10/7/2023 0 Comments Big farm mobile harvest facebook![]() ![]() Long before the Dutch brought the oil palm from West Africa to Southeast Asia in the 1840s, coconut palms grew across the region, from India to the islands of the Pacific. “Coconut is dominated by smallholders, and the issues they are facing, including low productivity, low investment and lack of access to markets, are creating a vicious cycle,” said Chandra Pandjiwibowo, senior director for Asia-Pacific at the Rainforest Alliance. Decades of under-investment and neglect mean both trees and coconut farmers are getting old, putting the future of production across the region at risk. Palm oil has replaced locally produced coconut oil in many Indonesian, Malaysian and even Filipino kitchens. ![]() At local markets, the farmers also sold products like coconut sugar, coconut milk and dried coconut. ![]() “Riau province was one of the biggest areas of coconut,” said Amrizal, who has been working in the industry since 1984, and today leads the Indonesian Association for Coconut Product Manufacturers.Īt his family’s house, their cooking oil came from coconut grown almost entirely by smallholder farmers. Back then, the Indonesian island of Sumatra was heavily forested, dotted with rubber plantations, and home to tens of thousands of small-scale coconut farmers. When Amrizal Idroes was growing up in West Sumatra in the 1970s, he remembers how nearly no one had heard of palm oil. ![]()
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