantations.

“Nigeria has less than 800,000 hectares under cultivated oil palm, Indonesia has 16.3 million hectares, Malaysia has about 5.6 million hectares, so you can’t compare that, even our wild groves which we used to estimate in 90s to be about 2.1 million hectares is far less than that now with urbanization, cutting down of trees, so you cannot get more from the wild as you get from cultivated system”, he explained.

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