Nature Blog Network Future Earth: Death by palm oil

Friday, 27 March 2009

Death by palm oil

Elephants from the "Conservation Response Units" are called upon by farmers in the Indonesian island of Sumatra, when their crops are being raided by wild elephants from nearby forest. The captive ones patrol the forest edge and warn the raiders away. Sounds apocryphal but I've seen it working - and the balance between conserved forests and local agriculture is maintained.

Enter the commercial oil palm companies - even one that should know better, a subsidiary of the UK-registered company Anglo Eastern Plantations that is a member of the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil. Not only is the company clearing protected lowland rainforest illegally in an area that has not been zoned for conversion to agriculture, but it has built a road through an elephant sanctuary. This opens up general access and last Tuesday two of the elephants were shot.

Something to ponder as you eat your ice-cream, spreads and other goodies loaded with palm oil - also recently shown to be suspect in terms of saturated fats. There are some sustainable plantations and some efforts by the food industry to comply. Good, balanced, recent info is supplied by Mongabay and the Rainforest Action Network. But basically the uncontrolled expansion of plantations across the globe is destroying biodiverse forests and peatlands, ecosystem services, orang utans, elephants and more. Leaves a rather bad taste in your mouth, don't you think?

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