Rubber bounces back in Indonesia with the help of Agroforestry Systems

Alternative rubber agroforestry systems are raising incomes, retaining biodiversity and increasing rubber production in Indonesia.

Rubber production began in Indonesia in the early twentieth century. It is one of the country’s most important crops as many Indonesian farmers gain some or all of their income from growing and selling rubber.

The World Agroforestry Centre launched its research on rubber agroforestry in Indonesia in the mid-1990s. By then, many development agencies had already spent millions of dollars promoting high-yielding monoclonal rubber plantations, and these were beginning to replace traditional jungle rubber systems on many smallholdings.

“The monoclonal plantations gave farmers much higher yields than jungle rubber gardens, and therefore better incomes,” says World Agroforestry Centre economist Suseno Budidarsono. “But there were also some disadvantages.” They required considerable capital investment, which many households could not afford. The conversion of jungle rubber to monoclonal rubber systems was also causing significant losses of biodiversity.

These trends, and the conversion of jungle rubber to oil palm, prompted the Center and its partners to devise alternative systems of rubber agroforestry that would increase smallholder yields while retaining some biodiversity.

“The Centre’s main consideration was selecting technologies that would be suitable for smallholders who had little cash, limited family labor, small land holdings, and little or no access to high-yielding planting materials and other inputs,” recalls Ratna Akiefnawati, a scientist at the Indonesian Rubber Research Institute.

In 2010, researchers compared rates of adoption in 30 villages in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan, and 30 villages in Bungo District, Jambi. In villages where the project had been active, the area and number of households adopting the new systems increased tenfold. More surprisingly, rates of adoption in villages where the project had not been active were almost as high.

The researchers identified several reasons for this. First, smallholders in Indonesia had heard of clonal rubber varieties and their advantages, and many had tried them – not always with success – in the past. This meant that it did not require a huge effort to promote new clones.  Second, the World Agroforestry Centre had been a key source of information about clones for farmers who were not associated with its present or past projects. This suggests that its dissemination methods in local languages were highly effective. Finally, the government and development agencies had actively promoted the use of new clones.

Studies in Bungo District of Indonesia found jungle rubber systems that harbor 689 different trees, mammals, and birds, while rubber and oil-palm mono-cultures contain just a handful. A 60-year-old rubber agroforest stores roughly the same amount of carbon as a 25-year-old secondary forest, 110 tons per hectare. This is just under half the amount found in primary forest in the district and means that jungle rubber could have an important role to play in sequestering and storing carbon under schemes designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation.

The environmental importance of jungle rubber prompted the World Agroforestry Centre and some of its local partners to investigate the possibility of establishing a reward system that would encourage farmers to retain their jungle rubber and the important ecosystem services it provides. Researchers are also looking into eco-certification, which could help prevent farmers from intensifying their rubber production. These two avenues for farmers to benefit from ‘jungle’ rubber remain a work in progress.

The story of the Centre’s rubber agroforestry research, spanning over a decade and a half, is told in a new booklet, Rich Rewards for Rubber, which is available on the Centre’s website.

This post is part of our series celebrating “40 years of CGIAR”
Photo credit: Charlie Pye-Smith/World Agroforestry Centre