Linking global environmental benefits to sustainable
land use alternatives
“Best bet” Land-use Systems
Country reports
Alternatives To Slash-And-Burn In Indonesia
Unique id: IDAQFNZB
Source file: D:\Projects\ASB\ASB Country and Thematic
reports\Indonesia PhaseII report\Part IV-V .xml
Authors: Thomas P. Tomich, Meine van Noordwijk, Suseno
Budidarsono, Andy Gillison, Trikurnianti Kusumanto, Daniel Murdiyarso, Fred
Stolle, Ahmad M. Fagi, Iswandi Anas, A.F.S. Budiman, Kenneth Chomitz, Rebecca
Elmhirst, Chip Fay, Hubert de Foresta, Dennis Garrity, Danan P. Hadi, Suryo
Hardiwinoto, Kurniatun Hairiah, Genevieve Michon, Nu Nu San, Cheryl Palm,
Soetjipto Partoharjono, Djuber Pasaribu, Eric Penot, Robert Simanungkalit,
Martua Sirait, S.M. Sitompul, F.X. Susilo, David Thomas
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This part of the report concerns Project Output 3.1, recommendations that link global environmental
benefits to land use practices by (a) assembling and prioritizing alternatives
to slash-and-burn in terms of sustainable agriculture and (b) analyzing
environmental impacts and collating these analyses with data on agricultural
productivity and sustainability of current and alternative land use. If
alternatives to slash-and-burn were to have hope for significant impact in Indonesia (or any of the countries involved in
ASB), the scope of the research project had to expand beyond climate change and
biodiversity reported in Part II. This
‘linking’ goal of the project, which necessarily involves assessments of
tradeoffs (and complementarities) among impacts spanning the plot, household,
landscape, watershed, and national level--as well as global environmental
phenomena—could not be achieved meaningfully without assessment of the sustainability and adoptability of the
alternatives reported in Parts III and IV.
V.1
ASB-Indonesia matrix
This ASB matrix approach was
developed as a tool to link global benefits with sustainable alternatives that
are adoptable by farmers (Vosti et al
1998; Tomich et al, 1998). The
ASB-Indonesia matrix links environmental, agronomic, policy, socioeconomic, and
institutional indicators and was developed in collaboration with scientists
from other ASB sites. These criteria and
selection of specific indicators were discussed in detail in Parts I-IV:
Indicators of global environmental impacts:
Carbon sequestration, measured as time averaged carbon
Biodiversity, using the aboveground species richness for vascular
plants
Agronomic sustainability:
Summary indicator and specific qualitative indicators for pests and
diseases
National policymakers’ concerns:
Potential profitability (comparative advantage), measured as the net
present value of returns to land assessed at social prices
Equity and stability, measured in part by employment
opportunities. Indicators of
adoptability presented below also are relevant to poverty alleviation
objectives derived from concerns about equity and stability.
Smallholders’
socioeconomic concerns and adoptability of land use alternatives
Production incentives (financial profitability)
received by smallholders, measured as returns to labor valued at private
prices.
Household food security, where one of the most important considerations
is the pathway for obtaining food: own production, exchange, or wage labor.
Qualitative indicators of problems in markets that may create barriers
to adoptability. Problems in input
supply, output, labor, and capital markets are indicated respectively by an
‘I’, ‘O’, ‘L’, or ‘K’. Uppercase letters
indicate serious constraints; referred to as ‘red lights’ below. Lowercase letters indicate potential
constriants; called ‘yellow lights’ below.
Qualitative indicators of other institutional problems that also have
the potential to create barriers to adoptability. The specific problems and issues considered
below were access to non-market information (indicated by an ‘N’), regulatory
issues (‘R’), local environmental issues (‘E’), insecure property rights (‘P’),
equity biases (‘B’), and need for social cooperation (‘C’). Again, uppercase denotes a ‘red light’ and
lowercase is a ‘yellow light’.
Now that this array of indicators
has been assembled in Table V.1, it is possible to examine tradeoffs and
complementarities across the various criteria.
V.2
Relationships among global benefits, sustainability, and local/national
objectives
Because of the multiple
criteria regarding production and environmental services of forests,
‘deforestation’ must be viewed as a multidimensional phenomenon. Sometimes this policy problem may simplify to
a few key dimensions (tradeoffs).
Conversion of natural forest has the major effect on the supply of
forest functions, but the subsequent land uses also matter a great deal for
agronomic sustainability and the supply of global environmental benefits. Table
V.1 presents very preliminary estimates of the orders of magnitude of these
differences for 7 systems that represent the major land uses in Sumatra’s peneplains, the low-elevation, undulating areas of poor soils that
comprise the island’s largest agroecological zone.
All the tree-based systems (smallholder agroforests and
monoculture as well as large-scale plantation monoculture) in Table V.1 are
agronomically sustainable. On the other hand, shortening of fallow rotations
from 10 years or more to less than 5 years with rising land scarcity is
undermining sustainability of shifting cultivation, which has been disappearing
anyway as population pressure increases in Sumatra (van Noordwijk et al.
1995a) And continuous cultivation of
cassava does not appear sustainable on this land because of depletion of
nutrients and of soil organic matter. On these soils, marginal revenues from
fertilizer applications to cassava do not cover fertilizer costs at current
prices, which are near the world market price for most nutrients except
nitrogen, which has been subsidized in Indonesia. (Subsequently, fertilizer subsidies were lifted.)
C sequestration depends largely on cycle length (frequency of clear
felling for rejuvenation). Where
treecrop systems can be rejuvenated without clear felling, a substantial
increase in C stock may be possible.
Moreover, there do not appear to be big differences among forest
extraction and the other tree-based systems regarding carbon stocks and
greenhouse gases. Thus, as far as agronomic sustainability and climate change
objectives are concerned, tree-based systems dominate among the alternatives.
Raising
productivity of rubber agroforests, which span millions of ha, offers a
promising pathway in Sumatra. There
appears to be great potential for raising profitability of these systems though
adaptation of existing higher-yielding clones within existing smallholder
systems, which would also enhance household food security and expand employment
opportunities. It may be possible to combine these potential benefits from the
perspective of smallholders and national policymakers with significant
biodiversity conservation because the mix of planted species is augmented by
natural regeneration of forest species (Michon and de Foresta; van Noordwijk et al. 1995b). Indeed, these agroforests may approximate a
number of forest functions, thereby providing the technical foundation for
sustainable community-based forest and watershed management. But it must be emphasized that agroforests
are not
perfect substitutes for biodiversity conservation in natural forests. Indeed
conversion of natural forests to agroforests involves a significant reduction
in species richness. For assessments of higher plants made along 100 m line
transects in Sumatra, over 350 species were
found in primary forests while the number dropped to about 250 species for
rubber agroforests. However, the richness remaining in agroforests still is
much higher than the 5 or so species of higher plants found in rubber
monoculture (Michon and de Foresta).
As discussed in Part IV, a key
unresolved question is whether the potential for development of smallholder
rubber agroforests can compete with the (private and social) profitability of
large-scale alternatives, including oil palm plantations, industrial timber
estates and logging concessions. These are viewed as ‘best bets’ for economic
development by many policymakers and donors, in large part because of
conventional wisdom of economies of scale in plantation development. If it turns out that large-scale
development alternatives are more profitable—recall from Part IV that this is
not a foregone conclusion—an important tradeoff between global environmental
benefits and national development objectives will have to be faced. This is
because there is an important tradeoff with biodiversity conservation for
large-scale plantation monocultures such as oil palm.
Even if further analysis shows that the
large-scale schemes hold no advantages in terms of private and social
profitability compared to smallholder schemes (see Part IV), a potential
tradeoff between profitability and biodiversity conservation remains to be
addressed concerning smallholder systems (van Noordwijk et al.,. 1995b). Farmer
management aimed at increasing productivity of systems often decreases
biodiversity. Whether or not this apparent trade-off between productivity and
biodiversity is inescapable is the subject of debate--and further research.
Very little is known about the shape of the family of curves describing the
trade-off function, or even whether a trade-off always exists (Figure V.1). If
the relationship is convex to the origin, even modest productivity gains cause
great loss of biodiversity. If the relationship is concave, biodiversity loss
is relatively slow for initial increases in productivity. In this case, raising
productivity to an intermediate level may involve a modest trade-off in terms
of biodiversity loss. Thus, two of the most important research questions
regarding the selection of ‘best bets’ in Sumatra are: what
is the shape of this family of curves? and what factors influence the
biodiversity of these complex, multistrata systems as productivity of their
components increases? So while there
may be a tradeoff between potential profitability and aboveground biodiversity
in tree-based production systems, this
requires further verification.
Figure V.1
Potential profitability
versus biodiversity for new technology
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V.3Potential for development of technological options
A wider range of tree-based
‘best bet’ alternatives for smallholders should be examined regarding their
environmental, agronomic, and economic impacts and feasibility of
adoption. The priorities listed in Table
V.2 were identified by scientists active in the ASB-Indonesia Research
Consortium at a national meeting held in Bogor on 6 May 1998.
Table V.2 Priorities for further studies of Sumatran
land uses
