**3.4 Institutional impacts**

Outside the national framework, publics institutions seems not adapt to the local context of oil palm cultivation. Smallholder's access to land is not guarantee. This lack of good governance is a treat that can't favor sustainability of the whole sector. In addition, securing the elaeisfarming basins, prey to attacks by armed groups, is also seen as a necessity for Cameroon. An integrated and sustainable management approach in the oil palm sector takes into account all stakeholders. Governance requires having at least a national oil palm strategy still awaiting, then fighting against deforestation, approving selling prices, rationalizing production and reducing imports. Cameroon has a national strategy for sustainable development of the palm oil sector which is pending validation. This strategy identifies a set of actors and hierarchical decision-making bodies for the governance of the sector. The national steering committee is responsible for monitoring the implementation of the strategy. To this body, one can add programs and projects, professional organizations (inter-professional organizations, cooperatives and unions), consular chambers and national and regional consultation frameworks.

Overall, this analysis summarizes direct, indirect and cumulative impacts. **The direct impacts on the biophysical environment are:** air contamination, olfactory pollution, ground and surface water contamination/pollution, soil contamination

and pollution, flora and fauna destruction, biodiversity degradation, deforestation and forest conversion, reduction of NTFPs and landscape aesthetics**. The direct impacts on the human environment can be summarized as:** employment and income, local economy, human health, insecurity and conflict, noise, odours, cultural heritage and waste. **Indirect impacts (physical and human)** include habitat fragmentation, degradation and loss of biodiversity, food insecurity, cultural heritage, social protection, collective bargaining and local crafts. **To end, cumulative impacts (physical and human environment)** affect habitat fragmentation, degradation and loss of biodiversity, deforestation coupled with the rubber and cocoa single-crop farming or the merchant crop including plantain; food insecurity; social conflicts; social protection and collective bargaining.

Institutional impacts are the most neglected aspects of the oil palm governance in African countries. First of all, very few countries have legislation specifically related to forest degradation and land use change and the government gives privilege on land to foreign investors and agro industries being local and not [20]. Unfortunately, without appropriate policies, smallholder production is not necessarily more rainforest-preserving, as smallholders are also significantly involved in deforestation [25, 33]. Strategies that aim at including smallholders in palm oil need to take into account: securing of land titles, access to credit, and technical support while accounting for the existing heterogeneity [46, 47]. Djouma et al. [48] propose a win-win partnerships between agro-industries and smallholders to boost the development of the national palm oil sector. Meijaard et al. [26] emphasize on certification as it is the case in Malaysia an Indonesia while African countries could not. But it is true that high carbon stock and high conservation value approaches are part of international concerns related to deforestation and oil palm environmental impacts [26, 45].

Finally, how to produce while limiting negative externalities as much as possible, one can ask? The answer can be found on several international programs launched for many agricultural crops taken individually or in groups. In the cocoa sector, for example, there are ISO 34101 standards for a sustainable and traceable cocoa bean [49]. To these initiatives must be added the certifications (like RSPO, Global Gap, Fairtrade, etc.) which give advantages on the market to producers respecting certain sustainability rules [21, 50].
