palm oil

Some activist groups are abandoning the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil—a panel of palm producers, consumer companies, and activist groups that provides sustainability certificates for the industry—over complaints that it has not done enough to correct industry abuses.

Four hundred of the biggest food companies in the U.S. and Europe have pledged not to buy from suppliers responsible for deforestation. But no one can say for sure whether their promises are actually protecting forests, according to a report from Climate Focus.

One of the poorest nations on earth, Liberia has made palm oil a key part of its campaign to create jobs and reduce poverty. The head of the country's National Investment Commission says the palm oil sector could bring employment to up to 100,000 Liberians, says the Guardian, but "there was little consideration in this process of those who lived on the land or had the right to it."

More than 100,000 people died prematurely because of smoke and haze created by vast forest fires, mainly in Indonesia, last year, said the New York Times, pointing to research by two U.S. universities. The blazes destroyed more than 10,000 square miles of forests and began with fires intended "to clear land for palm oil plantations and other uses," said the newspaper.

Just like the operators of large-scale plantations, small-scale farmers in Southeast Asia chop down rain forests to plant oil palm trees, says a study led by a researcher from Lund University in Sweden. “For the great majority of small farmers, chopping down diverse forests and investing in a single species of tree – monoculture – is the simplest and quickest path out of poverty," says the researcher Yann Clough.

The rampant destruction of rainforest by the Indonesian palm-oil industry is leaving villagers with few options but to poach species like the Helmeted Hornbill to extinction, says Jocelyn Zuckerman in FERN’s latest story, published with Audubon Magazine.

The worldwide spike in food prices nearly a decade ago set off a land-buying surge by wealthy investors and nations wanting to shore up their food supply by acquiring cropland in developing nations. The surge was decried by critics as land grabs that would displace small farmers and herders. "The emerging new trend we wrote about in 2008 has continued and become worse," says the nonprofit Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN).

Wheat farmers around the world are forecast to reap a crop of 723 million tonnes this year, down 10 million tonnes, or 1.4 percent, from the record harvest of 2015, said the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in its first forecast of 2016 crops.

A new satellite-based monitoring system can spot logging of endangered forests in as little time as a week, depending on cloud cover, says the environmental group World Resources Institute.

The world's largest palm-oil producers and exporters, Malaysia and Indonesia, "have joined hands to establish a council to strengthen cooperation and improve the welfare of smallholders," says The Star Online, based in Malaysia.

In a piece that explores the dramatic expansion of palm-oil plantations in the rainforests of Indonesia, journalists Jocelyn Zuckerman and Michael Hudson detail abuses committed against the Batin Sembilan, an indigenous community in Sumatra that was forcibly resettled by the largest agribusiness in Asia, Wilmar International Limited.

The FDA's announcement of a three-year phase out of most uses of trans fats, usually present in foods as partially hydrogenated oils (PHOs), may not be the end of the story, says Time. The replacements for PHOs "have their own problems."

Forest fires burned 1.64 million hectares across seven provinces of Indonesia this year, with peatlands accounting for 41 percent of the area lost to flames, said the Center for International Forestry Research on Monday. The figures, based on satellite data, show that only a portion of the the fires could be attributed to direct land-clearing work for palm oil plantations.