Palm-Oil

This article originally appeared in Mongabay. Editor’s note: The strong focus on mapping forests mentioned in this article makes one suspicious. Mapping is needed for governments to control “natural ressources” and give concessions to companies to exploit them. It was never needed for indigenous populations, so far as, since they’ve known their landbase for millenia. Wherever you are, don’t trust governments. Never. People worldwide must understand that governments always serve the rich and powerful exploiters and never the local residents. ...

by Liam Campbell In 1997, forest fires in Indonesia grew so large that they accounted for 40% of global emissions during that period. The Borneo rainforest is the most ancient in the world, having taken 120 million years to evolve into its current state of rich diversity. Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropic peat bogs, deep and vast stockpiles of carbon which have formed over millennia. When these peat bogs ignite they are almost impossible to extinguish because they burn deeply into the Earth and smoulder for weeks or even months, and they can also release millions of years worth of stored carbon into the atmosphere very suddenly. Although seasonal fires are common in the Borneo, climate collapse has made the rainforest more susceptible, and the magnitude of this year’s fires are already unfathomable. ...

by Sebastián Ortega and Jhonny Valle Ayuque / openDemocracy via Intercontinental Cry Leader of the Shipibo-konibo community, Olivia Arévalo Lomas, was 81 years old when she was shot in the chest and murdered. The principal suspect, Canadian Paul Woodroffe, died a few hours later. The leader, practitioner of traditional medicine and defender of the Peruvian Amazon, Olivia Arévalo Lomas, of Shipibo-konibo ethnicity, was 81 years old when she was murdered last Thursday by two 380 calibre shots to the chest. ...

Featured image: Oil palm seedlings at Tamaco Commercial Oil Palm Nursery. Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas by World Rainforest Movement via Intercontinental Cry For decades, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) has demanded that the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) urgently reviews its forest definition, which mainly benefits the interests of industrial monoculture tree plantations companies. FAO’s definition reduces a forest to any area covered by trees. In doing so, the FAO definition discards other life-forms as well as the biological, cyclical and cultural diversity that define a forest in its continuous interconnection with forest-dependent communities . FAO’s reductionist definition also allows the companies behind tens of millions of industrial fast-growing plantations to claim their monocultures are “planted forests”. Countries’ forest statistics thus count these industrial monocultures as “forests”, in spite of the well-documented social and environmental impacts such plantations have caused around the world. The United Nations (UN) declared March 21st as the International Day of Forests in 2013. At the WRM, we are taking this day as another opportunity to expose FAO’s misleading forest definition. ...

Featured Image: The Orang Rimba have lived in the forests of Sumatra for generations, but now they are under threat. © Survival International By Survival International Members of the nomadic Orang Rimba tribe in Indonesia have been attacked and their possessions burned as part of an eviction from a palm oil plantation on their ancestral land. The Orang Rimba are a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe who have been dependent on and managed their forest home in Sumatra for generations. Although a national park was created to protect local wildlife and – unprecedented in Indonesia – the tribe, the Indonesian government has signed over most of their ancestral lands to palm oil, timber and other plantation companies. ...

By Diana Parker / Mongabay Nearly 150 homes were reportedly destroyed in the latest incident in a long-standing conflict between indigenous Batin Sembilan residents and former Wilmar unit PT Asiatic Persada. Indonesian security forces allegedly stormed several villages inside a Sumatran palm oil plantation concession last weekend and earlier this week, accompanying company staff and hired thugs accused of destroying dozens of homes and looting residents’ property. Witnesses said the raids began when members of the Indonesian military (TNI) and the police mobile brigade (Brimob) descended on Padang Salak hamlet in Bungku village at 4 p.m. on Dec. 7 together with PT Asiatic Persada personnel and local thugs paid by the company. ...

By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay Industrial oil palm plantations are spreading from Malaysia and Indonesia to the Congo raising fears about deforestation and social conflict. A new report by The Rainforest Foundation UK (RFUK), dramatically entitled The Seeds of Destruction, announces that new palm oil plantations in the Congo rainforest will soon increase fivefold to half a million hectares, an area nearly the size of Delaware. But conservationists warn that by ignoring the lessons of palm oil in Southeast Asia, this trend could be disastrous for the region’s forests, wildlife, and people. ...

By Bangor University Growing oil palm to make ‘green’ biofuels in the tropics could be accelerating the effects of climate change, say scientists. Researchers from Bangor University found the creation of oil palm plantations are releasing prehistoric sources of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. The findings throw into doubt hopes that biofuels grown in the tropics could help cut greenhouse gas emissions. Working as part of an international team, the north Wales scientists looked at how the deforestation of peat-swamps in Malaysia, to make way for oil palm trees, is releasing carbon which has been locked away for thousands of years. ...

By Agence France-Presse A large palm oil plantation project in development in Cameroon since 2010 will put livelihoods and ecosystems in peril if allowed to continue, a US-based think-tank warned Wednesday. “With the loss of livelihoods by thousands of Cameroonians on the line and critical and unique ecosystems in peril, this project must be stopped,” the Oakland Institute said in a report Wednesday. Authoured in collaboration with Greenpeace International, the report said the project from SG Sustainable Oils Cameroon (SGSOC) was a case of massive deforestation disguised as a sustainable development project. ...

By Oliver Milman / The Guardian The world’s densest population of orangutans is set to be “extinguished” by a massive new wave of fires that is clearing large tracts of a peat swamp forest in the Indonesian island of Sumatra, conservationists have warned. Environmentalists claim that satellite images show a huge surge in forest blazes across the Tripa peat swamp in order to create palm oil plantations, including areas that have not been permitted for clearing. ...