Agriculture and Environment: Palm Oil

Introduction

The main environmental problems from oil palm production are habitat conversion, threats to critical habitat for endangered species, use of poisons to control rats, and pollution from processing wastes.

Most productive among vegetable oils
Most of the world's oil palm trees are grown on a few islands in Malaysia and Indonesia. These islands have the most biodiverse tropical forests found on Earth. What is particularly striking about palm oil is that it is much more productive, per hectare, than any other vegetable oil.

Given the extraordinary productivity of oil palm trees, it should have been very easy to maintain representative areas of biodiversity within areas of production and to ensure that corridors were maintained that would allow larger animals (especially elephants, rhinoceroses, and tigers) to move between larger parks and protected areas. This did not happen.

Now that prices have declined so much, it should be possible to retire the unproductive, unprofitable plantation areas and return them to a more natural state to maintain biodiversity (or at least connect protected areas) and restore ecosystem functions. There has been great reluctance to do this, to date, even though it makes economic sense.