Oil Palm Deforestation

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Oil palm is a fast and easy way to diminish poverty in areas with severe poverty, however can lead to severe deforestation as well as desertification as a result. Developing countries could use oil palm as great starting point to help grow their country as long as they do not get too enticed that they rely solely on oil palm production.

Oil palm is an important crop for the first world that has had a big impact on the global market, the environment, as well as social implications on developing countries. Oil palm demand by the global market stems from the first world’s requirements for a clean bio-fuel, a replacement for trans fat, and to help supply the world’s vegetable oil demand5 and is hard for developing countries to ignore their
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Obidzinski et al.3 used satellite images to map the areas where oil palm was grown as a comparison to previous years before palm oil development, which can cause environment orthodoxy. They found that the rate of deforestation was rapidly expanding, and by 2006 almost sixty per cent on the entire forest has been transformed into oil palm, in addition to a minimum of eighty three per cent occurs at the direct expense of the forest3, and has been mentioned by an Indonesian rights and resource group,4 that in 2014 Indonesia had the highest rate of deforestation on Earth. Moreover, World Watch6 has estimated that in the expansion of oil palm production more than 340,000 hectares of Indonesian land has been traded from dense lowland forest to oil palm plantations, and plans to increase this amount to 1.4 million hectares of land in 2010. As discussed by World Watch,6 the rate of expansion is too fast, and if continued, will wipe out plant and animal species along with some endangered animals, such as the great ape, which live primarily in these forests, and as mentioned by Obidzinski et al,3 soil erosion, decline in water quality via runoff, flash floods, increase human disease, air pollution from burning the forest and oil palm waste, moisture loss, and loss of biodiversity are all end …show more content…
However, the decrease in poverty caused by oil palm revenue leads to some positive indirect outcomes to be reported such as schools being built, health clinics/hospitals, or religious centres.3 The paper by World Growth5 supports oil palm because of the requirements of oil palm for the global market, and that it is generating money for the people of Indonesia, West Kalimantan, and Bunyamin, which is beneficial to the people in poverty as stated in Cramb and Curry.1 However, the scale they used was too broad, and missed the true financial impacts as reported by Obidzinski et al.3 that it further widened the gap between the upper class and the poor. However, Cramb and Curry1 measured the macro and micro economic issues and concluded that the popular ideology of oil palm’s capitalist expansion is destructive to rural livelihoods is more complex than expected, and that in some regions, the people of Asia and the pacific region provided a potential to escape poverty by adding money and jobs to their economy and adding new livelihood

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