Smallholder farmers play an important role in Indonesia’s palm oil industry. There are roughly 1.7 million of them, who cultivate about 40 percent of the 11.7 million hectares of oil palm in the country. But the productivity of smallholder farms is much lower than that of company-run plantations. In 2015, International Finance Corporation (IFC), partnered with the Government of Canada and Musim Mas Group, an Indonesian palm oil company, to work with independent palm oil smallholders in North Sumatra with the aim of helping farmers learn best practices to improve their productivity and sustainability.
