Traffic Magazine For Men Spring 2014 | Page 63

PALM OIL DEFORESTATION The worldwide recession has led many producers to cancel their seed orders and scale back expansions, according to a USDA Foreign Agriculture Service report released last month, which said that new plantations would slow - possibly into 2010. The analysis expects global demand to then return to earlier levels of 2.2 million tons per year. “Prices will go up. This is a short-term phenomenon,” said Tim Killeen, who represents the conservation organization Conservation International on the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a multi-stakeholder effort to form sustainable standards for palm oil production. “I know there is a lot of interest among energy companies with large European markets.” In the meantime, industry leaders are asking the Indonesian government to stimulate the palm oil market. “If Indonesia and Malaysia want to see a fair demand for palm oil and avoid all this fluctuation in prices, you have to create domestic demand,” said M.R. Chandran, an RSPO advisor and industry consultant, according to AFP news agency last month. In an effort to stimulate demand, Indonesia passed biofuel mandates last year that require the country’s cars and trucks to include either ethanol or palm-oil biodiesel in their fuel mix. From 2000-2009, Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market, eclipsing Malaysia’s production in 2006 to become the world leader. Indonesia’s palm oil exports increased nearly 11 million tons over the decade, or about 27 percent per year. This expansion came at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside, mostly tropical lowland forests. The government plans to establish about 1.4 million hectares of new plantations by 2010, according to the Indonesian Palm Oil Commission. The industry group estimates that more than 7 million hectares of plantations have been established, leaving an additional 24.5 million hectares available for future expansion. Such expansion, however, could wipe out the remaining natural habitat of several endangered species. The Center for Orangutan Protection warned last year that the great ape may become extinct in Central Kalimantan, a region of the rapidly developing island o