2025 palm oil barometer demands fairer value chains to support smallholder farmers

A caller planetary study is calling for a extremist translation of thenar lipid procurement practices to guarantee fairer returns for smallholder farmers crossed West Africa.

The Palm Oil Barometer 2025: Procurement for Prosperity, released by Solidaridad and endorsed by assorted smallholder representatives and cultivation experts, highlights the urgent request for equitable worth organisation successful the thenar lipid sector.

The study underscores the cardinal relation of lipid thenar successful nutrient information and livelihoods successful West Africa, describing it arsenic a harvest with the imaginable to assistance farming families retired of poorness wrong a generation.

Despite this promise, smallholder farmers, who predominate the region’s lipid thenar production, proceed to person a disproportionately debased stock of profits.

In Ghana, smallholders are liable for managing astir 81% of the country’s lipid thenar cultivation area, yet galore look challenges specified arsenic debased yields and mediocre entree to ceremonial markets. Similar issues persist crossed the region.

In Nigeria, wherever smallholders relationship for 80% of nationalist thenar lipid production, farmers proceed to trust connected outdated processing techniques and conflict with constricted infrastructure.

Côte d’Ivoire’s smallholders negociate 73% of lipid thenar land, portion successful Sierra Leone, astir 70% of thenar lipid is produced by small-scale farmers, galore of whom beryllium connected harvesting chaotic thenar groves.

The study besides noted a determination imbalance arsenic West Africa consumes much thenar lipid than it produces, forcing galore countries to trust heavy connected imports.

This shortfall, coupled with systemic barriers specified arsenic constricted entree to inputs and capital, restricts smallholders from boosting accumulation and contributing much importantly to nationalist nutrient security.

“Governments and industry, successful collaboration with sustainability certification platforms, request to follow a caller concern exemplary for engagement, organisational development, and capableness gathering that supports improved entree to inputs and markets for autarkic smallholder farmers,” it mentioned.

The Palm Oil Barometer 2025 identifies the unequal organisation of worth on the proviso concatenation arsenic a halfway contented preventing smallholders from afloat benefiting from the planetary thenar lipid trade.

The study raises captious questions astir the viability of sustainable accumulation if farmers cannot unafraid just compensation oregon put successful climate-resilient practices.

It noted that, "Smallholders successful Africa, are peculiarly susceptible to volatile marketplace prices and the expanding interaction of clime change, which puts their already precarious incomes astatine further risk."

The study truthful calls connected policymakers, manufacture leaders, and sustainability bodies to rethink procurement strategies and guarantee that those astatine the instauration of the proviso chain, smallholder farmers, are not near behind.

SSD/MA