Using Regenerative Agriculture to Heal the Land and Help Communities: Q&A With Kaleka Founder Silvia Irawan

In Seruyan, a regency in Indonesia’s Central Kalimantan province, independent smallholders are trialing regenerative agriculture strategies in their oil palm farms in an effort to shift away from environmentally degrading monoculture practices and restore ecosystems.

The intervention, run by non-profit research organization Kaleka (formerly Yayasan Inobu), has come out of a wider jurisdictional approach pilot that is aiming to bring all palm oil producers in the district, with over 320,000 hectares of plantations, into compliance with the international Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certification scheme.

One of the key targets of Seruyan’s Jurisdictional Approach is to encourage the certification and sale of Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO) by the district’s smallholders, which include both Indigenous Dayak people and transmigrant settlers from different provinces. However, as Kaleka’s deep village-level work is finding, there are complex challenges that need to be overcome if all independent smallholders are to be convinced to participate in this process.

These issues include demands on oil palm companies to fulfil their obligations to provide community plantations for local smallholders, and the growing number of Indigenous farmers wanting to cultivate their ancestral land for oil palm as a stable source of income. While communities are standing up for their land rights, it could also mean losing more forest cover, and potentially infringing RSPO’s no-deforestation rules, which were tightened in 2018 to include secondary forest.

Through regenerative agriculture trials, Kaleka is trying to find ways for smallholders to cultivate oil palm more sustainably, without reducing their incomes. To date, the organization has supported 220 independent smallholders across seven villages in Seruyan in adopting organic farming and agroforestry methods, alongside developing alternative livelihoods aimed at reducing reliance on oil palm over time.