Across southeastern Liberia, oil palms grow wild in the forest. Known as “country palm,” the Elaeis guineensis tree is native to West Africa and treasured by local communities.

“In the rural areas where there are palms in the wild, if you want to farm in those areas people will say to you, ‘Do not cut down the palm trees!’” says James Otto, program coordinator at the Sustainable Development Initiative, an environmental and community rights NGO based in Liberia. “The palm is usable by everybody, it’s not one person to a palm tree.”

Harvesting the fruit is traditionally a communal effort, and it’s manually processed into cooking oil and butter that’s then used in almost every dish, along with multiple other household and medicinal purposes. Selling products made from country palm at the local market has long been a source of income for subsistence farmers.

“I remember my grandfather doing that,” Otto says. “But it is not only for livelihood purposes, it has a serious tie with our culture, with our way of life.”

He cites the example of traditional leaders visiting from other parts of Liberia where there was no wild palm to obtain and bring back seeds, “so they would germinate in their own land areas, so it’s a key tradition for the people of Liberia.”

Wild oil palm is not only beneficial for communities, but for birds and mammals too; it’s native to one of the largest contiguous blocks of lowland rainforest in West Africa, “so there are a lot of important species of conservation concern in those areas,” says Ben Freeman, a conservation biologist at the University of Liberia.

“One of the most endangered bird species [in the region] is the Timneh parrot [Psittacus timneh], which feeds on oil palm a lot, as well as hornbills,” he says. “[E]ven pangolins make use of the palm trees for their habitats, so it is a key part of the ecosystem.”

Despite native oil palm’s longstanding presence in Liberia’s forests and traditional communities, there’s been little research into its use. However, the social and ecological value of country palm farming is now being quantified as part of the Sustainable Oil Palm in West Africa (SOPWA) Project, a collaboration between the University of Liberia and the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Based in Sinoe county, the project is comparing old-growth forest with country palm farming plots and industrial plantations owned by industry giant Golden Veroleum Liberia, one of the largest oil palm companies in Liberia, to measure the relative biodiversity and survey the ecosystems within each land use type.

“There was no comprehensive research program that was looking at the whole ecosystem impacts of oil palm production in Africa,” says SOPWA Project coordinator Michael Pashkevich. This is needed, he says, as most of the understanding of the environmental impacts of oil palm has so far been based on large-scale and smallholder monoculture plantations in Southeast Asia.

Commercial oil palm production has been expanding in West Africa in recent decades, as corporations from Southeast Asia have sought new territory to establish plantations, but the context in this region is “really ecologically and culturally different,” Pashkevich says.

The deeply rooted relationship between country palm farming and the forest is embedded in these differences, and Pashkevich says this could offer a completely different way of thinking about the oil palm crop that has become synonymous with environmental destruction.

“At a basic level, country palm is in a state of natural regeneration, as farmers rotate cultivation across the landscape, ensuring that it is never at such a rate that it’s going to threaten the rainforest permanently over time, which makes it very sustainable,” he says.

Country palm cultivation is part of the shifting agriculture system, with farmers rotating crops such as rice and cassava over areas of land and burning them at the end of the dry season. They don’t cut down the old palms when they plant new crops, because they’re beneficial to the community. And besides, the trees are fire tolerant, so withstand the burning process, says Freeman, who’s also the in-country coordinator for the SOPWA Project.

“Most of the local population are involved in farming, but the primary objective is not oil palm farming,” he says. “[T]hey farm for rice and other food products, and eventually the natural regeneration that takes place includes oil palm.”

The general pattern from the field study data, so far, is that country palm sits somewhere in between rainforest and industrial palm in terms of the types of species that it hosts and their relative abundance.

“So, if the rainforest is an actual system, country palm is this secondary regenerating rainforest and then you have this highly modified system, so it represents this nice middle ground,” Pashkevich says.

Unsurprisingly, the field data show that country palm plots have higher levels of plant species diversity compared to monoculture oil palm production systems.

“In our plant survey we found 22 species in our country palm across all of our plots, so that accounts for about a third of the total species that we found in the rainforest and that’s within a relatively small 50x50m [164×164-foot] plot,” Pashkevich says.

SOPWA also found that country palm settings also remain cooler than industrial oil palm plantations when daytime temperatures peak. This is when habitat changes have the greatest impact on ecosystems through influences in microclimate, according to a 2024 paper published by SOPWA researchers in Science of The Total Environment.

From a biodiversity perspective, a cooler environment means the species assemblages of country palm plots are more likely to resemble those of rainforests, Pashkevich says.

“For many animals and plants, the microclimate is really important and not just in terms of where they prefer to inhabit, but it can be really critical in a heatwave where they can take refuge,” he says. “[S]o it’s important for biodiversity because a change will also predict changes in ecosystem functioning as well.”

These insights into country palm could also provide “a very nice source of ideas from West Africa, in ways to mitigate some of the ecological impacts of production,” Pashkevich adds.

This could mean advances in multispecies agroforestry design and the value of having a more diverse understory in industrial oil palm plantations, he suggests.

Although the definition is in flux, regenerative agriculture strategies such as these are gaining traction in Indonesia and Malaysia where large-scale experiments within commercial plantations are showing promising results for how they can improve biodiversity and ecosystem functions, reduce the need for chemical inputs, as well as boost crop resilience to climate change.

“Thinking of the application of wild harvested oil palm as part of diversified agroforestry systems and trying to understand more about the diversity of the species and associated management practices could be a really promising contribution to regenerative agriculture and restoration,” says Rachael Garrett, professor of conservation and development at the University of Cambridge.

From a management perspective, another finding coming out of the SOPWA Project is the importance of retaining rainforest around industrial plantations to support restoration.

“The country palm system works well alongside the industrial oil palm plantations in southeast Liberia because they are still surrounded by large amounts of rainforest, including high carbon value and high carbon stock conserved forest,” Pashkevich says.

This means there’s “a very high chance that the rainforest will re-establish in these areas if the plantations are one day abandoned, so there’s an option still,” he says.

“We can see that as we move through the plantations, it’s obvious that in the edge habitats near the rainforest there’s a higher amount of forest species growing in the understory relative to the interior of the plantations, so there’s an obvious spillover that would occur,” he adds.

The SOPWA Project is also finding that the industrial settings aren’t entirely a dead zone for biodiversity. “If the goal is to maximize the amount of biodiversity across the landscape, then there is a role for oil palm in the conversation because in this mosaic landscape you get the species from the rainforest, you get the species from the oil palm and the species from the country palm.

“It’s not that I’m advocating that rainforest should be turned into oil palm, but there are species within it at a relatively high number and that includes species that are conservation sensitive,” Pashkevich says.

In terms of sustainable oil palm management of both industrial and country palm settings, “a lot of what we’re learning is that it’s the landscape scale that really matters,” he adds.

In Liberia, there’s still a chance to avoid the rampant expansion that occurred in parts of Indonesia and Malaysia at the turn of the millennium, where more than 80% of the world’s palm oil is cultivated. Restoration of these plantations is expected to become an increasingly challenging issue, as soil degradation from multiple plantings diminishes productivity over time.

“The main challenge in Southeast Asia is there’s huge areas of land where the rainforest has been cleared and it’s unlikely the rainforest will re-establish without intensive effort,” Pashkevich says.

“In Liberia this is not an issue yet, so long as it can retain that rainforest.”

So far, oil palm expansion has fallen far short of the government’s expectations for economic development. After Liberia’s civil conflict ended in 2003, the administration of then-President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf awarded four oil palm corporations with ties to Southeast Asia more than 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres) of unused concession land. But the companies have been unable to expand production to the extent of their concession agreements.

The stalled development is in large part due to the zero-deforestation commitments made by the companies, according to a study published recently in the journal World Development. The large amounts of high conservation value and high carbon stock forest within the concession areas also restricts expansion under the international sustainability requirements of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

Golden Veroleum Liberia, as one case, is currently cultivating oil palm on 20,000 hectares out of its 220,000-hectare concession agreement (49,400 out of 544,000 acres), having been told by the RSPO to halt further expansion until deforestation and land rights disputes have been resolved, as Mongabay reported in 2021.

Responding to a query from Mongabay on whether GVL had plans to expand and if it had since resolved the complaints with the RSPO, the company said in a statement:

“GVL’s total planted area is around 20,000 ha. The exact details are reported to the RSPO annually. While GVL’s concession agreement identifies a larger area of interest for potential development, any new development would be subject to approval, including community consent.

“The RSPO complaint against GVL was closed for monitoring in June 2023 and GVL is implementing the RSPO’s recommendations, as detailed in quarterly progress reports.”

Commentators Mongabay spoke to say the other oil palm corporations face similar constraints on expansion.

“The promised development hasn’t happened and the expansion of  plantations has been slowed, at least in part to meet international requirements for sustainable oil palm to conserve forests,” says Joss Lyons-White, lead author of the World Development study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Conservation and Development Group at the University of Cambridge.

This has created a paradoxical situation where communities with plantations want to stop expansion, but others in forested areas are frustrated by the lack of oil palm development, according to the study.

Since customary land rights were strengthened by a new law in 2018, land disputes are also an ongoing issue for plantation companies. At the outset, the concession agreements were made without proper consultation with the communities, according to Otto from the Sustainable Development Initiative.

“In some instances, local farmers accepted the plantations at the initial stage without fully understanding what large-scale plantation would mean to them, then later started to resist when the company started to expand,” Otto says. “This has created many challenges, including conflict within communities over royalties from the land and it has created more poverty.”

While the plantations have brought employment opportunities for local communities, often this is only a short-term benefit, Otto says. In addition, the long-awaited smallholder outgrower schemes — through which small-scale farmers supply crops to companies — that were supposed to be attached to each of the awarded concessions have not yet come to fruition due to a lack of available government funding.

“Industrial oil palm can only provide wage labor, whereas outgrower schemes can provide opportunities for smallholders to develop their own businesses and have some independence even though they’re contractually tied to mills, so the fact that that hasn’t developed has certainly been a major problem [for Liberia’s oil palm expansion strategy],” Lyons-White says.

Instead, the presence of industrial oil palm is destabilizing rural livelihoods, including country palm farming, Otto says.

Where farmland has been turned into plantation, locals now have to buy the produce they would otherwise have grown themselves. “It takes them from a sustenance base to a market base and that challenges them for real. Now to live in the industrial oil palm areas you need to have other skills, such as technical or teaching, so those are the challenges that come along,” Otto says.

“The more large-scale industrial monoculture plantation that’s planted, the more it is clearing land in the forest area, which means they are taking away the traditional palms, so it puts locals who are dependent on the land for their livelihoods and sustenance at risk,” he adds.

Mongabay reached out to the Ministry of Agriculture for comment, but didn’t receive a response by the time this article was published.

The Sustainable Development Initiative, along with other civil society organizations, is calling for the government to reprioritize its oil palm strategy away from large-scale industrial to a smallholder community-driven model.

“Our call is not only from us, it is embedded into the national oil palm strategy and action plan,” Otto says.

The action plan includes an objective for developing financing mechanisms for community oil palm development. However, as with the outgrower scheme, the funding to achieve this wasn’t provided by the previous government, Otto says. The new president, Joseph Boakai, who took office in January 2024, has vowed to prioritize agriculture and sustainable development, including enhancing smallholder activity. But it’s unclear whether his plans also include expanding monoculture oil palm, Otto says.

“We are saying that the existing large-scale plantations should remain as they are, but the priority should be for community driven small-scale oil palm. This puts the economy in the hands of the local people who are now the owners of the land and gives the space for them to farm and to continue their traditional activities,” he says.

Garrett, the Cambridge professor, agrees that a local, community-focused approach would be best for Liberia’s palm oil future, adding that expansion plans should avoid the monoculture mindset typical of industrial agriculture.

“I would frame it as scaling up traditional diversified agroforestry systems within which oil palm is a component,” she says.

Freeman says small-scale oil palm cultivation is deeply rooted in many rural communities in Liberia, and needs to be part of the plan for a sustainable future.

“I think the lessons to learn from this [research] process, are recognizing that country palm farming is part of the culture and livelihood and to allow communities to continue to strive in this landscape,” he says.

Banner image: Liberia is home to three species of pangolin, which are also referred to scaly anteaters and are considered the world’s most-trafficked mammals. They are also threatened by habitat loss. This tree pangolin (Phataginus tricuspis) is listed as Vulnerable while the other two – the giant pangolin (Manis gigantea) and long-tailed pangolin (Manis tetradactyla) – are listed as Endangered. Image by Sharp Photography, sharpphotography.co.uk via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Citations:

Pashkevich, M. D., Marshall, C. A., Freeman, B., Reiss-Woolever, V. J., Caliman, J. P., Drewer, J., … Turner, E. C. (2024). The socioecological benefits and consequences of oil palm cultivation in its native range: The Sustainable Oil Palm in West Africa (SOPWA) Project. Science of The Total Environment, 926, 171850. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.171850

Lyons-White, J., Zodua, P. A., Yobo, C. M., Carlon, S. C., Ewers, R. M., & Knight, A. T. (2025). Challenges for implementing zero deforestation commitments in a highly forested country: Perspectives from Liberia’s palm oil sector. World Development, 185, 106803. doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106803

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AgricultureAgroforestryBirdsCommodity agricultureEndangered SpeciesEnvironmentForest LossForest RegenerationForestsGreenHabitat LossIndustrial AgricultureOil PalmPalm OilPangolinsParrotsPlantationsRainforestsTropical ForestsAfricaLiberiaWest Africa

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