Πηγή: International News Magazine
By Joan Baxter Sep. 20 2011
Palm oil is expected to be the world's most produced and internationally traded edible oil by 2012. At what price? As foreign investors descend on Africa to develop large-scale palm oil plantations, the survival of local people is being threatened. They are losing control of the land and water on which they depend for their food production and livelihoods.
OAKLAND (IDN) - The oil palm nursery occupies several hectares of newly cleared forest and fallow land in Sierra Leone. The nursery manager says that by 2012 he will have 540,000 oil palm seedlings, enough to plant over 3,000 hectares. By 2017, the plan is to establish oil palm over 40,000 hectares that have been leased by a foreign investor for 45 years, with a possible extension of 21 more.
But for him, this is a "small" plantation. He is managed far larger ones in his native Malaysia. He says Sierra Leone has to start now to establish oil palm plantations because there is no more land in Malaysia and Indonesia.
By next year palm oil is forecast to be the world's most produced and internationally traded edible oil. Apart from its use as a cooking oil, it is also found in an astonishing range of processed foods and cosmetics. One in ten supermarket products contains palm oil. Government targets for the use of agrofuels in Europe, China and North America are making palm oil, which can be used to produce biodiesel, an even hotter commodity. The burgeoning demand for palm oil is fuelling a war of words over its pros and cons, and fuelling a new scramble for land in Africa.
Malaysia and Indonesia currently account for about 83 per cent of production and 89 per cent of global exports of palm oil. But environmental and civil society groups have drawn world attention to the way thatrainforests and peat-lands have been cleared in Southeast Asia for industrial-scale oil palm plantations, some intended to produce agrofuels purportedly intended to mitigate climate change even as they aggravate it.
Malaysia’s Palm Oil Council has been defending the industry, establishing The Oil Palm website to ‘educate others’ on the benefits of palm oil. There is even a Oil Truth Foundation website, filled with vitriolic attacks on organisations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which have been critical of industrial palm oil producers. An email enquiry to the website received no response.
To try to counter the criticism, in 2004, palm growers, oil processors, traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, investors and NGOs formed the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, ‘dedicated to promoting sustainable production of palm oil worldwide’. But Friends of the Earth maintains that this ‘demand for ‘sustainable’ palm oil is simply leading to the expansion of other palm oil plantations onto forested land’ and causing more deforestation.
A recent moratorium in Indonesia on new concessions for land in forest areas and peat-lands, as full of loopholes as it may be, is driving industrial giants such as Sime Darby, Olam International and Wilmar International and a host of European, American and Asian investors and speculators seeking to get in on the palm oil boom to search for new lands. Their target is the 'final investment frontier', the much-abused continent of Africa.
The 'Final Investment Frontier'
There are no detailed studies showing the full extent of foreign investment in land for oil palm in West and Central, so information about land deals, many lacking any transparency, is piecemeal at best.
In Liberia, a country that was ravaged for years by war, an estimated 5.6 per cent of the total land mass has been leased out to foreign investors for palm oil production. Sime Darby has a 63-year lease for 220,000 hectares of land for oil palm plantations in the country. Singapore-listed Golden Agri Resources has another 220,000 hectares for palm oil estates, and Equatorial Palm Oil, a UK-listed palm oil developer has another 170,000 hectares. This, in a country that still has to import 60 percent of its staple rice needs.
