A short presentation by Valentine Reiss-Woolever (PhD candidate, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge) on Crop choice: the social factors that influence oil palm smallholders and their ecological effects followed by Q&A and discussion with the speaker.
Coffee Break Seminars are a relaxed online learning and discussion platform for our food security community. Talks take place every Friday during term time at 2pm, UK time.
Please find the event recording here.
Abstract:
Oil palm, the world's most traded vegetable oil, is cultivated on over 19 million hectares of land, 40% of which is managed by smallholder farmers. As autonomous actors, independent farmers directly influence their plantations through management decisions, and are directly influenced by their plantations through oil palm income and food security from sustenance crops. Although it must only be done every quarter-century, the decision to replanting oil palm is a costly process, and to reduce the financial burden many smallholders choose to intercrop immature palm oil plants with other sustenance or market crops. This decision has lasting effects on farmer, crop, and the wider ecosystem. We have used social and ecological surveys from independent smallholders in Malaysia as a case study to determine which socio-demographic and attitude factors influence smallholder decisions to replant oil palm as a monoculture versus polyculture crop, and what the ecological impacts of that decision are.
Speaker:
Valentine Reiss-Woolever (PhD candidate, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge)