Agriculture and Environment: Palm Oil

Environmental Impacts: Habitat Conversion

In Africa oil palm has been a subsistence crop for generations. As such it tends to be an agroforestry crop that is interplanted with other cash and subsistence crops. In most cases, this type of production does not have a large impact on biodiversity.

More recently the establishment of vast monocrop oil palm plantations in Asia and Latin America, as well as in West Africa itself, threatens vast tracts of tropical forests with high conservation value.

In need of serious attention - Indonesia
Nowhere is this problem of forest conversion more acute than in Indonesia. In Indonesia, even though there are 20 million hectares of abandoned agricultural land appropriate for the establishment of oil palm plantations, this land is not being planted. Instead, in the 1990s concessions for plantations were granted mostly in forests.

Planters feel that it is more expensive to plant in grasslands or in degraded areas because they will have to add so much more chemical fertiliser. The cost of clearing forests is subsidised from the sale of timber from concession areas. Some oil palm production plantations were converted from other uses such as former rubber plantations whose production is now less valuable than in the past.

Peat forests - a big casualty
However, it is most primary forests that are being converted. Being relatively easy to clear, peat forest areas are one of the main areas of conversion. They were the sites of many of the forest fires in Indonesia in the late 1990s. Peat forests are even less suitable for conversion to plantations than any other tropical forests.

Peat forests have very high water tables so often palm oil plantings have to be made on elevated pedestals that prevent the roots from being in standing water. As a consequence, many trees fall over for lack of support. If an entire peat forest area is cleared, then the area can dry out so that palm oil production is more successful.

Rubber plantations classified as "forest"
The Malaysian government has successfully lobbied for rubber plantations to be classified as "forest" by the FAO. Such areas are classified as part of the "permanent forest estate," which obfuscates the amount of natural, biodiverse forest that is actually left in the country. There is a chance that the same case might be made for oil palm plantations in the future.

Once land is classed as "forest," developers can continue to convert more biodiverse natural forests to monocrop plantations without it ever showing up in any statistical sources. This would have a major impact on biodiversity wherever such crops as oil palm trees are planted.

Impacts on primary forest habitats
In addition, however, the people who would be lured to the forests as oil palm workers and harvesters would tend to have an additional impact on biodiversity through killing or harvesting other species. There is a direct relationship between the growth of oil palm estates and deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. In the Kinabatangan watershed area of Sabah, Malaysia, large areas of previously logged forests have been converted into oil palm estates.

In Indonesia oil palm plantations have also been created illegally within a number of different protected areas. Habitat conversion from natural forests to oil palm plantations has been shown to have a devastating impact not only on the tropical forests with the most species of trees per hectare but on other plant and animal species as well.

For example, there are nearly 80 mammal species found in Malaysia's primary forests, just over 30 in disturbed forests, and only 11 or 12 in oil palm plantations (Wakker 1998). Similar species reductions occur for insects, birds, reptiles, and most important of all for soil microorganisms.