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Deforestation and the palm oil's effect : An Indonesian case study

(2017)

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Abstract
This paper highlights the role of palm oil expansion at the expense of global forests. We make this focus throughout the price elasticity of palm oil’s supply to know what will be the reaction of the palm oil plantations’ owners with a change in the palm oil price. Indonesia is the perfect country to learn about the possible effect played by palm oil on deforestation because it has major issue with deforestation and, at the same time, it is the main palm oil producer. We then use the Indonesia Database for Policy and Economic Research (found on the World Bank’s website) where palm oil production and area are listed for each district between 1976 and 2013. Our research studies effects of price changes on palm oil production and area. The focus is on the different types of palm oil plantations (private, smallholder or state owned enterprise) as they may respond differently to an increase in profitability of the crop (due to an increasing investment capacity, incentives and objective). Will an increase of the palm oil price lead to more or less production of palm oil? Will we observe differences between the different kinds of palm oil plantations’ ownership? Will the price make bigger changes on immature palm oil plantations (3 years or less), on mature palm oil plantations (4 years or more) or on already damaged palm oil plantations? Our results show that with both estimations (OLS and fixed-effects), the total production of palm oil do not increase and even decrease with poor significance though. However, we found a positive supply response to prices in the very short run. Total production of palm oil increases by 30.69 tons (with OLS) and by 50.88 tons (with fixed-effects) when the moving-average of prices in t-1 and t-3 increases by 1 dollar/ton. However, this latter coefficient is not significant. This shows some kinds of higher intensification of the production in the short run but these numbers are not that big though. The poor significance of our results for the different types of ownership does not allow us to make great conclusions about their differences. The little we can say is that both regressions with the public sector (production and area) are the most often significant. However, the sign of the coefficients of the production response to prices are negative which was not the sign expected. The same reasoning can be made for the different types of plantations. We get very poor significance for these variables (Mature, Immature and Damaged). The only one to be significant and with the positive expected sign is the damaged dependent variable. As the moving-average of prices in t-8, t-9 and t-10 increases by 1 dollar/ton, the damaged area increases by 2.338 ha (with OLS) and 2.735 ha (with fixed-effects). However, these coefficients are not big at all. This means more palm oil plantations are cleared and thus in a post-productive situation when the price of palm oil increases years ago. These results due to their poor significance are close to those found in the literature. Very low elasticities were found when the coefficients were significant. Palm oil plantations’ owners tend not to react to prices even when we try to take the year(s) of planting into account.