Palm oil
PALM OIL
A
APressed from the fruit of the African oil palm, palm oil is the vegetable oil that the world now eats more of than any other. The chances are it is in the soap you reached for this morning, the loaf you bought at lunchtime and the packet of biscuits in the cupboard. So why do food companies find it so useful? The main reason lies in a handful of unusual qualities — chief among them the fact that it does not melt but stays firm at ordinary room temperature. That firmness makes it well suited to keeping processed food edible over long stretches, which is why so many items on supermarket shelves can carry 'best before' dates that run months, and sometimes years, ahead.
B
BConservationists, however, point to several reasons for alarm at how quickly the crop has spread. Report after report describes forests felled, habitats wrecked and animal numbers falling, all traceable to the clearing of land for vast single-crop plantations, above all in Indonesia and Malaysia. A long list of threatened creatures — rhinos, elephants, orangutans and many more — has paid the price as the plantations advance, but it is the Sumatran tiger that has become the animal most often pictured in campaigns against their spread.
C
CPlenty of farmers have rushed to plant as many oil palms as they can. Between 1995 and 2018 the area given over to the crop worldwide swelled from roughly five million hectares to almost twenty million, until it made up close to a tenth of all the cropland on Earth. Fifty years ago the annual global harvest amounted to barely three million tonnes; the yearly figure today sits near seventy million tonnes, and some projections have it doubling again before 2060.
D
D'Few things now endanger the planet's variety of life as gravely as this crop does,' warns Dr Katarina Molnár of Ashfield Metropolitan University. 'Where rainforest once stood, oil palm is taking over — and rainforest is precisely where the species are. That is the heart of the problem.' Views like hers have prompted some campaigners to raise a drastic possibility: that shoppers ought to refuse palm oil altogether. Professor Idris Bello, an economist at the Centre for Development Studies in Accra, is wary of that instinct. 'It is tempting to cast palm oil as the villain and line up against it,' he says. 'That version is more dramatic and it feels obvious. But once you take in how tangled the issue really is, a more careful, less clear-cut account comes nearer the truth.'
E
EBello's caution is borne out even by the charge of deforestation, which turns out to be less clear-cut than it first appears. A hectare of oil palm yields at least four times — and possibly as much as ten times — the oil that the same area of soya, rapeseed or sunflower would give. That remarkable productivity, the very thing that makes the crop so profitable, may also count in its favour ecologically: if a plot of oil palm delivers ten times the oil of a rival crop, then ten times the land would have to be stripped bare to match its output using that rival. The carbon question, too, hangs on what the oil palm has replaced. Plants differ in how much carbon they lock away from the air and hold in their tissue, and the more a crop stores, the more it blunts the warming of the climate. 'In certain respects,' Bello notes, 'growing oil palm actually captures more carbon than some of the alternatives. Clear virgin forest for it, as has been allowed to happen unchecked in Indonesia and Malaysia, and the result is disastrous. But put it where rice once grew, and it may well store more carbon than before.'
F
FA further answer to the boycott campaigners rests on the part palm oil plays in uplifting the lives of millions across the developing world. Would it truly be wise to drive the oil out of global supply chains, given how many people on low incomes in poorer countries make their living from it? Finding a fair way to weigh that human benefit against the environmental costs has turned into a genuinely contested matter.
G
GThere is even a prospect that oil palm estates need not stay the lifeless single-crop expanses — 'green deserts,' as Molnár calls them — that they so often are. Work in her laboratory has fastened on one modest plant that might change everything. The canopy basket fern, which perches on trees purely for support rather than drawing any nourishment from them, grows wild across many tropical regions, where it does the job of a keystone species. Reintroduce it to the plantations, Molnár believes, and these barren tracts could slowly win back their wildlife, offering shelter to everything from fungi and bacteria to insects, frogs, lizards and even small mammals.
H
HThe trade is now watched over by a body known as the Alliance for Responsible Palm Cultivation (ARPC), whose ranks take in growers, processors, retail chains and conservation groups alike. After nearly a decade of negotiation, its members eventually settled on a common set of rules that a producer must satisfy before its oil can count as officially 'responsible.' Among the conditions, the Alliance bars the clearing of untouched forest, obliges certified members to be open about the way they operate, and requires them to check local water tables at regular intervals. Only when every requirement has been met may the oil be marketed as verified responsible palm oil. On recent counts the Alliance certifies around fourteen million tonnes each year — roughly a fifth of everything the world produces.
Question 1 - 7
Which section contains the following information?
1
an outline of several possible ecological benefits that growing the crop could bring
2
an account of a body that oversees how the industry affects the natural world
3
instances showing how commonly the oil turns up in everyday goods
4
mention of a single plant that might improve conditions for life on plantations
5
statistics showing how fast the growing of oil palm has increased
6
a financial argument against turning away from the crop
7
cases of animals that have suffered as plantations have been set up
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
1
an outline of several possible ecological benefits that growing the crop could bring
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
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