Resolve conflicts in the palm oil sector with role-playing games

Audio 01:21

Palm oil cultivation in Kuwala, in the north of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Jefta Images / Barcroft Images / Barcroft Media via Getty Images

Text by: RFI Follow

4 min

To resolve conflicts in oil palm plantations, scientists from the Cooperation Center for Research in Agronomy for Development (CIRAD) have developed role-playing games.

And it works.

This technique is presented at the IUCN congress in Marseille.

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With our special correspondent in Marseille,

Agnès Rougier

Resolving territorial conflicts, protecting natural resources without harming local populations, this is what the role plays developed by CIRAD researchers can be used for.

These games were developed for the palm oil sector in Cameroon, Indonesia and Colombia.

Claude Garcia, professor of forest management at the University of Applied Sciences in Bern:

We have developed games that explain how the industry works from the inside.

We made small producers and industrialists play these games, and then, by playing, we understand the positions of the other, we understand their weaknesses, their strengths, their room for maneuver and that allows us to have better agreements.

Contracts changed after role-playing

Role-playing gives players the opportunity to experience a situation through each other's eyes, and that's very powerful.

Alain Rival, Director of CIRAD for South-East Asia, explains why it works precisely with this sector: “

 The role-playing games on palm oil always work very well, precisely because it is a complex sector. .

It is a North-South sector, where there are actors in producing countries, there are processors in developed countries, and these are people who very rarely speak to each other directly, so they do not know the problems of the sector as a whole.

 "

"

We have seen companies that changed the nature of the contracts they offered to small producers to give them more favorable conditions, having better understood what was getting stuck, what was holding producers by the throat,

 " says Claude Garcia.

In the context of climate change, on an increasingly populated planet, role-playing games now have their place in conflict resolution.

► Also to listen: Today the economy - Olam, Singaporean trading group, palm oil giant

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