Biology Forums - Study Force

What are benefits and problems derived from the planting of palm plantations. The answer covered the effects on human, orang utans and the environment

Thats a hard one.Sorry I dont know.

ok

True. it's a bad situation,.

I don't know about the orangutans, but palm oil, especially locally made is much healthier than most imported oils, contrary to what the soybean industry has said. It will help save shipping costs for people to use locally grown palm oil instead of having oil shipped from other continents.

yes.

One of the principal impacts is the appropriation of large areas of land which have hitherto been in the hands of indigenous or peasant populations and have provided their livelihoods. This dispossession commonly generates resistance from local people, which is in turn confronted by repression by state forces as well as that of the oil palm companies themselves. The violation of land rights is thus typically followed by other human rights violations, including even the right to life.

Against the background of a world increasingly concerned about the loss of tropical rainforests, it is worth noting that almost all these industrial monoculture oil palm plantations are established in forest areas. Large oil palm plantation companies, which found it convenient to "clear" forest areas for plantations by setting them on fire, were responsible for the gigantic forest fires in Indonesia which shocked the world in 1997. Behind nearly every industrial oil palm plantation lies some such process of deforestation, even if it is usually not so extreme.

The tropical forests which are eliminated to make way for these plantations are the habitat for an enormously diverse range of species. Studies in Malaysia and Indonesia have shown that between 80 per cent and 100 per cent of the species of fauna inhabiting tropical rainforests cannot survive in oil palm monocultures (Wakker 2000). Those few species that do manage to adapt often become "pests" since, having lost their normal food supply, they begin to make a meal of the young palm plants. This in turn necessitates the application of pest "control" methods which include chemical pesticides, causing further damage to biodiversity as well as to fresh water supplies and the health of local populations.

Oil palm monocultures are also associated with soil erosion: forest clearance leaves soils bare and exposed to heavy tropical rainstorms. Erosion, in turn, causes contamination and sedimentation in watercourses, affecting supplies of drinking water and fish on which the local communities depend.

Oil processing industries also have an impact on water quality because of the large quantities of effluents which they release into rivers -2.5 tonnes for each tonne of oil processed. Pollution control laws are seldom complied with.

Despite all this, proponents insist on presenting oil palm plantations as the solution to all the social ills of the region in which they wish to establish them, declaring that they will generate employment, wealth, infrastructure, educational opportunities etc., in an effort to gain the support of local people.

The clearing of Indonesia?s rainforest for palm oil plantations is having profound effects ? threatening endangered species, upending the lives of indigenous people, and releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide

In Kalimantan, the region of Borneo that falls under Indonesian jurisdiction, most tropical lowland rain forest will cease to exist by 2010 if current rates of deforestation continue unabated

Implicit in these changes is the loss of critical habitat for flora and fauna in a region that is home to some of the planet?s most impressive biodiversity and the outright extinction of several species of large animals  Several large species at high risk are the Sumatran tiger, both the Sumatran and Bornean orangutans, and the Asian elephant.