GreenWatch

B. McPherson Palm oil is used in a myriad of places around the world. From face creams to biodiesel, palm oil is everywhere in today’s modern world. Why? Because it’s a cheap(relatively), versatile substance that remains soft but solid at room temperature, is non-toxic and edible and can be produced by trees and sunlight. It sounds like an all around winner but as the palm oil industry has grown along with massive tropical plantations of the oil palm major environmental damage is becoming evident. About 87% of the world’s palm oil is produced from plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia. The ripping up of rain forests has far reaching deleterious effects on the people and animals that were living there. Now the insatiable appetite for palm oil is industrializing tracts of land in Africa with Nigeria leading the way in leasing out land for palm oil plantations. Researchers at the University of Bath may have come up with an alternative to digging up the tropical forest...

B. McPherson Are you killing the orangutans? Demand clean palm oil. The palm oil industry in tropical south east Asia has been hit by a severe drought. Rainfall has dropped to levels not seen in over a decade. The oil palms are very sensitive to lack of water and adapt by producing fewer and smaller fruits which, crushed, are the source of palm oil. Indonesia normally produces 86% of the world’s supply of this versatile oil. Twix chocolate bars are a small fraction of the uses industry has for this oil. Widely used in the food industry, palm oil is also found in many cosmetics and used as biodiesel in some countries. The two largest consumers of palm oil, India and China, are facing steep increases in the price of the commodity as production has fallen 12%. Some shortfall may be made up by competing oils produced in the Western Hemisphere, canola and soybean oil. The agricultural industry has been hit in other areas as well with a falling off of rice and coffee produ...

B. McPherson The explosion of palm oil plantations in the tropics has pushed people and nature out of the way as corporations seek to cash in. Indonesia has been hard hit with destruction of its wetland jungles. In the process species found nowhere else have been pushed to the teetering edge of extinction. Included in the sacking of the jungles are our close relatives, the orangutans. International Animal Rescue (IAR) was recently involved in saving a female orangutan and her baby along with a pregnant ape who were slowly starving to death. They were clinging to the one remaining tree left when land clearing was done to start another palm oil plantation. An unusual twist in this story is the people responsible for clearing the land contacted the rescue organization. The more usual course of action has been to simply kill the marooned wildlife. The badly starved animals have been removed to a rescue centre where they are being cared for. Coincidentally, a group of ...