Initiating Landscape Frameworks Approach in Improving Indonesian Cocoa Productivity

Jakarta, September 30, 2021—It is no longer advisable for sustainability activities to exist in a vacuum. In every target area, there are multiple commodities, environmental concerns, companies, organizations, and public entities. All of these components within one jurisdiction comprise what is referred to as the “landscape”. When meaningful jurisdictional collaborations are formed in a strategic manner, it is possible to result in a synergy that benefits the local community, private and public stakeholders, and nature, while creating an attractive investment environment. At that point, the discussion moves from sustainable commodities to sustainable regions. This is the ideal.

Cocoa Sustainability Partnership (CSP) members and stakeholders from other agricultural platforms are already involved in trying to create and sustain such landscape-level collaborations. We understand that this is the way forward toward the achievement of sustainability goals, but it is a challenging endeavor. One particular difficulty is the fact that every jurisdiction, or landscape, is different with each having its own unique variety of stakeholders, local interests, governmental strategies, and environmental concerns. As such, engaging in a landscape approach to sustainability requires localized deliberation, in contrast to a unilateral approach where program elements can be fairly replicated from one area to the next. In other words, it is impossible to create a comprehensive landscape approach manual with any high degree of specification for implementers.

The good news is that there are things we can do to help increase the knowledge and enhance the landscape efforts of agricultural stakeholders. With this in mind, CSP is inviting stakeholders from various commodity platforms to participate in the Sustainable Landscape Framework Collaboration in Indonesian Cocoa Production Areas Workshop.

The workshop was conducted to share knowledge and experience gained from current landscape initiatives, to look for common threads that can help form the basis of useful landscape framework resources in the future, and to trigger new cross-sectoral collaborations and scale up initiative. The workshop was conducted on September 30, 2021 with online method, and attended by stakeholders of Indonesian cocoa sector, and representatives of national and local governments. And the whole sessions were moderated by Jeremy Hicks.

In his welcoming remarks, Wahyu Wibowo, Executive Director of CSP mentioned that One of the purposes of the workshop is to discuss on how to develop a consortium, coalitions, alliance, or other kinds of partnership to drive sustainability in the cocoa sector within landscape approach frameworks. "Different kind of tools and approaches may be applied, however the commitment from all parties is required as well as tangible results, and the objectives of landscape approaches must be beneficial for all stakeholders. Therefore, lessons learned are important to show how this approach functions and plays a role," he added.

Nassat Idris, Program Director of Yayasan Inisiatif Dagang Hijau (IDH), delivered his presentation on field implementation to support sustainable production, forest protection, and social inclussion. He explained that the issues of sustainability for Indonesian context were deforestation and mangrove degradation, poverty in tenth highest risk in Indonesia, low productivity of smallholders, and some conservation key species. "Cacao can be a very important component in the landscape, but it depends on the best use of the land itself and other ecological factors should be on top when deciding the commodities that will be developed. In some cases, cacao can be part of win-win solution between go and no-go areas in the palm oil sector, and can be part of solutions for livelihoods. However, there are many factors to fulfill the goals because it depends on infrastructures, supply chains and committed buyers. So, that’s why we need a multi-stakeholder process to see the opportunities and also to be translated to the project scale," Nassat explained.

Betha Lusiana, SFITAL Project Coordinator of World Agroforestry (ICRAF), elaborated the jurisdictional approach for sustainable cocoa landscape with learnings from the implementation processes in North Luwu, South Sulawesi. Sustainable Farming in Tropical Asian Landscapes, or SFITAL, was designed with three main strategies i.e. developing the district landscape characterization based on spatial and statistical analysis with the village as the unit of analysis. The next strategy was the typology was designed by considering spatially explicit variables that represented ecosystem services potential and potential production, and verifiying by farmer characteristics based on household survey and community FGD, the situational and stakeholder mapping and existing desktop study on cacao supply and value chain. The further strategy was consulting with the local government, NGOs, the private sector and partners who had been active in the area, mostly member of Sustainable Cocoa Working Group. "There is the jurisdictional approach to sustainability and there is the jurisdictional approach to commodities sourcing. With commodities sourcing, I assume you want to focus on a specific commodity when implementing a jurisdictional approach. But in general, it can be applied across commodities. The important part is defining what are the target goals. It is cross sectoral when it comes to commodities, but when comes to conservation basically it will be done at landscape level," as Betha Lusiana elaborated.

As representatives of Proforest, Mike Senior as Deputry Director Conservation and Land Use, with accompanied by Rifat Aldina as Program Manager in Indonesia, explained about the South Sulawesi landscape scoping activities. During the session, Proforest recommended learnings as Luwu and Pinrang districts might present the most impactful district to prioritise for developing a landscape initiative. This classification based on large cocoa production area, large number of cocoa farmers villages, and largest area of potential High Carbon Stock (HCS) forest and High Conservation Value (HCV) forest. Furthemore, Sidrap and Palopo as neighbouring districts for bigger landscape approach, and an initiative could focus on supporting farmers livelihood improvement whilst stabilising the forest frontier with conservation and restoration. "It is better for Indonesian stakeholders to decide what is the best approach, so having this dialogue is important to bring together companies, civil societies, local organizations and governments to discuss about priorities. The model of the Cocoa Forest Initiative might be helpful to start developing some national objectives and then continue to the second level which is trying to implement activities in a particular landscape jurisdiction," Mike Senior said.