Palm Oil Smallholders Left Out of Corporate Zero-Deforestation Pledges, Study Finds

When multinational companies promise to purge deforestation from their supply chains, the fate of the world’s rainforests is often framed as a negotiation between corporate boardrooms and environmental campaigners. Yet a new study published in PLOS Sustainability and Transformation argues that the people most directly affected by these pledges, the smallholder farmers who cultivate much of the world’s oil palm, have been largely written out of the story. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Sumatra, Indonesia, researchers Adelina Chandra, Janina Grabs, Eva-Marie Meemken and Rachael D. Garrett reveal deep fractures in the relationships between companies and communities, and they make the case that zero-deforestation commitments will keep falling short unless they are rebuilt around principles of equity, recognition and care.

Zero-deforestation commitments, commonly abbreviated as ZDCs, have proliferated over the past decade as companies have sought to decouple commodity production from forest loss. Many of the most ambitious pledges are framed as NDPE commitments, standing for No Deforestation, No Peat and No Exploitation, a formulation that explicitly links environmental protection with social safeguards. On paper, these promises cover millions of hectares of tropical landscape. In practice, the study finds, they are designed almost exclusively by powerful downstream actors, such as traders, refiners and consumer goods manufacturers, without meaningful involvement of the upstream, non-industrial producers whose livelihoods and land access are shaped, both directly and indirectly, by the resulting rules.

To understand how these commitments land on the ground, the research team turned to the communities themselves. In two provinces in Sumatra, Indonesia, they conducted 28 focus group discussions with oil palm smallholders, cooperatives and other local stakeholders, alongside 25 expert interviews with individuals familiar with the dynamics of the palm oil sector. This bottom-up approach is unusual in a literature dominated by audits, certification data and corporate sustainability reports, and it allowed the researchers to capture how farmers experience the policies that govern their market access, rather than how those policies are described from headquarters.

The findings point to significant gaps in what the authors describe as procedural equity, the fairness of the processes through which decisions are made and grievances are addressed. Communities reported inadequate mechanisms for voicing concerns when company policies affected them, insufficient procedures for meaningful participation in the design and rollout of sustainability initiatives, and a striking lack of attention to how implementation was expected to proceed. In other words, smallholders were often told what new rules meant for their crops and their contracts, but they were rarely consulted about whether those rules made sense in their specific circumstances, or given credible channels to push back when they did not.

Procedural inequity is not merely a matter of hurt feelings or bad manners in corporate-community relations. It has material consequences. When smallholders lack information about which buyers will accept their fruit, or why a cooperative has been flagged for non-compliance, they face uncertainty that can depress prices, push production toward less scrupulous intermediaries, or drive land-use change into more vulnerable forests. The study suggests that the architecture of ZDCs, by concentrating decision-making power downstream, can reproduce precisely the exclusions that sustainability policies claim to remedy, leaving the farmers who are asked to change their practices with little ownership over the change itself.

Perhaps the study’s most important contribution is its insistence that history matters. The authors uncover what they call a critical need to recognise historical and ongoing relationships between communities and companies when designing corporate sustainability policies. In Sumatra, many communities have long, complicated entanglements with palm oil companies, involving land acquisitions, promises of development, employment arrangements and episodes of conflict. A zero-deforestation commitment that arrives as if on a blank slate, ignoring these accumulated relationships, is likely to be received with suspicion or indifference. Conversely, policies that acknowledge past grievances and build on existing social ties may find far more traction.

This relational perspective leads the researchers to propose a conceptual expansion of how equity is understood in supply chain governance. Equity, they argue, should be treated as an evolving concept, one that ideally should be shaped by contextual realities rather than fixed in advance by corporate checklists. Standard frameworks tend to emphasise distributional questions, such as who bears the costs of conservation and who reaps the benefits, and procedural questions, such as who gets a seat at the table. The study does not discard these dimensions but argues that they are incomplete without attention to the quality of the relationships themselves, including trust, recognition and mutual obligation.

From this insight flows the paper’s central recommendation: the integration of relational aspects and care-based support into zero-deforestation commitments. Care-based support, in this framing, means that companies would move beyond compliance monitoring toward actively supporting the communities on whom their supply bases depend, providing resources, flexibility and responsiveness attuned to local needs. Rather than treating smallholders primarily as risks to be audited, companies would treat them as partners whose wellbeing is integral to environmental outcomes. The authors position this as a complement to the current understanding of equity, not a replacement, adding a dimension that recognises vulnerability, dependence and the ethical significance of long-term relationships.

The implications extend well beyond Indonesian palm oil. Zero-deforestation commitments now span cocoa, soy, beef, timber and other commodities, and regulatory instruments in major consumer markets are increasingly hard-wiring such commitments into law. If the Sumatran evidence is representative, the effectiveness of this entire governance wave may hinge on factors that rarely appear in sustainability dashboards: whether farmers feel heard, whether companies honour relationships built over decades, and whether implementation procedures are designed with, rather than for, the people on the ground. The study’s bottom-up methodology offers a template for testing that proposition in other landscapes.

For the researchers, the message is ultimately one of redesign rather than rejection. They do not argue that corporate zero-deforestation commitments are futile; indeed, their concern is that these commitments will underdeliver unless the social fabric of producing regions is taken seriously. By weaving procedural fairness, historical recognition and care-based support into the design of ZDCs, companies and policymakers could align environmental ambition with the lived realities of smallholder producers. In the oil palm landscapes of Sumatra, where global supply chains meet village livelihoods, that alignment may determine whether the next decade of deforestation-free promises becomes reality or remains another pledge written far from the forest’s edge.

Subject of Research: Equity and community relations in corporate zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia's palm oil sector

Article Title: Relational aspects and care-based support in Zero-Deforestation Commitments

Article References: Chandra, A., Grabs, J., Meemken, E.-M., & Garrett, R. D. (2026). Relational aspects and care-based support in Zero-Deforestation Commitments. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(5), e0000235. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000235

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000235

Keywords: zero-deforestation commitments, oil palm smallholders, Indonesia, Sumatra, palm oil supply chains, procedural equity, NDPE, corporate sustainability, care-based support, community-company relations, supply chain governance, PLOS Sustainability and Transformation