Researchers led by Syaharuddin Alrif, Rahim Darma, Muhammad Hasbi, and Reza Asra applied a multidimensional sustainability assessment, adapted from a fisheries evaluation technique called RAPFISH, to the emerging konjac agrifood system in Sidenreng Rappang, one of the first areas in South Sulawesi to cultivate the crop commercially. Their approach, which they call RAP-Konjac, scored 27 attributes across five dimensions: economic, social, environmental, technological, and institutional. Thirty-two key informants, including twelve smallholder farmers, six local collectors, processing representatives, extension officers, academic researchers, and regional planners, provided structured scores on a five-point scale, with risk-based attributes such as export dependency reverse-coded so that higher values always meant more sustainable conditions.

The choice of study area was deliberate. Sidenreng Rappang had roughly 164 hectares of konjac under cultivation involving about 30 farmer groups and 600 farmers, and two districts, Pitu Riase and Watang Sidenreng, accounted for approximately 141 hectares, or 86 percent of the regency’s identified konjac area. Pitu Riase serves as the principal production center, while Watang Sidenreng hosts a processing factory capable of handling 40 to 70 tons of fresh tubers daily, along with aggregation, marketing, and logistics functions. Together they offered a complete window into the value chain, from field to factory gate.

The analytical machinery behind the assessment is elegant in its transparency. Multidimensional scaling transforms the ordinal attribute scores into positions within an ordination space, generating a sustainability index on a 0-to-100 scale for each dimension. Stress statistics below 0.20 and coefficients of determination above 0.80 confirmed that the ordinations fit the data well; in this study, stress values ranged from 0.145 to 0.165 and R-squared values from 0.924 to 0.933. Monte Carlo simulations, which rerun the analysis under random scoring perturbations, shifted the indices by no more than 1.39 points, meaning the results were robust to the inevitable uncertainty in expert judgment.

The headline number looks reassuring. Averaged across the five dimensions, the konjac system scored 57.41, placing it firmly in the moderately sustainable category. But the researchers’ central insight is that this aggregate figure conceals a striking asymmetry. The environmental dimension scored 67.73, the strongest of the five, while the technological dimension scored just 48.80, the only one classified as less sustainable. The 18.93-point gap between the best and worst dimensions reveals a system whose ecological foundation has developed far faster than its capacity to convert that potential into stable quality, local value addition, and resilient market participation.

The technological weakness is not a deep collapse but a near-threshold constraint, sitting just below the 50-point boundary that separates less sustainable from moderately sustainable. That positioning matters for policy, because it suggests comparatively focused improvements in farmer-level post-harvest facilities, industrial downstream processing access, certified seed systems, logistics, and innovation support could shift the dimension into a stronger category. Without such improvements, farmers remain locked into selling fresh tubers, while actors with processing facilities capture most of the value added. Nationally, the scale of this mismatch is stark: of more than 700,000 tons of konjac produced in 2020 and 2021, only about 150,000 tons met export requirements, a gap attributed to product quality, processing capacity, and compliance with market standards.

To identify where intervention would matter most, the team performed a leverage analysis, removing each attribute in turn from the ordination and measuring how much the sustainability configuration shifted. Seven attributes exceeded the high-leverage threshold of a root mean square change of 10 or more. Supply chain efficiency scored 14.90 and export market dependency 14.89, followed almost identically by agricultural extension at 14.88 and partnership effectiveness at 14.66. Seed variety conservation (11.56) and pest and disease management (11.14) anchored the environmental dimension, while industrial downstream processing technology sat exactly at the 10.00 threshold. Notably, none of the five social attributes reached even the borderline range, suggesting that social factors function as long-term enablers rather than immediate leverage points.

Combining each dimension’s sustainability status with its leverage scores produced a clear policy priority ranking: technology first, then economic restructuring, institutional strengthening, ecological consolidation, and finally inclusive rural capacity building. The economic findings carry a particular warning. Heavy dependence on a narrow export market exposes farmers and processors to external demand shocks, shifting quality standards, and buyer concentration, while fragmented supply chains raise transaction costs and weaken farmers’ bargaining positions. The researchers argue that konjac development should not be managed solely as an export-oriented commodity opportunity; transparent pricing, clearer grading standards, domestic market development, and stronger buyer-farmer coordination are equally essential. Institutional support, especially commodity-specific extension services, is the glue that holds these improvements together, because konjac cultivation, drying, slicing, grading, and quality standards all demand specialized knowledge that many farmers currently lack.

The environmental story is more nuanced than the strong 67.73 score might suggest. The assessment covered locally observable management practices, erosion risk, pest management, seed conservation, and chemical input use, but it did not quantify water use, energy consumption, or greenhouse gas emissions, so the index reflects local environmental management rather than a complete life-cycle footprint. Even so, the high leverage of seed variety conservation and pest management signals a real vulnerability: as commercial cultivation expands, reliance on selected planting materials can erode genetic diversity and intensify disease pressure. Ecological suitability, the authors conclude, is a necessary foundation for konjac development but is nowhere near sufficient on its own for a sustainable transformation.

Perhaps the most transferable lesson of the study is methodological. A system can be classified as moderately sustainable overall while remaining poorly prepared for transformation in one or more of its enabling dimensions, a condition the researchers call asymmetric sustainability. By pairing dimension-specific indices with attribute-level leverage scores, RAP-Konjac turns stakeholder knowledge into a transparent, testable order of policy attention, an approach that could be applied to other konjac-producing regions and to other emerging bio-based commodities racing from forest edge to global market. The konjac boom in South Sulawesi is real, and its ecological footing is comparatively solid, but whether smallholder farmers capture a fair share of the glucomannan economy will depend on closing the technology gap before the raw-material export pathway hardens into permanence.

Subject of Research: Multidimensional sustainability assessment of Indonesia's emerging konjac (porang) agrifood system using RAPFISH-based multidimensional scaling in Sidenreng Rappang Regency

Article Title: Multidimensional sustainability assessment of Indonesia's emerging konjac agrifood system: A case study in Sidenreng Rappang

Article References: Alrif, S., Darma, R., Hasbi, M., & Asra, R. (2026). Multidimensional sustainability assessment of Indonesia's emerging konjac agrifood system: A case study in Sidenreng Rappang. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101555. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101555

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.indic.2026.101555

Keywords: konjac, porang, glucomannan, sustainability assessment, RAPFISH, multidimensional scaling, agrifood system, Indonesia, South Sulawesi, smallholder farmers, value chain, transition readiness

The study was led by Professor Muhammad Alif K. Sahide, who heads the Forest and Society Research Group at Hasanuddin University’s Faculty of Forestry, working with researchers at other Indonesian institutes, and was published in the journal Forest Policy and Economics. It dissects two consecutive national experiments: Strategi Jangka Benah, or SJB — the “Rehabilitation Period Strategy” rolled out in 2020–2021 — and Presidential Regulation No. 5/2025, the enforcement-first framework that succeeded it. Critically, the team did not limit itself to reading policy documents. By engaging directly with stakeholders in Central Kalimantan and West Sulawesi, two regions where SJB was actually implemented, the researchers observed how these instruments behave on real landscapes and among real farming communities rather than in ministerial offices. Their diagnosis is stark: Indonesia has oscillated between two competing logics — incorporating oil palm growers into a legal framework, and reappropriating the land through state control — and neither logic confronts the underlying drivers of forest conversion. That blind spot, they conclude, is precisely where the problem lives.

The technical roots of the dilemma run deep into Indonesian land law. Vast territories are formally designated as kawasan hutan — the state forest zone — a status based on administrative classification rather than on what is actually happening on the ground. Cultivating oil palm inside these zones without formal forest-area approval is, on paper, encroachment, even when farming families have worked the land for years. That is how millions of hectares of productive, established plantations ended up in legal limbo: agronomically rooted, economically indispensable, and formally unauthorized. The economics explain why the overlap persists. Oil palm is among the most remunerative crops a smallholder can grow; it fruits year-round, generates harvest income on a near-monthly cycle through the sale of fresh fruit bunches to processing mills, and outcompetes most alternative land uses in financial return. As international pressure for sustainably sourced palm oil intensified, the overlap between commodity expansion and state forest land became politically untenable, pushing Jakarta to attempt what no policy has yet achieved: protecting the forest estate without dismantling the rural livelihoods built on palm. For the state, the forest zone is fundamentally a question of legality; for the farmers inside it, it is a question of survival — and the two have rarely been reconciled.

The first serious attempt to untangle the knot was SJB, introduced across 2020–2021. Its name translates roughly as a “buffering period strategy” — a deliberate pause designed to let reality on the ground catch up with the law. Instead of evicting farmers or clearing plantations, the strategy allowed existing oil palm cultivation to continue through a transitional period while farmers were expected to progressively convert their monocultures into mixed agroforestry systems. In principle, this is elegant landscape engineering. Agroforestry interlaces cash crops with timber species, fruit trees, and food crops, rebuilding a more complex canopy structure that can improve soil cover, reduce erosion, diversify household income, and soften the ecological footprint of industrial monoculture. SJB explicitly prioritized gradual rehabilitation and social inclusion, betting that a defined buffer period would let farmers adjust without livelihood shock. The state, in effect, traded immediate enforcement for a promise of transformation: keep farming for now, but begin replacing a single-crop system with a layered, more forest-like one.

The fieldwork in Central Kalimantan and West Sulawesi exposed why that wager largely failed. Converting a productive oil palm stand into agroforestry is not a cost-neutral ecological upgrade; it is a major economic sacrifice. Timber and many food crops mature slowly, while palm oil pays continuously. Yet SJB offered farmers few economic incentives to make the transition — no meaningful subsidies, no guaranteed markets for alternative crops, no bridge financing for the lean years. With palm oil remaining profitable and alternative livelihoods limited, replacing productive plantations with slower-growing timber or food crops was, for most smallholders, economically irrational. In stakeholder engagements across the two provinces, the same calculation surfaced repeatedly: diversification made ecological sense, but without compensation, credit, or markets for alternatives, it meant an income loss that small families could not absorb. Oil palm was not merely a crop in these landscapes; it was the backbone of household cash flow, and a policy that asked farmers to uproot their most reliable income without replacing it asked them to personally underwrite forest restoration.

Then the pendulum swung. In early 2025, the government issued Presidential Regulation No. 5/2025, reframing the problem as one of law enforcement and territorial control. The regulation introduced administrative penalties, opened the door to potential criminal enforcement against violations, and empowered the state to reclaim forest land. Where SJB asked how to bring farmers along, Perpres 5/2025 asks how to take the land back. The Hasanuddin team warns that this shift leaves the implications for smallholder livelihoods dangerously undefined. The regulation frames reclamation primarily through enforcement and territorial control — who is penalized, who is removed — while saying little about what happens to the people who cultivated the land, or who will control it afterward. The researchers find that this enforcement-oriented approach could create further uncertainty over land and livelihoods, precisely the conditions under which long-term stewardship of land tends to collapse. For smallholders already living with legal ambiguity, the new regime can convert a stable, if informal, livelihood into a precarious one almost overnight.

That gap matters because of who is best positioned to absorb reclaimed land. The researchers caution that forest land recovered through reclamation could become concentrated among state-owned companies or other actors with greater political, bureaucratic, or financial influence — a dynamic that would marginalize smallholders even further while leaving the underlying economics of oil palm untouched. Enforcement without tenure clarification, in other words, does not eliminate the incentives driving conversion; it merely changes who can safely act on them. The team characterizes the two policies as fragments of a fragmented governance architecture: SJB prioritized gradual rehabilitation and social inclusion, while Perpres 5/2025 places far greater emphasis on law enforcement and state control. What neither confronts is the structural engine of conversion — profitable global demand, insecure land rights, and the scarcity of viable rural alternatives — which means the forest frontier keeps advancing no matter which enforcement mood prevails.

The researchers’ alternative begins where both policies have so far refused to go: land rights. Before penalties are imposed, they argue, the state must clarify who holds legal rights to the land, so that enforcement does not criminalize farmers for administrative ambiguities the state itself created. Social forestry programs — community-based tenure and management schemes — should be used to give smallholders secure, legally recognized rights over the land they farm, converting today’s gray zone into a governed one. This is not merely a matter of fairness; it is a question of investment logic. Farmers will not plant slow-growing timber trees or diversify into food crops if they believe the plot could be reclaimed next year, because agroforestry only pays across time horizons that insecure tenure cannot guarantee.

The blueprint also reaches upward and outward. Local communities, the study argues, should be involved directly in planning forest restoration, and must share in the benefits of restored land, so that conservation competes with palm oil on economic terms rather than moral ones. Coordination must also span the whole of government: the agriculture, forestry, and energy ministries need aligned policies on farming, palm oil, biodiesel, and forest protection, so that the state is not simultaneously stimulating palm demand through energy policy while policing its expansion through forestry law. Without that alignment, every field-level intervention fights incentives created upstream, and the cycle of conversion, amnesty, and crackdown simply repeats itself with sharper edges each time.

The study’s deepest message is that forest restoration cannot be separated from the livelihoods and land rights of the communities who live inside these landscapes. Without addressing land rights and economic needs, the researchers conclude, new regulations risk producing uncertainty without resolving the underlying challenge. “The challenge, then, is not merely to design better policies, but to build governance architectures that can navigate the inherent trade-offs between economic, social, and ecological goals in a transparent, accountable, and equitable manner,” says Professor Alif. The analysis was made available online on June 13, 2026, and published in Volume 189 of Forest Policy and Economics on August 1, 2026, arriving just as Perpres 5/2025 begins to reshape practice across the Indonesian archipelago. With roughly 3.4 million hectares of oil palm at stake, and global scrutiny of palm oil supply chains intensifying, the question is no longer whether Indonesia will act on its forest zones, but whether it will act in a way that keeps both forests and forest communities standing.