Solidaridad, a solution-oriented civil society organization, has presented an Oil Palm Sustainable Management Plan (SMP) to the Kogi State Government as part of efforts to promote sustainable and climate-smart oil palm production.
The plan was developed under the National Initiatives for Sustainable and Climate Smart Oil Palm Smallholders (NISCOPS), a project designed to support smallholder farmers in improving productivity and incomes while strengthening their access to markets.
The SMP is structured around four key pillars: environmental stewardship and climate resilience; sustainable economic development and competitiveness; social inclusion, livelihoods, and human rights; and governance, institutions, and policy alignment.
The framework seeks to tackle challenges affecting the oil palm sector, including low productivity, deforestation, fragmented and underfunded smallholder farms, weak policy and land-tenure systems, limited use of technology, climate vulnerability, greenhouse gas emissions, poor access to finance, and the aging population of oil palm farmers.
Speaking on the initiative, the program manager of Solidaridad Nigeria, Ernest Ita, said the plan was designed to help farmers increase productivity on existing plantations instead of expanding their farms through forest clearance.
Ita said assessments conducted by the organization identified aging plantations, poor-quality planting materials, inappropriate use of fertilizers and agrochemicals, deforestation, and insecure land tenure as factors limiting the productivity and sustainability of smallholder oil palm farming.
According to him, Solidaridad’s intervention had so far reached more than 10,000 smallholder farmers and nearly 5,000 palm oil processors, while about 7,000 farmers had received harvesting tools and approximately 600 farmer groups had been supported with improved planting materials.
He added that the adoption of recommended Best Management Practices had led to productivity improvements among some farmers, with yields rising from a baseline of about 2.7 tonnes per hectare annually to more than six tonnes.
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Ita urged the Kogi State Government and local government authorities to incorporate the SMP into their agricultural policies and strategies.
“We are hoping that government, at the local government level and at the state level, will adopt this Sustainable Management Plan into their agricultural strategy so that our oil palm farmers, and even palm oil processors, can produce sustainably,” he said.
He said the framework could be adopted or adapted into government agricultural policies and local bylaws, adding that its implementation would provide a common direction for farmers, processors, and other stakeholders across the oil palm value chain.
Also speaking, the Project Coordinator, Samson Shaibu, described the SMP as “the practical framework of oil palm development,” saying it was anchored on environmental stewardship, social inclusion, economic development, and policy coordination.
Shaibu said smallholder farmers accounted for between 80 and 82 percent of oil palm production, making their productivity important to the growth and sustainability of the industry.
He noted that many existing smallholder farms were dominated by wild and aging oil palm trees, stressing that replacing them with improved planting materials and intensifying production on existing farms could increase output without encouraging unnecessary expansion into forest areas.
Ita further said the framework promotes the participation of women and young people in the oil palm sector and encourages the use of Free, Prior and Informed Consent before development activities are undertaken in communities.
He explained that the SMP was developed through consultations with community, local government, and state-level stakeholders before it was validated.
Ita expressed optimism that the four states covered by the project would adopt the framework and that other oil palm-producing states across the country would eventually follow suit.
The initiative is also expected to support Nigerian oil palm producers in responding to international sustainability requirements, particularly those relating to deforestation and access to the European market.
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