Member Project Malaysia 2026

Cooperation with Wild Asia

  • When

    April 2025 to March 2027

  • Who

    Cooperation with Wild Asia, a social enterprise based in Malaysia

  • Where

    Johor & Sabah, Malaysia

Scaling Sustainability in Palm Oil Value Chains:Empowering Small Producers through Inclusive and Nature-positive Palm Oil

Since April 2025, the FONAP member project has been supporting small producers in Johor, Malaysia, through Wild Asia’s SPIRAL initiative (Small Producer Inclusive Resilience Alliance).

Small producers account for around 25–30% of global palm oil production. However, they continue to face barriers to accessing European supply chains. Reasons include, among others, high certification costs and increasing requirements for traceability and sustainability. The project follows a bottom-up approach and was developed jointly with mills, traders and local communities. It combines traceability systems with regenerative farming practices that are developed and tested in Living Labs. In this way, the project shows how climate action and compliance with sustainability requirements can reinforce each other.

Project objectives

  • Strengthen supply chain transparency and support preparation for EUDR requirements
  • Support small producers through regenerative agriculture and RSPO certification
  • Strengthen carbon reporting and climate action
  • Build partnerships between mills, buyers and small producers
  • Develop and demonstrate scalable solutions through Living Labs
  • Share knowledge and scale successful approaches

Oil palm smallholder stacks palm fronds as part of regenerative farming methods in Wild Asia’s WAGS BIO programme.

Project approach

The project is implemented by Wild Asia and is based on two complementary approaches:

SPIRAL (Small Producer Inclusive Resilience Alliance) brings together mills, traders, buyers and small producers to strengthen collaboration, improve market access and build resilient, low-carbon supply chains.

The Wild Asia Group Scheme (WAGS) supports small producers in obtaining RSPO certification, improves traceability and promotes more sustainable farming methods. The newly certified producers were added to Wild Asia’s existing network, which now covers around 41,000 hectares in Malaysia and Thailand.

Certified palm oil meets a key market demand: it increases the availability of more environmentally and socially responsible palm oil for palm oil mills, as well as the availability of certified products from small producers for RSPO-certified mills.

RSPO-certified palm oil mills are the central starting point for the physical supply chain of palm oil produced in a more environmentally and socially responsible manner. Certification ensures that the processed oil palm fruit comes from legal, deforestation-free and socially responsible cultivation.

Impact to date

Supply chain

  • Number of mills participating in WAGS: 3 → 4
  • Number of participating traders: 3 → 7
  • Number of WAGS members: 396 → 441

Small producers

  • Sustainably managed area: 1,692 → 2,140 ha
  • Number of female small producers increased by more than 12%
  • Number of Indigenous small producers: 0 → 27

Regenerative agriculture

  • Five demonstration plots established
  • One Community-Based Transformation Unit established
  • Three BIO seminars conducted

Partnerships and knowledge transfer

  • Three SPIRAL events conducted
  • Knowledge exchange with GIZ-GRASS Indonesia in a training-of-trainers format on regenerative agriculture in oil palm cultivation, presenting Wild Asia’s WAGS BIO methodology

Why regenerative agriculture?

Wild Asia’s regenerative agriculture programme (WAGS BIO) focuses on improving soil health by completely avoiding agrochemicals, composting, using biochar, and utilising organic residues.

These practices reduce production costs, improve farm profitability, and help gradually turn agricultural land from net CO₂ emitters into carbon sinks—meaning that, overall, they sequester more carbon than they emit.

Beyond reducing emissions, regenerative agriculture restores ecosystems, strengthens rural livelihoods, and contributes to building climate-resilient palm oil supply chains.

SPIRAL mill in Johor

Partnership with mills

Long-term impact for small producers requires more than short-term support—it requires systemic change. The project therefore strengthens mills in taking an active role in carbon reporting, reducing environmental impacts, and integrating regenerative practices such as organic fertilisation, erosion control, integrated pest management, and the protection of biodiversity areas.

As key actors in the supply chain, mills can improve the inclusion of small producers, increase transparency, and promote lower-carbon practices. The carbon reporting tools developed by Wild Asia help mills better understand and improve their climate footprint, while also strengthening their market position.

Scaling impact

To roll out successful approaches more broadly, the project will not only generate technical insights, but also translate them into accessible, practice-oriented knowledge for the entire sector.

Wild Asia will produce a public results report as well as communication materials, including a video documentary series and digital content. These summarise the key findings and experiences and show how corporate engagement can drive inclusive, lower-carbon transformations.

Through SPIRAL, buyers, mills and producers jointly develop practical solutions—such as the WAGS APP—that increase transparency*, strengthen trust in sourcing from small-producer supply chains, promote demand for more environmentally and socially responsible palm oil, and support compliance with future market requirements.

*The WAGS APP connects farmers, advisory professionals and actors in the palm oil value chain in a digital network. The app makes it easier to capture key farm data, for example on legal requirements, production and sustainability, and processes this information so that it results in concrete, practical recommendations.

Building on previous FONAP member projects

This project builds directly on two previous FONAP member projects, also implemented by Wild Asia:

Impact of the FONAP Add-on Criteria on Small Producers in Malaysia

From Sustainable Palm Oil to Sustainable Landscapes (together with FORTASBI)

The insights from these projects on chemical-free production, soil health and landscape approaches now form the basis for scaling regenerative agriculture, climate action and resilient supply chains in Johor.

The project is planned as a three-year initiative.