1. A few years ago when oils and fats were cheaper than petroleum, the EU and USA rushed to promote the use of biofuels for various reasons. One not-so-frankly-revealed reason was that oilseed farmers will benefit from the new market outlets and the increase in prices. The governments also benefited from this strategy because agricultural subsidies would be reduced if prices of soyabean and rapeseed were high and price support subsidies would not be needed. In addition, it makes good political statements to say that biodiesel will help reduce global warming through reduced green house gas emissions, and also enable the countries to be less dependent on imported petroleum fuels.
2. Diverting a major portion of rapeseed and soya oil supply and stocks for biodiesel did result in increasing prices which benefited the EU and US farmers tremendously between 2004 and the middle of 2008. During this time, it became obvious that palm oil was a potentially good raw material to participate in the biodiesel industries in both the EU and USA as it is generally cheaper than soyabean or rapeseed oil. This resulted in increasing concern amongst the EU biodiesel lobbies who are integrated with the rapeseed industry over the potential competion from palm oil and they tried to prevent it from being imported for biodiesel production and use in the EU. This was also to ensure that biodiesel subsidies are not shared with competing imported oils.
3. Various trade barriers were set up by the goverments. For example, biodiesel standards were developed in the EU to disqualify palm oil biodiesel from being accepted. The cold flow plug point(CFPP) standard was introduced to ensure palm oil did not meet the required test and the anti palm oil lobby was relieved at the new arrangement. However, the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) announced that palm oil biodiesel methyl esters can be processed with a new technology that would overcome the CFPP problem. Furthermore, if the blending of biodiesel is only at 5%, the CFPP value of palm oil biodiesel methyl esters becomes irrelevant as the 5 parts of palm biodiesel is totally dissolved by the 95 parts of petroleum diesel giving an acceptable blend. However, unknown to many, tallow produced in the EU and used for biodiesel would also fail the CFPP test and this would not go well with the local tallow lobbies.
4. EU farmers continue to question the reason for an imported commodity such as palm oil biodiesel to be accorded biofuel subsidy which is meant for local oilseed farmers. The outcries became louder as some power plants began to use palm oil as biofuel and enjoyed the subsidies and the cheaper prices. The rapeseed lobbies were worried that by allowing cheaper palm oil for use as biofuel in vehicles and power plants, it will eventually affect the demand for local oils, and create a substantial outflow of subsidies.(This narrow view ignores the fact that Malaysia imports large amount of EU and US goods and needs market access for its exports in order to remain a valued trading partner)
5. A new import barrier for palm oil was subsequently introduced arising from the view of the former Dutch Environmental Minister who argued that if palm oil is encouraged for use as biofuel it would stimulate an increase in production leading to the opening of forest land. This apparently will affect the environment, animal habitats and biodiversity. He was able to introduce the fear factor of what could happen in the future if palm oil demand undergoes a rapid increase.
6. The environmental NGOs were quick to sieze on the opportunity to harp on the fear of potential deforestation, and started to report on orang utan habitat loss and global warming effects of oil palm cultivation on peat. The change in focus from deforestation due to logging to now oil palm plantation became a refreshing rallying point for NGOs perpetual campaigns. Afterall palm oil has more money to offer than the logging industry which has over the years witnessed a decline.
7. Once the issues of deforestation and palm oil fell into the hands of NGOs like FOE and Green Peace who use unscrupulus methods to attack their target victims, the whole issue of biodiesel development and protection of subsidies was totally forgotten. The farmers in the EU and USA who are worried by palm oil invasion for the new found application of their oils and fats as biodiesel are totally served by the NGOs who gladly run the anti-palm oil campaign while pocketing huge amount of funds. The collusion to get the NGOs to campaign against palm oil was cleverly disguised. It was reported for example, that the Dutch Lottery money of a staggering US$2 million was instrumental in financing Green Peace to carry out a blockade of a ship carrying palm oil from leaving an Indonesian port to sail to Europe in 2007.
8. It is clear that the fear factor used is based on the assumption that if demand for biofuel is increased, more oil palm cultivation will occur thus causing deforestation. Fortunately, Malaysia has consistently proven the assumption as baseless and wrong.
9. Let me debunk the various fallacies that are often cited to paint a bleak picture of the ever popular oil palm.
Fallacy 1: Oil palm plantations are claimed to be the cause of deforestation.
Palm oil producing countries such as Malaysia have permanent forest reserves which take up to 55% of the country’s total land area. Laws are in place to disallow these permanent forest areas to be converted to other uses including for agriculture or growing of oil palm. The remaining forest areas are meant for conversion into other uses, including agriculture. Some of these conversion forest areas are already alienated to individuals or organisations although the land may still not yet be converted and remain under forest cover. NGOs like Green Peace argue that these unconverted areas should be declared as forest through a moratorium on deforestation which essentially means a stop to a developing country like Malaysia from using its potential agricultural land to improve the life of its farmers. It is equivalent to asking the EU farmers to reforest back some 50 % of their agricultural land to help prevent global warming and preserve biodiversity. In all fairness, Greenpeace should agressively campaign for reforesting 50 % of agricultural land of the UK and EU and if successful, Malaysia should have no problem following the standard set by the EU in terms of land use ratio for agriculture.
There are also calls by NGOs for the Prince Chales Conservation fund to compensate developing countries for conserving more forests. Logically, these funds would be better used to reforest the over extended and over deforested agricultural areas in the UK. Most agricultural land can be easily reforested if so desired. The slogan “Plant Thy Own Forest” and “Stop Envying Thy Poor Neighbours Green Backyard” can be adopted. Otherwise Green Peace is cunningly introducing double standards where the EU can deforest and develop these areas into agricultural land, while the developing countries farmers are comdemmed to perpetual poverty by preventing them from exercising their sovereign rights to develop their agricultural land.
Fallacy 2 -It is often claimed that the expansion of oil palm cultivation will affect the habitats of the orang utans in Sabah and Sarawak.
A recent study revealed that orang utan population is Sabah has not declined because the permanent forest area ( the favourite habitat of the orang utans that was surveyed five years ago)has not changed over the last five years. The study further revealed that the orang utan population in the non-permanent forest areas is increasing based on the survey of nesting sites. More surprisingly, orang utans living near oil palm plantations were observed to regularly visit the plantations to feed on loose oil palm fruitlets and benefit from an all year round availability of a healthy food source which is naturally rich in vitamin A and E, giving the orang utans a healthy shining coat. This suggests that development of the oil palm as a crop and conservation can successfully operate side by side.
Fallacy 3 The third fallacy is linking oil palm to deforestation and attributing this to global warming.
The oil palm planted area of 4.3 million hectares in Malaysia represents a mere 0.09% of the world agriculture land. Assuming these areas were originally forests, Malaysia’s share of deforestation for world food production is 0.09 %. I wait to see the NGO global warming scientists’ prediction on the rise in global temperature caused by oil palm cultivation in Malaysia that resulted in 0.09 % of total deforestion via agricultural development. Even doubling the oil palm area may not add substantially to the world deforestation total. However, expanding oil palm may save deforestation by curtailing the rapid expansion of other inefficient land-use oil seed crops which need to be grown otherwise to overcome world shortages.
Fallacy 4 Potraying palm oil as inferior to soyabean or rapeseed oil in global warming debate.
Oil palm in Malaysia and Indonesia is an agricultural crop which is grown mainly for the export market. We are the only two major net exporter countries (Argentina is a distant third)for vegetable oils and fats. The rest of the world are mostly net importers. It implies that if palm oil supply is reduced in the future, ten times more forest areas will need to be converted to agriculture to meet the shortages by growing soyabean or other annual oilseed crops compared to the area needed to grow oil palm to produce the targeted quantity of oil.
Recently, it was revealed that new varieties of oil palm are capable of increasing the yield by 3 times more and if further research to stabilise this yield potential is undertaken through international collaboration, palm oil can be a sound candidate to help solve not only future food shortages but also the biofuel need of the world. In simple terms, it has been calculated that a hectare of oil palm will potentially produce oil sufficient to fuel a VW Polo car 400,000 km of travel per year including the use of the methane fuel generated by the oil palm mill effluent, while a hectare of soya bean can fuel only 8,000 km of travel by the same car as a comparison. The irony is that the EU and USA are gladly promoting the most inefficient bio fuel derived from soyabean and rapeseed sources ,which can only mean massive deforestation possibly in Agentina, Brazil or where ever soyabean and rapeseed can be grown. The opportunity for oil palm to serve as an efficient fuel source and to save more forests from being converted into soyabean and rapeseed farms is sadly overlooked and we can only blame this on the manupulative science which is used by NGOs to raise emotions and blur the truth from reaching the attention of decision and policy makers in the EU and USA.
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Impressively well thought-out and researched!
Hi, nice post. I have been pondering this issue,so thanks for writing. I will definitely be coming back to your blog.
Where is the study that found orangutans benefit from vitamin A and E on oil palm plantations published?
Appreciate your comment, but we are trying to help our poor people escape poverty by giving them a viable crop to plant. If we had planted soyabean or corn like they do in the West we would have used up all the land that even humans have no place to live in Malaysia. Let us hope we will continue to encourage each other not to be so short sighted. Tq Yusof
Mr Butler, We will be organising the first Ornag Utan Colloquim in Sabah late September / early October, and the study report by our expatriate primatologist will be discussed. We will continue to provide evidence based information to help all stake holders resolve their information needs.Tq Yusof
If foreign NGOs choose to ignore First World countries eco- unfriendly efforts, so be it. What we can do is properly research the allegations and come up with better alternatives. 0.09% is NOT equal to 0%, and still does contribute to global warming, especially since peatland rainforest is cut down to make space for plantations. It’s also true that palm oil biofuel also releases carbon dioxide during combustion, processing, transportation etc. making it NOT carbon neutral. Moreover, the energy balance of other plant matter, like discarded plant waste, husks, even dried roadside leaves and algae (!), is much, much more than palm oil biofuel,(7 versus 36, researched by the Palm Oil Research Center and National Geographic) besides, palm oil biofuel does not reduce emissions compared to gasoline as mush as the other plant matter (collectively called cellulosic ethanol), which is 91% less. Moreover, since palm oil is also used as food, when world food demand increases, the price of palm oil will inevitably go up, as the produced oil is also being used for fuel, and this will be very difficult on the world’s poor. Cellulosic ethanol grows on land unfit for other crops, and in many cases, doesn’t even need land (just think: the roadside leaves, if collected and processed, could power our cars!), so the food vs fuel debate does not arrive there. The problem is, cellulosic ethanol has not yet been produced, as development of such ethanol is still infantile, cause no one yet knows how to make it into a viable, cheap fuel. If Malaysia reduces its palm oil biofuel budget, it could fund a cellulosic ethanol research program, and capture the world economy if it manages a breakthrough. Bags of algae could be hung outside factories, soaking up their emissions, then collected and made into fuel- one acre of algae can yield 5000 gallons of biofuel a year. Malaysia must grab this chance instead of continually whining at the attitude of foreign nonprofits.
Our agricultural farmers used to plant rubber trees to produce and export natural rubber for tyres and other products. The world market paid very low price for rubber and our farmers lived in poverty for many decades. We cannot compete if we produced corn or soyabean on our asgricultural land as we cannot afford to mechanise like in the West. We are a developing country with little financial power. Now that our agricultural land can be used to grow an alternative crop like oil palm that gives a higher income, our farmers are beginning to move out of the poverty line. Our agricultural land is needed for our farmers to produce food and commodities in order to servive to modern world. The Malaysian Government pledged to conserve up to 50% of our forests at the Rio Earth Summit to ensure conservation of biodiversity and orang Utan habitats and we are still committed to that target which is better than most other countries forest availability ratio .Why must Dr Zaius of Red Apes threathen to harm our farmers with negative allegations against our agricultural produce like palm oil. Orang utans are our national Mascot and conservation programmes for them have long been established through the many Orang Utan Centres and santuaries.Even our own local NGOs do not complain. Are you better informed than our local experts? The act of one NGO citing other NGO’s report should be discouraged. NGOs must strive to provide independent evidence based information to be credible.
Dear Dr,
Where can i find the malaysian decreed to stop the deforestattion for palm oil planting. I heard bout it but failed to find such on the internet. Thanks
Dear Dr Yusof,
Do you have any evidence to support the claim that no Malaysian rainforest has been cleared for oil palm since 1990? There seems to be a lot of evidence that forest clearance for oil palm is ongoing in Peninsular Malaysia - particularly in the states of Kelantan and Pahang. There is also ongoing clearance of peat swamp forest for oil palm in Sarawak. All this is still happening today - in 2009.
Dear Mr Lim,
The permanent forest area in Malaysia has stabilised and lately even increased. The permanent forest area is more than 55% of total land of the country. The permanent forest is not allowed to be used for other developments by law and if an area has to be converted for an important development, an equivalent area of replacement needs to be gazetted. Malaysia only pledged to maintain 50% of its land area under permanent forest at the Rio Earth Summit. Other areas are likely to be developed for all types of uses as the country develops. Please remember that we are a developing country.
There may be areas currently under forest but the land may already be given out to individual s or companies for development. It is the sovereign right of the country to develop its land as we do not have to keep 100% of the country under forest just because our land can be forested very easily. Many such areas have been developed for oil palm cultivation in the past and this will continue into the future but that will not disturb our permanent forest area. Other countries have no right to dictate to Malaysia to have more forest unless they show better examples for us to follow. Presently most of these countries have less than 30 % of their total land as forest .
What about the the indigenous communities whose native customary rights to land are grabbed for palm companies? These lands were taken from them without prior consent.
Reply: The customary rights lands are only limited to Sarawak where the British took photographs of shifting cultivation areas from planes in the1950s as evidence that the land was allowed for agriculture to be practiced by the tribes responsible in that area. This was before Sarawak became independent. This created a messy land administration system as land titles were not given to the indigenous people, unlike their counterparts in Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah. The government continues to honour the NCR lands to be practiced by the indigenous people but lands outside the photographed areas are owned by the state and mostly they are preserved as permanent forests.
Over the years, the boundaries of the NCR lands became uncertain because the land is overgrown by forests and the indigenous tribes expanded their shifting cultivation areas or their claim. This leads to confusion and it prevented Sarawak from developing its land into modern agriculture system as land titles are not available for individuals in the NCR areas while State land has some elements of claims by the tribes in the locallity. In the mean time the affected land has been logged many times and what is left is degraded land with no commercial logging value and no forest products to be exploited.
The government is asking investors to develop these degraded land areas so that the land is rehabilitated and becomes productive. The indigenous people welcome the opportunity to develop their land and they are usually given 30% equity free of charge in the developed land as this will provide them with a source of income as the development matures. This scheme is fairly successful at present.
The problem is not every indigenous person agrees to the grand solution and some are persuaded by lawyers and NGOs to take the developers to court, hoping to get a settlement and compensation. If the government adheres to the boundaries of aerial photographs of the NCR land, the court claims by the indegenous people would not hold, but verifying the boundaries takes a long time and so will the court cases. Mostly the compensations are settled outsite of court to provide practical outcomes for progress to be achieved.
Leaving the system unresolved will be a big loss to the people of Sarawak as the affected land is generally unproductive. Interference by western NGOs does not help to solve the issue. It does not help forest conservation goals either as the area has been overlogged and over hunted because of poverty. Why do think it is difficult to find monkeys residing in such areas of degraded forests?..Monkeys are part of food sources for some tribes!
I believe it is the duty of all world citizens to learn to live in harmony and sustainability with the natural world. Cars, machines, skyscrapers, and manufactured items have a great allure. Yet, once awakened the allure of living in harmony with the natural world, is even stronger. I wish all good to the good people of Indonesia. I believe we in the West have to create a deep cultural change, and I hope the rest of the world does not intend to follow our lead. I hope they will indeed be the pioneers in this cultural shift. Thank you and may your work be guided by good science, and come to sustainable ends.
The allegations against palm oil are baseless. You may recall they tried to corner palm oil from every scientific angles but when the “trans-fat” issue became public, it hit hard against soy oil.
The recent “environmental” allegation is expected. They have been toying on that idea for some time. I just came back from Felda Besout. We conducted our own research. In all aspects, their claims are truly baseless. I was once a skeptic. And when the allegations were recently brought against Malaysia, I just had to do my own research to ascertain the truth in those reports. Hey, I’m after all a tree-hugger.
The eco-system and environment created by palm oil are amazing - and this on plots of tertiary forest land that should have been idle - but instead given a new life and it co-existed with the primary forest next to it. Economically sound, environmentally-friendly.
The wildlife is exhaustive - to name but a few - wild boars, tigers, elephants, beautiful butterflies (we saw thousands of them feeding on overly-ripen fruits from fruit trees that are planted in between the oil palm plants), snakes!
The palm oil plants grow to about 40-50 years old. All that while, untiringly providing the precious vegetable oil, biofuel and creating oxygen. Soy, rapeseed and peanuts are seasonal crops. The carbon emissions - well, I think we can imagine (or not) how high it can stretch.
This report is going to be interesting.
Look for information on orang utan colloquium to download from MPOC main web page http://www.mpoc.org.my