Serendipalm – sustainable palm oil from smallholder farms in Ghana

Palm oil is a primary ingredient in Dr. Bronner’s bar soaps. It gives our bars their hardness, and balances the lathering power of coconut oil while keeping the soap from softening and dissolving too quickly. With rapid expansion of oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia causing large-scale environmental degradation and social deprivation, it was imperative that we find a source for palm oil that did not cause new deforestation, endanger crucial habitats or impoverish communities.

We began our search for a sustainable and socially responsible source of palm oil in 2006. With support from the NGO Fearless Planet, we found partners in Ghana’s rural Eastern Region near Asuom. Serendipalm, our Ghanaian sister company, built a small-scale palm oil mill using traditional processes, but with better facilities and more efficient, safer equipment. We then began recruiting local smallholder farmers for conversion to organic practices.

Since the mill began production in 2008, Serendipalm has become the world’s most respected fair trade and organic palm oil project. It works exclusively with smallholder farmers and is the largest local employer in an area that has traditionally provided few reliable jobs. The 200+ workers in Serendipalm’s oil mill, primarily local unskilled women, enjoy working conditions and compensation unheard of in other small palm oil mills. Serendipalm also has attracted some 20 professional staff to Asuom—agricultural engineers, scientists, accounting and administration professionals who appreciate the company’s participatory style of management and its beneficial social impact. They have chosen to live in the countryside, where they can earn a living while making a difference—and many of them have put down roots in the area, starting families and raising children.

Serendipalm buys palm fruits from over 635 family farms with oil palm plots averaging seven acres in size. Farmers are paid fair prices plus an organic premium for their palm fruits, provided with biomass for mulching, training on organic agriculture to improve soil fertility and profitability, and offered interest-free loans for more productive oil palm seedlings. Many of Serendipalm’s oil palm growers also farm cocoa, and had a desire to move away from the extensive use of pesticides which is common in Ghanaian cocoa production—so we began converting them to organic practices and in 2018 will sell our first organic and fair trade cocoa.

In late 2016 we also began implementing dynamic agroforestry concepts, which consist of planned mixed stands of multi-strata tree plantings. Dynamic Agroforestry offers farmers a much higher yield and revenue per acre, higher biodiversity and thus lower pest pressure, as well as the potential for sequestering high amounts of atmospheric CO 2 . The concepts are being implemented initially on our own two small farming plots, and will be expanded to Serendipalm farmers and across Ghana in the coming years.

The fair trade premiums paid by Dr. Bronner’s and other customers have been used for a range of community development projects: water systems, public toilet facilities, a maternity ward and nurses’ quarters, a pedestrian bridge, lighting, school supplies, mosquito nets to protect against malaria, and “green islands”— the planting of trees in the villages that surround Serendipalm. Since our staff now have about 100 children and grandchildren, we are building a Montessori preschool which will be part of the campus of the “Regenerative Learning Center of Ghana,” an NGO founded by Serendipalm and Dr. Bronner’s and aimed at helping people, land and their communities redevelop.

Serendipalm now supplies fair trade and organic palm oil to Dr. Bronner’s, as well as several European fair trade companies, such as GEPA and Rapunzel. With growing demand for our palm oil, cocoa, and dynamic agroforestry practices we are expanding operations—to the benefit of farmers, workers, and the local community.