Does farming oil palm provide more benefits to local communities than preserving forests in Africa?: A case study in Cameroon

Increasing global demand for palm oil (PO) has driven the expansion of oil palm (OP) plantations at the expense of tropical forests, despite the fact that forests are crucial sources of medicine, food, drinking water, and biodiversity. This study investigates the fundamental ecosystem services (ES) trade-offs resulting from forest-to-OP conversion in Cameroon to determine if the benefits provided by farming OP outweigh those of preserving forests for local communities. We utilized a mixed-methods approach, including social valuation and stakeholder analysis. 250 semi-structured questionnaires were administered to OP and non-OP farmers to compare the perceived provision of 14 key ES across both land-use types. Our findings reveal a stark polarization of ES provision. Forests offer a multi-functional bundle of ES, particularly non-marketed provisioning (e.g., wild meat, medicinal plants) and regulating services, that are highly valued and essential for local community subsistence and resilience. In sharp contrast, OP plantations provide a specialized, high-yield service focused almost exclusively on crude palm oil production, which translates into significant and measurable monetary benefits for OP farmers, enabling investments in human capital like education and transportation. However, this economic gain comes at the cost of a catastrophic decline in nearly all non-marketed services, including biodiversity habitat and air/water quality. The resulting ES trade-off is fundamentally inequitable: it concentrates financial benefits among commercial actors and OP farmers while externalizing the ecological and social costs, specifically the loss of non-monetary livelihood support onto the most vulnerable, forest-dependent communities. We conclude that the current model of OP expansion fosters environmental injustice. For OP to genuinely provide a net benefit to local communities, policy frameworks must urgently be implemented to mandate the internalization of ecological costs, such as through Payments for Ecosystem Services schemes, to compensate for lost non-market ES and safeguard the remaining high-value forest fragments.