Indonesia's palm oil: the other side

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Imane writes:*

Imagine you planned a trip to Jakarta and are all excited about the pleasant temperatures of Indonesia. You try Googling ‘Jakarta’ and you see impressive skylines. You try again, but this time you add ‘haze’ to it. Suddenly, Jakarta became a lot less interesting and the comfortable temperatures do not matter as much anymore. You probably do remember the large media coverage of the expanding forest fires in 2015, caused by the unsustainable use of palm oil fields, but did not realize what environmental impact this actually had. While being the world’s largest supplier of palm oil, Indonesia has been struggling with the negative externalities of this strongly demanded commodity. The government has been put in the spotlights, while being accused not to take action in order to correct for the externalities. But what could and should the government do?

Whereas Friedrich Hayek would argue that the market will solve for the externalities, few people think the Indonesian government should not take action. The benefits of supplying and exporting palm oil are quite clear: it has contributed 4.5% to Indonesia’s GDP in 2010, and was nearly 7% of total export value. However, these benefits are not as equally divided over the cost bearers. Besides the regular costs that are calculated into the price of palm oil, negative externalities often fall upon other people that do not enjoy these benefits. Such negative externalities can be the damage to surrounding lands, the health implications from breathing the smoke, and the well-known haze: an environmental pollution that refers to the accumulation of small particles in the air, usually resulting from human activities such as deliberate forest burnings (Othman, 2006). Moreover, the Indonesian people are not the only ones who bear the costs: neighboring countries bear many of the environmental costs as well. In 2015, Malaysia had to close their schools for a few days because of the dangerous smoke that came from Indonesia. This example shows the far-extending externalities of burning forests to increase the yield of palm oil, while the benefits and costs are far from distributed fairly.

The demand for palm oil has been increasing over the years, which is why it is attractive to Indonesian palm oil producers to continue their production, as long as their benefits outshine the costs. However, the government could redistribute the burdens by increasing the tax for palm oil producers in order to increase their costs. This will allow the price of palm oil to go up, which will lead to less demand, less usage and therefore less negative externalities. Moreover, the money raised from this behavioral tax could be used to cover the externality costs. Another option could be the implementation and enforcement of stricter rules that will prevent as many negative externalities as possible. The ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) has formulated a Regional Haze Action Plan (RHAP), but due to game theoretical perspectives, this plan has not been successful. It is therefore a challenge to recommend either governmental or market solutions to correct for the negative externalities of palm oil in Indonesia, but by distributing the benefits and costs as fairly as possible, possible solutions could be approached.

Bottom Line: The government of Indonesia should correct for the negative externalities of burning palm oil fields. Increasing tax or implementing stricter rules should allow the benefits and costs to be distributed more fairly.