Palm oil is unavoidable. Can it be sustainable?
▻https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/12/palm-oil-products-borneo-africa-environment-impact/?sf219491406=1
In Gabon, one of Africa’s most forested countries, palm oil is coming home, and a boom may be on the horizon. Situated on the Equator and on the continent’s west coast, Gabon is roughly the size of Colorado with a third of the people. More than 76 percent of the country is covered in forest, with 11 percent of its land area protected in national parks. It’s a wildlife wonderland.
“It’s exactly the kind of large, intact forest you want to protect from any kind of development,” says Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth, a Washington D.C.-based environmental organization that has criticized Olam’s palm oil operations in Gabon. “There’s so much degraded land [across the tropics]. Why would you send your palm oil plantations to countries that have so much existing forest?”
One answer is that Gabon wants them. The former French colony has the fourth highest GDP per capita in sub-Saharan Africa, but much of the revenue comes from petroleum. It needs to diversify. Hurowitz argues that Gabon should be developing ecotourism instead. A relatively safe country with spectacular parks and wildlife, it has few airstrips, barely passable roads, and scant lodging. There’s a huge opportunity for more tourism—one that Gabon’s parks agency, the Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux (ANPN), is pursuing.