• Social equity is crucial to sustainable development: equity means ensuring that everyone has the resources they need to secure their well-being now and in the future.
• Oil palm is a profitable crop, but the costs and benefits of its expansion are distributed unevenly according to gender, age, class and community of origin.
• Different social dynamics pertain to large-scale plantations employing wage workers, tied smallholders attached to plantations and independent smallholders planting oil palm on their own land.
• Policy should favor independent smallholders with up to 6 ha of land to optimize distributive outcomes for women and men, young and old, while giving priority to customary landholders.