Improving smallholders' competitiveness: role of Cirad and PalmElit

Oil palm smallholdings represent about 80% of the oil palm area in Africa, while only 40% in the world. Smallholders hide a huge diversity of farm situation, from family farms to business farms, which can be in competition for land access or in synergy sharing the use of a small-scale mill. In Africa, smallholders have 3 main cropping systems: oil palm plantation with a spacing design, wild grove and isolated oil palm trees in food crops plots. Planting material is the main yield limiting factor in all these main cropping systems. Smallholders generally need technical support from local development projects or agro-industries to plant selected palms. Actual spontaneous development of oil palm smallholdings shows a lack of technical support for smallholders, a lack of local access to selected planting material. Cirad and PalmElit are proposing to build partnerships between development actors to create local inclusive business projects aimed to improve smallholders' competitiveness in Africa. In such inclusive projects, high yielding and low lipase PalmElit seeds are particularly adapted to improve competitiveness of existing unselected smallholdings and of new smallholdings. (Texte intégral)