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Spare Africa the ravages of its native oil palm
OPINION
Palm before the storm With the oil palm set to take off as a major cash crop in its native Africa, we must avoid a repeat of the habitat loss of the past, says Curtis Abraham IT’S beginning to feel like déjà vu. With global demand for cosmetics, soap, biodiesel and vegetable cooking oil ever on the rise, the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) has been a boon, providing the essential ingredient for all these. So much so, that it is now widely cultivated beyond its native range, notably in SouthEast Asia, where the creation of vast oil-palm estates has caused massive deforestation and the local extinction of some species. Anthropologist Joshua Linder at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, called it “private-enterprise-driven tropical deforestation from agriculture”. Now the prodigal plant is coming home. The boom in South-East Asian oil-palm cultivation has hit a stumbling block owing to a diminishing supply of new agricultural land. This, combined with economic incentives such as cheap labour, attractive land acquisition terms and low taxes, has seen foreign agribusinesses converting large tracts of land in west and central Africa to grow oil palm. We can safely assume that the high levels of deforestation, forest fragmentation and biodiversity loss that industrial oil-palm cultivation has caused in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Peruvian Amazon and Colombia will in time occur in Africa, too. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that globally, new acreage given over to oil-palm cultivation quadrupled between 1961 and 2007, when it reached 154,000 24 | NewScientist | 18 January 2014
square kilometres. Much of this in the causes of deforestation was in South-East Asia, which in tropical Africa. Large-scale accounts for more than 80 per forest clearing for oil palm will cent of the world’s palm-oil be accompanied by a surge in production, but sub-Saharan bushmeat hunting as the influx Africa’s contribution wasn't of plantation workers seek to feed insignificant. According to a themselves and supplement their report published in 2012 by incomes. That could be a disaster the environmental group for Africa’s lowland primates and Greenpeace, 26,000 square for conservation generally. kilometres there have either come Contentious cases include under oil palm in recent years or that of Herakles Farms, an are earmarked for planting. agribusiness corporation based in Historically, the loss of New York City. In 2009, its affiliate rainforest in Africa stemmed Sithe Global Sustainable Oils from the expansion of “Describing land earmarked subsistence and smallholder for planting as 'degraded' farming. The increasing use of may fail to recognise its palm oil in food and cooking is biological importance" now causing a noticeable shift
Cameroon signed a 99-year lease on a concession of 730 square kilometres – nearly nine times the area of Manhattan. But this proposed plantation in the west of Cameroon quickly became a bone of contention. The firm pointed to a report by the Ghana Wildlife Society that stated that the areas affected “… consist primarily of fragmented and degraded landscape devoid of any large tracts of the original moist evergreen lowland forest with its characteristic dense and continuous closed canopy”. The firm’s critics said that satellite and aerial surveys revealed the majority of the area to be dense forest. A local and international campaign sprang up to try to halt the scheme. The company later withdrew from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a joint project between industry and conservation groups with the aim of promoting and certifying sustainable palm-oil production. The concession is surrounded by the Korup National Park, the Rumpi hills, the Bayang-Mbo Wildlife Sanctuary, the Bakossi mountains and the Nta Ali Forest Reserve. All are of high conservation value, and critics claimed that if Herakles Farms’s project had gone ahead it would have seriously threatened a fragile ecosystem. The company has reportedly agreed to scale down its plantation to 20,000 hectares. Other proposed African plantations are also attracting the attention of environmentalists. They include ATAMA Plantations
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Curtis Abraham is a journalist based in Kampala, Uganda
One minute Interview
Casualties of war Conflict is just the latest blow to efforts to save Africa’s forest elephants from extinction, warns Andrea Turkalo of rebel groups, are terrorising local villagers. They are also involved in poaching to help finance military operations. In May, they came into Dzanga clearing and gunned down 26 elephants. Was poaching a problem before that? Yes. We have lost 60 per cent of forest elephants in the Congo basin to poaching during the first decade of this century. At that rate, they could go extinct within 10 years.
Profile Andrea Turkalo is a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Based in the Central African Republic, recent violence saw her return to the US. The society’s online campaign to conserve elephants is called 96 Elephants
How did you come to study elephants in the Central African Republic? It was an accident. I never thought I would study elephants, but I happened to be in the right place about 30 years ago – the Dzanga Bai forest clearing. It is the most phenomenal location to see forest elephants in the world. So I stayed. You work on the Elephant Listening Project. What does it do? Elephants are very vocal. We use acoustical monitoring to track them in the forest where we cannot see them. What do we know about elephant chit-chat? The females do most of the talking, so to speak. There’s no syntax in their language and we don’t think they form sentences, but they can recognise each other’s voices. Elephants sometimes use frequencies that humans can’t hear – these are the sounds that travel the farthest in the forest. You recently had to flee violence in the area. How has that affected the elephants? Former members of Séléka, a disbanded coalition
Who’s to blame for poaching? Nowadays, poaching is often run by international syndicates or by outsiders – refugees who have emigrated into our area from the savannah to the north. It appears to be very well organised. We need a lot more intelligence on who these groups are and where the ivory is going. Are other countries involved? We think so. The Chinese have come into central Africa in a big way for mineral extraction and logging. Wherever they go, we see elephant numbers decline. Nowadays, traffickers around the globe can go online and find out where these elephants live. Our research group recently put up a photo of a beautiful old male with huge tusks on its website. Immediately, we saw an extraordinarily high number of page hits from China and the Far East. How do local people view poaching? Poaching isn't always perceived as a real crime. When poachers are caught, a lot of the time they get their wrists slapped, spend a couple of weeks in jail and are then released to continue the killing. Attitudes need to change. What can be done to halt the decline? We need a return to political stability coupled with the political will to support the wildlife rangers on the ground, and to get serious about punishing the poachers and the people they sell to. It’s also vital to put a lot more pressure on China and other ivory consumers to eliminate demand. Interview by Richard Schiffman
18 January 2014 | NewScientist | 25
Elizabeth Bennett/WCS
in the Republic of the Congo, which will occupy an area of dense forest inhabited by western lowland gorillas and chimpanzees. In Liberia, the Malaysian conglomerate Sime Darby is accused of harming biodiversity and the livelihoods of local farmers. Both companies point to promised economic benefits and insist they are environmentally responsible. All is not doom and gloom. Palm oil can be produced in a more sustainable and responsible manner, one which poses a minimal threat to biodiversity, forest and existing livelihoods. To help ensure this happens, no new oil-palm concessions should be awarded until environmentally and socially responsible policies are in place. Failing this, governments should stop any expansion of plantations into areas inhabited by endangered primates and other zones of high biodiversity. There is also an urgent need to clarify what constitutes a “degraded habitat”, a label often used to justify land being converted into plantations. Simply describing land as degraded may fail to recognise its biological and socio-economic importance, so any definition should be nuanced and consider different degrees and types of degradation. Primatologists can also influence the movement for responsible palm-oil production. With their knowledge of the likely ecological impact of new plantations, they should be more proactive in policy formation and in campaigns to protect ecosystems and promote transparency in land acquisition. One can only hope that past lessons and the attention being focused on the expansion of palm-oil production in Africa might be enough to avoid a walk down a deforested path that feels all too familiar. n
Palm before the storm With the oil palm set to take off as a major cash crop in its native Africa, we must avoid a repeat of the habitat loss of the past, says Curtis Abraham IT’S beginning to feel like déjà vu. With global demand for cosmetics, soap, biodiesel and vegetable cooking oil ever on the rise, the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) has been a boon, providing the essential ingredient for all these. So much so, that it is now widely cultivated beyond its native range, notably in SouthEast Asia, where the creation of vast oil-palm estates has caused massive deforestation and the local extinction of some species. Anthropologist Joshua Linder at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, called it “private-enterprise-driven tropical deforestation from agriculture”. Now the prodigal plant is coming home. The boom in South-East Asian oil-palm cultivation has hit a stumbling block owing to a diminishing supply of new agricultural land. This, combined with economic incentives such as cheap labour, attractive land acquisition terms and low taxes, has seen foreign agribusinesses converting large tracts of land in west and central Africa to grow oil palm. We can safely assume that the high levels of deforestation, forest fragmentation and biodiversity loss that industrial oil-palm cultivation has caused in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Peruvian Amazon and Colombia will in time occur in Africa, too. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that globally, new acreage given over to oil-palm cultivation quadrupled between 1961 and 2007, when it reached 154,000 24 | NewScientist | 18 January 2014
square kilometres. Much of this in the causes of deforestation was in South-East Asia, which in tropical Africa. Large-scale accounts for more than 80 per forest clearing for oil palm will cent of the world’s palm-oil be accompanied by a surge in production, but sub-Saharan bushmeat hunting as the influx Africa’s contribution wasn't of plantation workers seek to feed insignificant. According to a themselves and supplement their report published in 2012 by incomes. That could be a disaster the environmental group for Africa’s lowland primates and Greenpeace, 26,000 square for conservation generally. kilometres there have either come Contentious cases include under oil palm in recent years or that of Herakles Farms, an are earmarked for planting. agribusiness corporation based in Historically, the loss of New York City. In 2009, its affiliate rainforest in Africa stemmed Sithe Global Sustainable Oils from the expansion of “Describing land earmarked subsistence and smallholder for planting as 'degraded' farming. The increasing use of may fail to recognise its palm oil in food and cooking is biological importance" now causing a noticeable shift
Cameroon signed a 99-year lease on a concession of 730 square kilometres – nearly nine times the area of Manhattan. But this proposed plantation in the west of Cameroon quickly became a bone of contention. The firm pointed to a report by the Ghana Wildlife Society that stated that the areas affected “… consist primarily of fragmented and degraded landscape devoid of any large tracts of the original moist evergreen lowland forest with its characteristic dense and continuous closed canopy”. The firm’s critics said that satellite and aerial surveys revealed the majority of the area to be dense forest. A local and international campaign sprang up to try to halt the scheme. The company later withdrew from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a joint project between industry and conservation groups with the aim of promoting and certifying sustainable palm-oil production. The concession is surrounded by the Korup National Park, the Rumpi hills, the Bayang-Mbo Wildlife Sanctuary, the Bakossi mountains and the Nta Ali Forest Reserve. All are of high conservation value, and critics claimed that if Herakles Farms’s project had gone ahead it would have seriously threatened a fragile ecosystem. The company has reportedly agreed to scale down its plantation to 20,000 hectares. Other proposed African plantations are also attracting the attention of environmentalists. They include ATAMA Plantations
For more opinion articles, visit newscientist.com/opinion
Curtis Abraham is a journalist based in Kampala, Uganda
One minute Interview
Casualties of war Conflict is just the latest blow to efforts to save Africa’s forest elephants from extinction, warns Andrea Turkalo of rebel groups, are terrorising local villagers. They are also involved in poaching to help finance military operations. In May, they came into Dzanga clearing and gunned down 26 elephants. Was poaching a problem before that? Yes. We have lost 60 per cent of forest elephants in the Congo basin to poaching during the first decade of this century. At that rate, they could go extinct within 10 years.
Profile Andrea Turkalo is a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Based in the Central African Republic, recent violence saw her return to the US. The society’s online campaign to conserve elephants is called 96 Elephants
How did you come to study elephants in the Central African Republic? It was an accident. I never thought I would study elephants, but I happened to be in the right place about 30 years ago – the Dzanga Bai forest clearing. It is the most phenomenal location to see forest elephants in the world. So I stayed. You work on the Elephant Listening Project. What does it do? Elephants are very vocal. We use acoustical monitoring to track them in the forest where we cannot see them. What do we know about elephant chit-chat? The females do most of the talking, so to speak. There’s no syntax in their language and we don’t think they form sentences, but they can recognise each other’s voices. Elephants sometimes use frequencies that humans can’t hear – these are the sounds that travel the farthest in the forest. You recently had to flee violence in the area. How has that affected the elephants? Former members of Séléka, a disbanded coalition
Who’s to blame for poaching? Nowadays, poaching is often run by international syndicates or by outsiders – refugees who have emigrated into our area from the savannah to the north. It appears to be very well organised. We need a lot more intelligence on who these groups are and where the ivory is going. Are other countries involved? We think so. The Chinese have come into central Africa in a big way for mineral extraction and logging. Wherever they go, we see elephant numbers decline. Nowadays, traffickers around the globe can go online and find out where these elephants live. Our research group recently put up a photo of a beautiful old male with huge tusks on its website. Immediately, we saw an extraordinarily high number of page hits from China and the Far East. How do local people view poaching? Poaching isn't always perceived as a real crime. When poachers are caught, a lot of the time they get their wrists slapped, spend a couple of weeks in jail and are then released to continue the killing. Attitudes need to change. What can be done to halt the decline? We need a return to political stability coupled with the political will to support the wildlife rangers on the ground, and to get serious about punishing the poachers and the people they sell to. It’s also vital to put a lot more pressure on China and other ivory consumers to eliminate demand. Interview by Richard Schiffman
18 January 2014 | NewScientist | 25
Elizabeth Bennett/WCS
in the Republic of the Congo, which will occupy an area of dense forest inhabited by western lowland gorillas and chimpanzees. In Liberia, the Malaysian conglomerate Sime Darby is accused of harming biodiversity and the livelihoods of local farmers. Both companies point to promised economic benefits and insist they are environmentally responsible. All is not doom and gloom. Palm oil can be produced in a more sustainable and responsible manner, one which poses a minimal threat to biodiversity, forest and existing livelihoods. To help ensure this happens, no new oil-palm concessions should be awarded until environmentally and socially responsible policies are in place. Failing this, governments should stop any expansion of plantations into areas inhabited by endangered primates and other zones of high biodiversity. There is also an urgent need to clarify what constitutes a “degraded habitat”, a label often used to justify land being converted into plantations. Simply describing land as degraded may fail to recognise its biological and socio-economic importance, so any definition should be nuanced and consider different degrees and types of degradation. Primatologists can also influence the movement for responsible palm-oil production. With their knowledge of the likely ecological impact of new plantations, they should be more proactive in policy formation and in campaigns to protect ecosystems and promote transparency in land acquisition. One can only hope that past lessons and the attention being focused on the expansion of palm-oil production in Africa might be enough to avoid a walk down a deforested path that feels all too familiar. n