Socio-Economic and Ecological Impacts of Oil Palm Plantation Expansion in Northeast India: A Critical Review

Abstract

Northeast India has been identified by national planners as a priority zone for oil palm expansion under efforts to reduce the country's heavy dependence on imported edible oil. The region's high rainfall, warm lowland tracts and available land have made it an attractive target for area expansion, yet the same landscape sits within the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot and is home to communities whose livelihoods and cultural identity remain closely tied to shifting cultivation and communal land. This review synthesises the socio-economic and ecological literature on oil palm plantation development in the northeastern states, with particular attention to Mizoram, Nagaland, Assam, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh. It examines changes in land tenure and the erosion of customary rights, shifts in household income and gendered labour patterns, and the market and infrastructural constraints that have slowed the sector's growth. It then reviews the ecological consequences of conversion, including forest loss, changes to hydrology, soil and carbon stocks, greenhouse gas emissions, and rising human-wildlife conflict, drawing on comparative evidence from Southeast Asia and from India's own longer experience with rubber plantation expansion in the same region. The review considers whether agroforestry-based cultivation models and sustainability certification schemes offer a workable middle path between the national goal of edible oil self-sufficiency and the protection of one of India's most ecologically and culturally distinctive regions, and it closes by weighing the sector's dietary and public health implications alongside its land use costs. Priorities for future research, the main conclusions that follow from the existing evidence base, and the limitations inherent in a rapidly evolving and still thinly researched field are set out in turn.