Bwindi Researchers

Please accompany me as my mind travels far from here in Bwindi, Uganda, across the Indian Ocean, to the forests of South East Asia and their orang-utans. These are places I know and care about. I’ve worked there and many friends still do. These are rich forests full of strange and remarkable plants and animals.

Like many people who have worked in that part of the world I am concerned about oil palm. Sometimes I dream about it.

The chances are that you, like most if the rest of us, use palm oil products almost every day (oil palm is the plant, palm oil is the product). If so, whether you are aware of it or not, your choices are influencing tropical land-use.

The truth is palm oil products are hard to avoid. There is little doubt too that as the areas of oil-palm are expanding, Asia’s forests are shrinking.

So do we know what we should know about the threat posed to tigers, elephants and orang-utans by packaged soup, lipstick, potato crisps (‘chips’), hair gel and the thousands of other products that contain palm oil? Obviously the world needs all kinds of raw materials and these demands inevitably have environmental costs. But what should we do?

Orang-utans have seen their native range greatly reduced in the last two decades (picture by Nardiyono).

The least we consumers can hope for is that our consumption choices encourage good rather than bad practice. But this is far from assured. While there is a vast amount of information about oil palm (the plant) and palm oil (the product), much of the key information on costs and benefits regarding forests, the environement and local people, is contradictory.

For much of the last 12 years I was based in Indonesia. The first time I travelled through Sumatra we drove in the smoky haze of vast forest fires. We drove for 2 days solid and for around 90% of that time all we saw was line after line of newly planted oil-palm heading toward the horizon on both sides of the road. Often the charred stumps of buttressed trees poked out amongst the palms as testimony to the dense forest that had stood there only recently.

At that time I thought that this could not last. Once all these vast plantations started producing oil, surely prices would crash and the expansion would slow and stop. I am an ecologist, not an economist. Indonesia has indeed become the world’s main producer of palm oil, but I was wrong that it would slow down. Growth has been exponential. Most of Sumatra’s lowland forests are gone but the forests are still shrinking and the palm plantations still expanding throughout Indonesia.

The forests of Borneo, here Kutai in Kalimantan, Indonesia, are amongst the most species rich in the world. Much has been converted to oil palm.

Many choose to see these issues in black and white: “oil palm bad, forest good”. Ok, that is one view. But oil palm is not about to disappear. I see a world that is largely painted in varying shades of grey. The question is to encourage the lighter shades and exclude the darkest. This is where objective research is sorely needed.

Oil palm, a palm originally from Africa, is a genuine wonder crop. It produces more vegetable oil on less land than any other crop. And it is very profitable too. Demand for palm-oil has grown not just in Europe and North America, but also in China and India with their huge emerging appetites. In the last couple of years the idea that palm oil might be a good raw material to generate ‘biodiesel’ as a ‘green fuel’ for transport has also gained considerable interest.

Conservationists have been understandably concerned. So have human rights organisations (with stories of people being forced off their lands, of abused workers etc.). The palm oil industry has found itself under pressure. Certainly some of the negative stories are true, but it is incorrect to imply that oil palm is only harmful. The greatest cause of suffering in South East Asia is poverty and oil palm has undoubtedly helped pull at least some people out of poverty. Forest clearance is not the only option either: palms can be productively planted in the extensive areas already cleared turning wastelands to productive assets.

Land that was once covered in rich forests have been converted to oil palm plantations. Here in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo).

More and more land has been converted to oil palm plantations. Here again in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo).

So how can we identify and encourage good behaviour by the palm oil industry? We need information that has not been coloured by spin. In an increasingly democratic and globalised world we need consumers to be well informed about the implications of their choices. We need good transparent research and we need good guidance, and we need it now!

I have helped develop a summary of these topics: i.e., what we know and need to know about oil palm developments. If you have an interest, please take a look here. This is a discussion that involves all of us.

Please let me know what you think.

Douglas