Oil palms and Sarawak's forests

by Paige Fischer and Harlan Thompson
The Borneo Project

The rainforests of Southeast Asia face a new threat: palm oil plantations. Instead of lush, diverse forest, identical rows of palm trees run for miles in all directions. In Malaysia, already the largest palm oil supplier in the world, plantations multiply particularly in Sarawak on Borneo. They are also expanding in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and other Southeast Asian countries.

Fruit from oil palm trees is pressed to release a fatty oil used in soaps, candy bars, snack food, fuel oil, cooking oil, and other goods. Palm oil has long been used on a local scale, but growing regional and international demand has logging barons converting heavily logged areas into a new income source.

Palm trees are planted in even rows, with wide, exposed space between them. The heat is intense, the erosion dramatic. Rivers run brown; forest fires start easily; animals find no habitat. The forest destruction is permanent.

Oil palms, which require heavy fertilization, are most productive between three and seven years of age. After 15 years, the trees produce little oil, and are replaced. With each cycle the soil is depleted; eventually it is useless. Even before the plantations close down, entire longhouse villages are often forced to relocate because they can no longer find fresh water, greens and roots, nor grow crops.

Local governments promote palm oil for fast revenue. Sarawak plans nearly a million acres of oil palm cultivation in 2000. International financial institutions and trade bodies promote the industry as well. Countries are encouraged to convert more land to plantations, export more palm oil, and allow foreign palm oil corporations to own plantation lands. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) made a recent financial package to Indonesia contingent on liberalization of the palm oil sector, while the World Bank provided $400 million in loans for foreign corporations to invest in the industry. The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and World Trade Organization (WTO) have been developing free trade agreements that most likely will boost palm oil production and encourage more forest destruction.

The social effects of oil palm plantations are similarly disruptive. Villagers are promised new jobs and a percent of the profits if they do not resist plantation development on their ancestral lands. Yet the jobs are few, low-paying, and temporary, and the profit sharing fails to materialize. Local environmentalists have been traveling from village to village, educating locals about the realities of plantation development with slide shows and testimonials from villages already affected.

Sawit (Palm Oil) Watch, a coalition of more than twenty NGOs in Southeast Asia, supports local campaigns against palm oil companies and the IMF's and World Bank's structural adjustment policies. Resistance has been mounting. Last year in Sarawak, a protester was shot and killed by police during a peaceful anti-plantation protest. In June 1999, environmental NGOs in Sumatra, Indonesia won a lawsuit against seven companies. These companies were found guilty of setting fires to clear farmland for oil plantations, and forced to pay compensation. In the US, environmental groups such as the Pacific Environment and Resources Center, Environmental Defense Fund, and International Campaign for Ecological Justice in Indonesia are supporting Southeast Asian efforts by pressuring US decision-makers to change international policies that expand the palm oil export industry.

Palm oil trees can be grown without adverse effects using traditional agricultural practices, but large-scale monoculture farming destroys the soil. If practiced non-sustainably and without consideration of local people's needs and well-being, palm oil could prove even more permanently damaging to rainforest communities than logging.

The Borneo Project will forward donations to groups in Sarawak fighting oil palm development. Contributions can be sent to Palm Oil Campaign, The Borneo Project, 1916 A Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Berkeley, CA 94703, (510) 705-8987. For more on the palm oil industry in Southeast Asia and the groups campaigning against it: Pacific Environment and Resources Center (PERC), 1440 Broadway, Suite 306, Oakland, CA 94612, (510) 251-8800.