Stanford Seed Project Explores Palm Oil Production To Combat Poverty

Stanford Graduate School of Business recently explored a Stanford Seed research project that explores how the expansion of the global palm oil sector could enhance “rural incomes, alleviate poverty and reduce tropical deforestation” and “transform the way that companies and governments operate in the massive palm oil space,” particularly in West Africa and Indonesia.

Stanford earth system science professor and Center on Food Security and the Environment Director Rosamond Naylor, whose area of expertise is the palm oil industry, is leading the project, which attempts to address the threat that large-scale multinational palm oil production—particularly in West and Central Africa—has on the ability of smallholding farmers who initially chop down the palm fruit to survive.

One of the major issues Naylor and her team are wrestling with is how to find “a way for large multinational companies to halt deforestation, while allowing for the increased participation of independent farmers.” Naylor says that the zero-deforestation measures these companies have begun to adopt significantly reduce the ability to source from independent smallholder farmers who often “cut and burn swaths of priceless natural forest, destroying habitat and emitting damaging greenhouse gases and regional air pollutants into the environment.”

Naylor says, “These are women and men who really have almost nothing, who are surviving day in and day out just by producing a few bunches of this fruit and are very anxious to improve their livelihoods.”

Naylor’s team works “on the ground with company leaders, farmers, policymakers and NGOs to investigate the issue from all perspectives” in an effort to get “people in these countries to take on this project themselves and take it forward without any Stanford assistance overall.”

“What matters most to me is that people have a dignified life.”

regions: San Francisco

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