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Palm Oil: An Environmentalist's Perspective

A look at the environmental issues surrounding palm oil including biofuels, forest conversion, habitat loss and endangered species. An initiative of The Orangutan Film Protection Project.

Vast swathes of tropical rainforest are being cleared to grow palm oil, especially in Kalimantan, where it is estimated that an area the size of three football pitches is cleared every minute. This deforestation is avoidable – millions of hectares of degraded land stand empty or unused in |ndonesia – but the potential profits from selling the timber reduces the costs of setting up a plantation by around 40%. Often, unscrupulous companies acquire land for the sole purpose of selling the valuable timber harvested from the hardwood forests – in many places the cleared land is not then developed for palm oil, with companies declaring bankruptcy in order to fulfil their contractual obligations. Even companies that do establish palm oil plantations sometimes choose to convert forested land because of the profit from the timber – this provides an immediate cash injection into the company when they must wait 3 to 4 years to harvest a profitable crop from young oil palms.

World-leading orangutan experts have now identified the clearance of rainforest for palm oil expansion as the single greatest threat to the survival of the orangutan in the wild. Current estimates are that each year 5,000 orangutans are dying in Borneo, and 1,000 a year in Sumatra – that means 15 orangutans are dying every single day. This is catatrophic for the orangutan, but also reflects the loss of a wider rich and unique biodiversity within the Indonesian rainforest. For example, Sumatran lowland forest is 2.5 times richer in terms of biodiversity of species than the very best Amazonian rainforest, and 1.8 times richer than the best Central African rainforest. This means that unsustainable palm oil production is destroying the most species-rich rainforests in the world. Orangutans, Asian elephants, sun bears, clouded leopards, Sumatran tigers, hornbills – these are just some of the better-known species losing their habitat and their lives due to unsustainable palm oil expansion.

Read more on the Palm Oil page