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Sanur, Bali. While palm oil producers frequently take flak for their dubious environmental policies, one expert believes the solution to large-scale forest clearances is a so-called hybrid approach on the part of all stakeholders.

Lian Pin Koh, a research fellow at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, in Zurich, said this approach brought together the interests of planters trying to maximize their palm oil production, environmentalists trying to preserve biodiversity and prevent carbon emissions, and indigenous communities trying to preserve their subsistence agriculture.

“The hybrid approach is where the government takes into account all priorities, which means they target areas that have the lowest carbon values, the lowest biodiversity values, low productivity for rice and higher productivity for oil palm,” Koh said at the 2010 International Meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, which is currently under way in Sanur, Bali.

Palm oil is the world’s cheapest, and hence most widely produced, vegetable oil. In 2009, global palm oil production topped 43.4 million tons, of which 47 percent came from Indonesia.

The country aims to double its crude palm oil output to 40 million tons by 2020 through increased yields and more plantations. That means expanding from 7.9 million hectares of plantations to about 10 million.

In his presentation on Tuesday, “Conservation in Human-Modified Landscapes: Sidestepping the Trade-Offs of Oil Palm Expansion,” Koh laid out the four factors that could be united under the hybrid approach: food production, forest preservation, high palm oil productivity and carbon conservation.

“The conclusion is that you can’t just focus on one of those priorities,” he said.

“Instead, you should have a more holistic approach, which allows us to minimize the impact of oil palm expansion on forests, on biodiversity, on rice production, on carbon and so on.”

But will it work in Indonesia?

The problem here, Koh said, is that the palm oil industry and conservationists are still split over the idea.

“So if they come together and start to identify areas, let’s say in Jambi, where they have very good productivity for oil palm, and maybe poor productivity for rice, and which has low carbon values, then this should be targeted first for oil palm plantations,” he said.

“These might not be perfect areas, but that’s how [the stakeholders] can begin to identify ways to conserve.”

He added that the idea had already been broached at the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, an international industry group.

“For example, they’ve talked about high-value conservation areas, but [they would need to] compromise because if you only look at protecting forests, then your oil palms will need to be planted in areas that are not so productive, which means they’ll require more land, which again means that potentially more forest will be converted into plantations,” Koh said.

“There will always be a trade-off if you pursue any of those priorities, but you can minimize them if you consider them together,” he added.

As for maximizing palm oil production by seeking out the most productive land, Koh said this “business-as-usual” approach had its downsides.

“The benefit is that you can manage the most productive areas, but the trade-off is that some of these areas also overlap with rice paddies or areas that have a very high carbon value, like peatlands,” Koh said.

Achmad Manggabarani, until recently the Indonesian Agriculture Ministry’s director general of plantation crops, said the government had already taken a similar approach to the palm oil issue.

“We’ve already taken into consideration all the various factors,” he said.

“We have a policy not to plant oil palms in rice-growing areas, which is why all the oil palm plantations are in Sumatra and Kalimantan rather than in Java. And we don’t always use virgin forest, but also forests that have previously been logged.”

Of the estimated 40 million hectares of virgin forest nationwide that have been cleared, oil palm plantations account for only 7.6 million hectares.

“We assign the planters these depleted logging concessions that have low biodiversity and carbon stocks,” Achmad said.

“If there’s still any [biodiversity or carbon] left there, we set up protected zones [where oil palm cultivation is forbidden]. We do get the odd violators, but for the most part the planters respect these zones.”