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.)

 

 


Table V.1   ASB Matrix for the Forest Margins of Sumatra

Land use

Global environment

Agronomic sustainability

National policymakers’ concerns

Adoptability by smallholders

Description

Scale of operation / evaluation

Carbon

sequestration

Biodiversity

Plot-level production sustainability 

Potential profitability

Employment

Production incentives

House-hold food security

Institutional & policy issues

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time averaged   (Mg/ha)

 Plant species/

standard plot

Overall rating

Main sustain-ability issues (1)

Returns to land

(Rp 000 / ha) at social prices

Time averaged labor input (days/ha/yr)

Returns to Labor

(Rp  / day) at private prices

Food entitle-mint

via:

Market imperfections (2)

Other institutional problems (3)

 

Natural forest

25 ha fragment / 1 ha

254

 

120

 

1

 

0

 

0

 

0

 

n.a.

 

 

 

Community-based forest management

35,000 ha common forest

 / 1 ha

176

 

100

 

1

 

9.4 to 18

0.2 to 0.4

11,000 to 12,000

own prodn & exchange

o

N, R, P, C

 

Commercial logging

35,000 ha concession / 1 ha

150

 

90

 

0.5

C

(32) to 2,102

31

(17,349) to  2,008

 

wages

O, K

N, R, E, P, B, C

 

Rubber agroforest

1-5 ha plots / 1 ha

116

90

0.5

C

73

111

4,000

exchange

 

P, b, c

 

Rubber agroforest w/ clonal planting material

1-5 ha plots / 1 ha

103

60

0.5

C,K,W,P

234 to 3,622

150

3,900 to 6,900

exchange

I, k

N, P, b, c

 

Rubber monoculture

1-5 ha plots / 1 ha

97

 

25

 

0.5

C,W,P

 

(993)

 

 

133

 

 

3,683

 

exchange

I, k

N, P, b, c

 

Oil palm monoculture

35,000 ha estate

/ 1 ha

91

25

0.5

C,Fert

1,480

108

5,797

wages

I, o, K

N, R, e, P, B, c

 

Upland rice / bush fallow rotation

1-2 ha plots / 1 ha

74

45

0.5

Fert,P

(180) to 53

15 to 25

2,700 to 3,300

own production

 

n, P, c

 

Continuous cassava degrading to Imperata

1-2 ha plots within settlement project / 1 ha

 

39

15

 

0

C,Fert,W

(315) to 603

 

98 to 104

 

3,895 to 4,515

 

own prod’n & exchange

o, K

n, E, p, c

 

Notes for Table V.1

(1) Plot-level production sustainability: C = soil compaction; K = potassium balance; Fert = cost P = pest or disease problem  

(2) Market imperfections: I = input market problem; O = output market problem; L = labor market problem; K = capital market problem

(3) Other institutional problems: N = non-market information problem; R = regulatory problem; E = local environmental problem; B = equity biases (gender or distributional); C = social cooperation required

For market imperfections and other institutional problems: upper case letters indicate more serious problems

 


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

 
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