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| Borneo Island |
Borneo is the third largest island in the world, and forty
years ago it was covered with dense rain forest. As you read this, loggers
in the Borneo rain forest are chopping down the trees, acre by acre. They will
burn the wood, which will release huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere. Then they will plant a palm oil plantation, use the fruit and
kernels to make oil, and sell it to massive corporations who will use it in
every commercial product imaginable, from washing powder, to chocolate, to
soap. It sounds like a straightforward commercial enterprise. So what’s so
‘dirty’ about palm oil?
The environmental impact
The
deforestation of the Borneo rain forest involves draining its natural peat swamp forests which store huge amounts of
carbon that are released into the atmosphere when they are dug up. According to
Greenpeace’s in-depth report on the palm oil industry in Borneo, titled Cooking the Climate, the
incineration of South East Asia’s peat forests has released 1.8 bn tonnes of
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In statistical terms these gases count
for 4% of climate-change emissions globally, from only 0.1% of Earth’s land.
Most of the cleared land was used to grow palm oil plantations.
In
addition to this, the mass clearing of trees for farmland disturbs the ecosystem
of the rain forest by decimating rare and exotic flora and fauna. With the
planting of a single crop plantation, the natural biodiversity of the
rain forest is lost. The mono-crop culture that has long-plagued
environmentalists in the west displaces or destroys most of the species in a
single sitting, as they are unable to adapt to living within vast acres of a
single crop. The environment, habitats and species that are destroyed have
lived together since the dawn of the rain forest, and the damage caused by palm
oil farming is irreversible. In the words of WWF employee Junaida Payne,
transporting this type of agriculture to the rain forest creates ‘biological
deserts’.
According
to a report by the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP), the deforestation that has already taken place in Indonesia
for palm oil, and the illegal logging that is still occurring there now,
indicate that most of the country’s rain forest will have been destroyed
entirely by the year 2022.
The animal impact
A
more widely-discussed topic in relation to the ills of the palm oil industry is
the loss of endangered species. The orangutan,
Asian elephant, Sumatran rhino, and Sumatran tiger are all species whose
survival hangs by a thread, to name a few examples. The orangutan’s natural
habitat is within the trees of the rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra, and
without these they cannot survive. Serge Wich of the US Great Ape Trust states that: ‘Unless extraordinary
efforts are made soon, it could become the first great-ape species to go
extinct.’
The human impact
The
mass deforestation that goes hand-in-hand with the palm oil industry also
displaces native peoples. They lose the land they have always lived on as well
as a precious symbiotic relationship with the rainforest environment.
Indigenous groups are evicted from the land to make way for palm oil
plantations, and they are powerless to fight back, particularly since much of
the logging that takes place is illegal.
