Tropical forests axed in favour of palm oil
04 June 2008
INDONESIA and Malaysia have long denied that their tropical forests are being burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations. It seems they've been lying through their teeth.
Between 1990 and 2005 palm plantations rocketed by 1.87 million hectares in Malaysia and by more than 3 million hectares in Indonesia. With the help of data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, Lian Pin Koh at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and David Wilcove of Princeton University found that more than half the palm plantations came at the expense of forests - largely pristine, intact forest in Indonesia and previously logged forest in Malaysia. The rest of the expansion covered pre-existing cropland.
The European Commission is drafting a law to ban imports of palm oil crops grown on intact tropical forests. But logged forests support nearly as much biodiversity as primary forests, say the researchers, and should also be protected.
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