Palm oil.

AuthorBlock, Ben
PositionLIFE - CYCLE STUDIES

Overview

People have shimmied up the oil palm to reach its prickly red fruit for thousands of years. Native to West Africa, Elaeis guineensis contains two distinct oils used in a variety of dishes. The Industrial Revolution provided a boon for African farmers, who supplied London's cravings for candle making and machine lubricants. Then colonial plantations took over production, and by the 1920s the crop had spread across the Congo Basin and into Central and South America. After European agronomists discovered that the oil palm thrived in Southeast Asia's heavy rains, the crop quickly transformed the island landscapes. By the mid-twentieth century, Malaysia and Indonesia were supplying the world.

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Once planted, oil palms can produce fruit for more than 30 years, yielding more oil per hectare than any major oilseed crop. Markets--for margarine, frying oil, soap, lipstick, biofuel, and more--continue their dramatic growth (an additional 2.2 million tons are demanded each year).

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Yet plantations often replace tropical forests, killing endangered species, uprooting indigenous communities, and contributing to the release of climate-warming gases. Due mostly to oil palm production, Indonesia emits more greenhouse gases than any country besides China and the United States.

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Production

With government support, millions of farmers spread across Indonesia and Malaysia's islands in recent decades to establish small oil palm farms, resulting in many violent clashes with local inhabitants. Government-arranged committees often appoint prominent village leaders to work with the industry in dividing community land, and corruption regularly fouls the deals. "They install a divide-and-rule tactic within the communities," said Norman Jiwan, an Indonesian human rights campaigner. He estimates that violent conflicts between oil palm estates and villagers rose from nearly 200 in 2004 to 514 in 2007.

Production methods differ depending on scale and oil palm variety. But the nearly 40 million tons of palm oil produced in 2007 resulted from four identical steps: separate the...

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