industryterm:oil palm cultivation

Primate woes where the oil palm grows | ConservationBytes.com
▻https://conservationbytes.com/2018/08/16/primate-woes-where-the-oil-palm-grows

https://coreybradshaw.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/gorilla.jpg?w=1200

A new article just published in PNAS reveals how future expansion of the palm-oil industry could have terrible consequences for African primates.

Researchers from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, CIRAD, Liverpool John Moores University, and ETH Zurich searched for “areas of compromise” combining high oil palm suitability with low primate vulnerability, as possible locations where to accommodate new oil-palm plantations while reducing detrimental effects on primate populations.

Results show that there is small room for compromise. In fact, potential areas of compromise are rare across the whole African continent, covering a total extent of 0.13 Mha of land highly suited to oil palm cultivation where primate vulnerability is low, rising to just 3.3 Mha if all land with at least minimum suitability to grow oil palm is taken into account.

Palm oil production is steadily rising, and expected to accelerate in response to growing world’s population, with future demand driven not only by the food industry, but also by the biofuel market.

#Palmier_à_huile #industrie_palmiste #primates

Ecocide and modern slavery in the land of the Maya: the impact of oil palm cultivation in Guatemala - Equal Times
▻https://www.equaltimes.org/ecocide-and-modern-slavery-in-the?lang=en

It looks clean and exuberantly beautiful, but the lake is contaminated. And the lives of 700 people depend on this lake, all residents of the Manos Unidas (United Hands) Cooperative, a community that is part of the municipality of Sayaxché, in the Petén department, northern Guatemala.

Manos Unidas has become the last frontier of resistance to the advance of palm oil production in the region, as the only community that has hung on to its land; and that, say its residents, is because the lands are common property.

#Guatemala #industrie_palmiste #esclavage_moderne

’We need more knowledge and more control’: Palm oil expands in Ecuador
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2016/11/we-need-more-knowledge-and-more-control-palm-oil-expands-in-ecuador

Over the past five years, the landscape of Maximiliano Moreno’s property in northern Ecuador and the air he breathes has changed. He went from being surrounded by vast forest to overlooking endless plains of oil palm. The situation prompted an agreement between Moreno and the owner of the neighboring land to reduce discharge from the plantation to his plots where he harvests cacao and breeds tilapias.

“Pollution [from oil palm cultivation] is something difficult, heavy insecticides are used, kilos of fertilizer per plant and everything is drained to the streams that cross the farm,” Moreno told Mongabay-Latam.

Moreno is a farmer and president of the Riveras del Punino community — located in the parish of Nuevo Paraíso, Francisco de Orellana (also known as Coca). Tempted by rising palm oil prices, he confessed that there was a time when he considered the possibility of working in the oil palm industry and cutting down all his fruit trees, cacao and timber inside his 30-hectare property. However, he was more interested in the conservation of his land’s vegetation and water sources. This was not the case for his neighbors, who Moreno said bought their respective 60-hectare properties to grow oil palm.

https://imgs.mongabay.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2016/11/16124416/bosques-deforestacion-palma-amazonia-especiales-Ecuador-0.jpg

#Équateur #industrie_palmiste #terres #déforestation

DRC: Communities mobilise to free themselves from a hundred years of colonial oil palm plantations | WRM in English
▻http://wrm.org.uy/articles-from-the-wrm-bulletin/section1/drc-communities-mobilise-to-free-themselves-from-a-hundred-years-of-colonial

Oil palms are native to the forests of Central and West Africa and inseparable from the region’s peoples and their cultures. Communities in this part of the world have relied on oil palms for thousands of years— as a source of food, textiles, medicines and construction materials.

Most of the world’s oil palms, however, are cultivated far away, in Southeast Asia, and not in forested palm groves, but on massive #monoculture #plantations where tropical forests used to stand. These oil palm plantations are a product of Europe’s brutal colonial legacy.

When the European colonizers invaded Central and West Africa during the nineteenth century, they came to understand (in a very narrow way) the possible wealth that could be generated from oil palm cultivation. They began taking over the local people’s large oil palm groves and tearing down forests to set up plantations. One of the pioneers of this effort was Britain’s Lord Leverhulme, who, through a campaign of terror against the local people, took over community palm groves and turned vast swathes of the Congo’s forests into slave plantations. His company’s oil palm plantations would eventually expand throughout West and Central Africa and then to Southeast Asia, and provide the foundation for the multinational corporation #Unilever, one of the world’s largest food companies. Unilever sold off its global oil palm plantations about a decade ago but to this day it remains one of the world’s biggest buyers of palm oil.

...

After 100 years in what is now the DRC, Unilever sold three of its oil palm plantations in 2008 to a company called #Feronia, registered until recently in the Cayman Islands. This company, listed on the Stock Exchange in Toronto, Canada and now majority owned by European development funds, had no previous experience in agriculture. Through its sale of these DRC plantations, Unilever made around USD 14 million dollars in cash and left behind around USD 10 million dollars in liabilities to the new owners.

#industrie_palmiste #esclavage #colonisation #exploitation #terres