Oil palm remains an important source of rural income in South East Asia. At the same time, Indonesia has become a hotspot for large-scale species extinction and a loss of biodiversity in favor of agricultural production. The present study sets out to assess the environmental performance of smallholder oil palm production with respect to biodiversity. Using a panel dataset that combines conventional farm data together with an account of plant diversity, we estimate a restricted hyperbolic environmental distance function. We integrate loss of biodiversity as an undesirable output into the production model which allows explaining shortfalls in environmental performance and the derivation of shadow prices of biodiversity conservation. We find a substantial environmental inefficiency, which is partly explained by both chemical and manual weeding practices, highlighting the potential for improvements in both the environmental and the economic dimension. Moreover, the value for conserving one species of the average biodiversity on a farmers plantation was 325 USD in 2018. Payments for ecosystem services schemes could be a viable policy response to conserve meaningful levels of biodiversity while simultaneously allowing smallholders to increase palm oil output. In general, addressing drivers of environmental performance in PES designs amplifies its effect without reducing output.

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关于棕榈油与生物多样性的权衡：小农生产者的环境绩效

油棕仍然是东南亚农村收入的重要来源。与此同时，印度尼西亚已成为大规模物种灭绝和生物多样性丧失的热点地区，有利于农业生产。本研究旨在评估小农油棕生产在生物多样性方面的环境绩效。使用将传统农场数据与植物多样性相结合的面板数据集，我们估计了受限双曲环境距离函数。我们将生物多样性丧失作为不良产出纳入生产模型，从而可以解释环境绩效的不足以及生物多样性保护影子价格的推导。我们发现环境效率严重低下，部分原因是化学和人工除草方法，凸显了环境和经济方面改善的潜力。此外，2018 年，保护农民种植园的平均生物多样性中的一个物种的价值为 325 美元。生态系统服务计划付费可能是一种可行的政策反应，可以保护有意义的生物多样性水平，同时允许小农增加棕榈油产量。一般来说，解决 PES 设计中环境性能的驱动因素可以在不减少产量的情况下放大其效果。