• Deforestation by agriculture and cattle-raising
• The Green Revolution: From crops for food to crops for domination
• Colonization and the role of agriculture in a nutshell
• The “development” model at the apex of deforestation
• Oil palm and soybean: Two paradigmatic deforestation cash crops

- Deforestation by agriculture and cattle-raising

Tropical forests have been inhabited for thousands of years by communities that made use of them for subsistence in many ways, including agricultural activities. It was a type of agricultural production that took into account crop interactions and was carried out in such a way that not only did it prevent destruction of the forest but was able to be in harmony with it. The communities promoted areas where a diversity of species useful for human consumption were concentrated, within a diverse scenario, but which did not undermine the forest’s biological bases. Some studies indicate that approximately 12 per cent of the Amazon forests are the “result of prolonged management by pre-historic populations.”

However, following Colonial intervention, the colonized countries –the Third World– were incorporated into the world market and an agricultural model was introduced that weakened indigenous land tenure and resource management systems. Whether in Latin America, Africa or Asia, the colonizers’ common intention was to convert previously self-sufficient economies into zones for agricultural production aimed at exports, placing the emphasis on “productivity” understood as the maximum output of a main crop, accounted for independently from the rest of the ecosystem. Thus crop and forage rotation, extensive animal husbandry with scant genetic diversity were implanted and later a series of technological innovations were applied to agriculture, which led to the manufacture of chemical fertilizers, machinery and motors (see the article on the Green Revolution in this same issue), which further entrenched this productive model.

Even when the countries achieved political independence, the model did not change and in general terms they remained captive of trade and economic dependency on the markets of the North, with the complicity of the national elites in power –both economic and political– and the decisive promotion of international bodies such as the World Bank and FAO. This dependency has progressively increased, creating instability, poverty and environmental degradation of the Third World countries’ agricultural systems.

The expansion of agriculture and cattle-raising has been identified as one of the main causes of deforestation and forest degradation in various countries around the world. In the case of agriculture, it is a two sided factor leading to both direct and indirect deforestation.

Agriculture or commercial plantations are usually an agricultural business practiced by companies. Through a concession agreement, the purchase of land or informal occupation, the companies take over the land with the intention of converting it to other uses. In the case of tropical zones, this possession extends to forests which are converted for the plantation of trade crops such as sugar cane, oil palm, rubber, coffee, cocoa and tropical fruit (bananas, citrus fruit, etc.). In this case direct deforestation is carried out by the companies to convert the forests into agricultural zones. For example, in Indonesia, the extension of oil palms has increased in an amazing way over the past few years, to the detriment of forests and the fallow bushes that grew after slash and burn agriculture. The experience of Indonesia with oil palms has been repeated in many other tropical countries over the past years.

However, commercial agriculture also produces indirect deforestation insofar as the commercial farms occupy the more fertile and best located lands in the valleys, displacing the increasing rural population that depends on agriculture for subsistence. Without access to agricultural lands in their immediate area and generally within the framework of unemployment, small farmers are evicted and must migrate, very often to less fertile and productive lands or to forest areas. During the seventies, the oil palm cooperatives that settled in the valleys along the northern coast of Honduras led to the displacement of thousands of small farmers and cattle raisers towards the steep wooded slopes and mudflow lands which they deforested to install their farms and grazing lands. The tragedy is that most of these lands are not suitable for long-term agriculture or grazing as once the forest cover has been removed the area becomes exposed to erosion and to the loss of minerals and nutrients, resulting in an impoverished soil. It is for this reason that subsistence agriculture practiced in tropical forests resorts to the migrant “slash and burn” system, as burning contributes nutrients to the soil for a while, and migrating to other areas after a few years allows the forest to fully re-establish itself.

In addition to the negative environmental impacts common to all forms of deforestation, commercial agriculture brings with it a series of problems related to the use of chemicals such as fertilizers, pesticides and weed-killers that have a detrimental impact on the workers’ health, contaminating crops, soil and groundwater. For example, in banana plantations, pesticides are used on the plants and the soil for pest control. But they also kill other living organisms and are harmful to the health of the ecosystem. The banana plantations also use irrigation dykes and underground pipes to transport water, altering the land’s hydrological balance. Once a crop produced under an intensive system in a forest zone is abandoned, many years -even centuries- may go by before the forest is able to grow again, if it ever does.

In a similar model to that of commercial agriculture, cattle-raising has developed as an industrial type of production, centred on limited genetic diversity, aimed at export to the markets of industrialized countries for the production of hamburgers in fast food chains and the production of frozen meat products. The expansion of cattle-raising has also been promoted by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as through tax incentives and has been closely linked to land concentration. The ranchers occupy large areas of forest which they themselves log or purchase on-farm "improvements" (cleared land) made by the small farmers. In the past the ranchers preferred zones of dry forest because it is easy to manage for cattle-raising and as grazing land, but later extensive logging of the tropical rainforest both in South and Central America took place.

Ecological destruction caused by cattle-raising programmes is long term and often irreversible. Soil nutrients are rapidly depleted and the land is invaded by toxic weeds. In a few years the land is so degraded that it must be abandoned.

Article based on information from: “A Brief History of Agriculture”, http://www.planetaorganico.com.br/enhistor.htm ; “Asuntos forestales. Deforestación: Bosques Tropicales en Disminución”, http://www.rcfa-cfan.org/spanish/s.issues.12-5.html ; Throwing a Monkey Wrench into the Industrial Farm Machine”, Eco-Logical, http://www.grinningplanet.com/2004/04-06/industrial-agriculture-1-article.htm ; “Saving What Remains”, http://www.mongabay.com/1002.htm ; “Rainforest Destruction. Causes, Effects & False Solutions”, World Rainforest Movement, 1999.

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- The Green Revolution: From crops for food to crops for domination

In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the introduction of a series of technologies in Mexican agricultural production. This gave rise to an agricultural production model known as the “Green Revolution” with a central concept of “high yielding varieties” developed in the framework of monoculture crops supported by a technological package including mechanization, irrigation, chemical fertilization and the use of toxic chemicals to control pests.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, FAO disseminated these technologies all over the world, announcing that the Green Revolution science was a “miraculous” recipe to achieve prosperity, solve hunger in the world and secure peace.

The application of this model has had –and continues having- an enormous impact on deforestation rates through the substitution of forest areas by large scale monoculture cash crops. Furthermore, the Green Revolution not only did not solve, but worsened the problem of world hunger, contributing to the loss of rural communities’ means of subsistence and to rural to urban migration. The great majority of today’s shanty towns in the cities of the South are a direct result of the application of this model.

Examples are abundant. At one time the Punjab region in India was advertised as a model for the Green Revolution. However, twenty years later the results are different. Instead of a land of plenty, Punjab now has soil erosion, crops infested with pests and indebted and discontent farmers. Instead of peace, Punjab has inherited conflicts and violence.

The introduction of “miraculous” seeds was based on a measure of output that ignored the context surrounding cultivation systems. The symbiotic relationship between soil, water, farm animals and plants, characteristic of indigenous and traditional agriculture was transformed by the Green Revolution into the interaction of inputs: hybrid seeds (and at present, increasingly transgenic seeds), irrigation and agrochemical products (fertilizers, pesticides, weed-killers). In assessing output, the interactions of this package with the soil and water systems – noxious environmental impacts- are not taken into account.

In fact, the characteristic trait of Green Revolution seeds is that they respond extremely well to certain external inputs, such as fertilizers and irrigation. However if these fail their output is worse than that of the traditional varieties. Furthermore, the strategy of increasing the production of a single agricultural component is done at the cost of decreasing other components and increasing external inputs. Thus a “high yield” may soon not be so if considered at a system level. In this respect, the measurement of output is restricted to the commercial aspect of crops and it sacrifices other uses of the plant. In this way, increased production of cash crops was achieved at the price of less biomass for animals and soil and a drop in the ecosystem’s productivity due to an excessive resource use.

The Green Revolution created a framework for the entry of the commercial sector into agriculture on establishing dependency on hybrid seeds –the basis of a private seed market– with reduced genetic diversity. Centuries of farmer innovation were abandoned. With the Green Revolution, western capitalism penetrated into the deepest part of agricultural production and traditional diversity was substituted by large scale cash crop farming, aimed at exports and sustained by a system of large banks funding seed and agro-chemical companies, with intermediaries and multilateral bodies fostering the model.

Not only is local biodiversity lost –it is calculated that over the past 100 years, agricultural genetic diversity has dropped by 75 per cent– but self-sufficient agricultural practices are also lost. In turn, small and medium-sized farmers have become the prisoners of indebtedness to enable them to purchase external inputs and of markets over which they have no control whatsoever.

In a “globalized” world, agriculture has lost the essence of producing food and has become yet another merchandise factory for market ploy, which in turn is in the hands of major capital owners who use it to dominate the world. But in the world of human beings, farming is still something different. In the sense of the Zapotecan indigenous people of Oaxaca, Mexico: “When corn is sown, four grains are thrown in at a time, one is for wild animals, another is for those who like other peoples’ property, another one is for feast days and the last one is for family consumption. The western criteria of output, efficiency and productivity are foreign to Zapotecan culture. Corn is not a business, it is a food for subsistence and that makes us happy, that is why before planting it we bless it to ask for a good harvest for all of us.”

Article based on information from: “The violence of the Green Revolution”, Vandana Shiva, 1991; “Intellectual Property Rights: Ultimate control of agricultural R&D in Asia”, GRAIN, http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=35 ; “El día en que muera el sol”, Silvia Ribeiro, Biodiversidad, sustento y culturas, Nº 3º, July 2004.

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- Colonization and the role of agriculture in a nutshell

From the 15th century onwards, technological progress enabled Europe to take an enormous lead in charting the whole world through the invasion of the American continent, the almost total annihilation of the native population, and the unrestricted take-over of political and economic power.

America's economy was restructured and oriented according to European requirements. A diverse agriculture was replaced by a system of large plantations to grow sugar, cotton and tobacco for the European market, under a monoculture system which was usually harmful to the soils after repeated use and left the countries vulnerable to plant diseases sweeping through the entire crop. Local biodiversity was degraded or lost and forests were cleared.

The American plantations were based on the exploitation of enslaved African people which made of Africa an annex to America, with the function of providing the continent's slave labour. Some hundred million African people were savagely chased for that purpose.

In the 19th century, the large scale single-crop farming that had been introduced in America was also imposed in Africa by the Europeans, along the same basis: to provide goods inexpensively to the European markets.

Sugar cane, tobacco, cotton, tea, rice and coffee were some of the main products grown in the colonies, which paradoxically had to begin importing food since cash crops generally took a majority of the available farmland, sometimes up to 80%.

Sugar cane required a heavy input of labour (originally slaves). Grown in monocropping, it depleted the soil quickly. By 1700, Brazil was the main sugar producing area in the world, and most of the West Indies became largely sugar cane plantations.

Tobacco was originally grown on small farms, later on in large plantations with slaves. Also cotton was a key raw material for the Industrial Revolution, which was originally focused on the textile industry, particularly cotton goods. Most cotton was grown on plantations. Like sugar and tobacco, it depleted the soil quickly.

Tea as a cash crop came to dominate the economies of south-east Asia. In India, tea plantations were established on the hills of Assam province by clearing the forests.

Rice had been grown by peasants in south-east Asia for their own use or for trade in local markets, for centuries before European control was established. Britain annexed Burma in 1852 and established extensive rice paddies to produce rice for export to Britain (the area under rice cultivation there increased 20 times between 1855 and 1920). Also the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 meant that crops from Asia were easier to transport. France occupied Indo-China in 1861 and brought about similar transformations. In both Burma and Indo China, large plantations drove out the small landowners and left the sharecroppers permanently in debt.

Coffee is indigenous to Africa, but it was first grown as a cash crop in Ceylon in the late 17th century, and later in Java. After a coffee blight broke out in the 1870s, production in south-east Asia fell. Brazil stepped in and became the main supplier in the world. As large coffee plantations exhausted quickly the soils, new fields were opened up as the railways penetrated deeper in the forest in the 19th century.

The independence of American and later African states did not mean a change in the economic and social structure. Agricultural, trading, and land-ownership patterns set during the colonial period persisted. Diversification proved very difficult, so newly independent colonies simply tried to produce more of the cash crops they had already been producing. This resulted in even greater dependence on the same commodities and a general response of finding even more products to export for cash. Newly born local elites also helped to maintain commercial dependence which was in general reinforced by economic and financial treaties with the former colonial powers and/or following successors.

In the early phases of Western imperialism, Asia wanted nothing that Europe offered. European powers could interpose themselves only as brokers of the common items of Asian trade. However, European colonialism transformed the landscape of Southeast Asia and the lives and livelihoods of its peoples, as it regularized, fenced and atomized the region in entirely new and foreign ways diminishing its shared identity. Between about 1870 and the early years of the twentieth century, European colonialism created a whole new state system in Southeast Asia.

The coffee production and trade of the Dutch East Indies company from the early eighteenth century on thronged the hills of West Java with imported coffee trees and carried off the produce for sale in Europe. Similarly, the Spanish in the Philippines sought to establish a monopoly over the production and marketing of tobacco in specified parts of Luzon for nearly a hundred years from the late eighteenth century on. From the 1830s, the Dutch forced Javanese peasants in their millions to grow huge quantities of coffee, sugar, indigo and other tropical products for export and sale in Europe.

The export-oriented monoculture productive pattern imposed by the colonial system –in the past as in the present-- has been at the expense of the people and the ecosystems, mainly the forests. Those cultures who had lived in close contact with nature had developed quite a balanced relationship with their environment, which could be a referent to follow. But old and later new colonization put a wedge that made the global world enter into the present blind alley.

Article based on information from: “The Third World”, http://www.yorku.ca/bwall/nats1840/lecturesx4/4x11thirdworld.pdf ; “Reinventing a Region: Southeast Asia and the Colonial Experience”, Robert Elson, http://www.palgrave.com/pdfs/1403934762.pdf

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- The “development” model at the apex of deforestation

Agriculture and cattle-raising are direct causes of deforestation. However they should be looked at in depth in order to be able to understand what promotes them, who benefits from them, how they arise. It may be said that it is a funnel-like process. What is most visible is on the outside, the disappearance of the forest as a consequence of these activities. Delving deeper, a series of policies and programmes promoting them may be identified, together with the actors who apply them and benefit from them, even deforestation actors who are not necessarily the beneficiaries, but rather the victims of such policies. Finally, at the apex of the funnel is the origin of the process: a development model of an industrial nature, sustained on unequal structures in which the concentration of wealth on one hand causes poverty on the other, having a philosophy of relating with the world – and with nature – of a strictly commercial vision.

We have already discussed the more visible manifestations of deforestation due to the expansion of agriculture and cattle-raising (see the article on “Deforestation by agriculture and cattle-raising” in this same issue). As to the policies encouraging the sector, a series of government measures may be identified on a national scale, such as subsidised credits (at lower interest rates than commercial rates), rebates on income and commercial taxes, exemption from paying import taxes on agro-industrial machinery, research and rural extension activities by the State, all acting as powerful factors to legitimate and consolidate the cash crop production model.

The problem of land tenure is also one of the underlying causes of deforestation. The processes have been varied in the different parts of the world, but a common trait has been that the lands that traditionally were in the hands of indigenous or peasant communities are allocated to national or foreign commercial agents.

Among the various problem situations regarding land tenure linked with agriculture and deforestation, two main ones may be identified:

* when the situation of disregard for the community’s rights over its territories occurs in the forest itself. In general this implies the eviction of the communities inhabiting the forest to allow for the entry of external agents, who launch the process of deforestation, while incorporating the area into the intensive production circuit aimed at exports.

In general this has been a characteristic process in Asia and to a certain extent in Africa.

* when the disregard of rights over land takes place in zones outside the forest. This process leads to migration –either spontaneous or promoted by the government– towards the forest, with the consequent process of deforestation.

In the case of Latin America for example, governments have used the forests as a sort of “safety valve” for pressure on land and the consequent social and economic problems. Thus in some settlement plans, free access to forest lands has been offered, often accompanied by road building with multilateral bank funding (increasing foreign debt) in order to open up and “develop” the forests. In other cases, as part of “development” projects, settlement programmes have been implemented, stipulating that the settlers must “clear” the land in order to have access to the deeds, which implies cutting down the forest. In this case, deforestation ends up by being considered as land “improvement” and the expression of the willingness of the occupants to “improve” their property. This same process is repeated, in another situation, with cattle-raising.

Central America is one of the best-known regions where the expansion of cattle-raising has caused severe deforestation. Cattle-raising has been part of the culture of the rural areas of Central America since Spanish Colonial times. In the hands of large landowners, cattle-raising was concentrated in the fertile lands of the highland valleys of the isthmus and along the Pacific Coast. With the opening up of the United States market for cheap beef and the improvement of local facilities during the second half of the twentieth century, the cattle ranchers increased their operations, encroaching on the rainforests of the North Coast. Many took possession of large tracts of forests and hired workers to clear them with chainsaws and by burning them. However, the most common way of acquiring new pasture lands was that of purchasing on-farm "improvements" that the slash-and-burn farmers had made on deedless land. These so-called “improvements” were no more than a small forest area that the farmers had cleared to plant their crops. After having obtained the rights of those occupying the land, the rancher finished off clearing it, planted grass and fenced in the property. Once the land was transferred to the rancher, the farmer moved on further into the rainforest to repeat the same deforestation cycle.

International policies have also been decisive in the expansion of the cash crop model. Such is the case with the structural adjustment programmes designed by multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Their application conditioned the granting of further loans and moratoria on the debt weighing down the impoverished countries of the South. Structural adjustment policies have promoted the expansion of export crops, directly accelerating the clearing of forests for agriculture or cattle-raising, as a recipe to obtain foreign currency. And, as we have seen, very often this has implied the displacement of small farmers or subsistence farmers, who have been pushed into the forests, where they practice slash and burn agriculture.

This system introduces, sooner or later, the idea that is at the centre of the development model, that is that worthwhile activities are those that lead to short-term economic profit. Activities that do not generate monetary value are scantly estimated in such a market oriented context. For this type of system to operate, three things are necessary and closely linked: large-scale production, monoculture production (either of crops or animals) and the concentration of land and capital.

Thus, ways of relating with the earth, water, plants, animals, seeds, are no longer “sacred”--to define a way of feeling that is characteristic of cultures that are closely linked with nature and natural cycles-- and become mere “resources” to obtain profit from. The ways of social relationship in this system also perpetuate inequity through unjust land tenure models, neglect of the rights of indigenous and traditional peoples, an unjust international trade system that does not consider the real value of the products and that takes advantage of monopolistic domination and unsustainable consumption models that are one of the pillars of international trade. Now, for the dominant ideology, everything becomes merchandise that must be given as a tribute to the new god of the globalized market, well custodied by the new high priests: the transnational corporations, multilateral institutions and local elites in power.

Article base on information from: Marketing the Earth. The World Bank and Sustainable Development”, FOE, Halifax Initiative, http://www.foe.org/res/pubs/pdf/marketingtheearth.pdf ; “Asuntos forestales. Deforestación: Bosques Tropicales en Disminución, http://www.rcfa-cfan.org/spanish/s.issues.12-5.html ; “Deforestation of Tropical Rain Forests, Rain Forest Report Card, BSRSI, http://www.bsrsi.msu.edu/rfrc/deforestation.html

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- Oil palm and soybean: Two paradigmatic deforestation cash crops

Deforestation of tropical forests took place at a rate of 10–16 million hectare per annum during the last two decades, and is showing no signs of slowing down. 16% of the whole Amazon forest has already disappeared and every day, another 7,000 hectares of forest is lost – a surface of 10 kilometers by 7 kilometers. The causes are complex and often interrelated, but among them is the role of large-scale commercial agriculture.

In recent years, some of the fastest expanding crops in the tropics have been oil palm and soybean primarily planted as export driven large scale monocultures. Globally, the oil palm area increased by 43% (10.7 million hectares) and the soy area by 26% (77.1 million hectares) during 1990-2002. Government policies have facilitated this expansion which has occurred primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia (for oil palm), and in Argentina, USA and Brazil (for soy). In Brazil, in 1940 there were only 704 hectares of soy fields, by 2003 there were 18 million hectares.

The most direct impact of this process has been the deforestation of approximately 2 million hectares of tropical forest in the case of Indonesia by 1999, and the loss of vast areas of forests in the Centre-West region of Brazil to make way for oil palm or soy plantations. Pesticides and herbicides inherent to these monocultures kill off the last vestiges of biodiversity able to co-exist with the plantations, and significantly diminish the chances of habitat restoration. In Indonesia and Brazil, oil palm and soy companies have been linked to devastating forest fires, that in 1997-98 alone destroyed over 11.7 million hectares of forest and other vegetation in Indonesia, and 3.3 million hectares of forest and other vegetation within the northern Amazonian state of Roraima, Brazil.

Soybean is a crop very suitable for capital intensive, large scale cultivation. The main products derived from soybeans are soy meal (the world’s main oil meal for animal feed) and soy oil (the world’s most consumed vegetable oil). Only a small part of the global harvest is processed as whole bean for human consumption, mostly in Asia. The growing demand for cattle feed in Europe has driven the production of soybean, but recently also by a growing market in China for the production of oil.

Brazil is the second biggest producer (50 million tons or 26% of world production in 2003) world wide, after the US (38%). Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia have market shares of 18%, 2% and 1% respectively. Other big producers are China and India (8% and 2% respectively).

Soybean is traditionally grown in temperate and subtropical regions worldwide, but now is expanding into tropical regions. The Amazonian region is being directly impacted as new high-yielding tropical soy varieties have been specifically developed for expansion in this region. According to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, the annual rate of forest loss in the Amazon increased by 40% in the year 2002, resulting mainly from pressure to replace forest with soy agriculture and cattle ranching.

Argentina shifted to the production of genetically modified soybeans, and it is assumed that until 2003 the expansion of the soy area has been at the expense of other agricultural crops, while now 75% of the soy area growth is assumed to take place in the humid parts of the Chaco region, and the remaining 25% in the Atlantic forest in Misiones Province.

In Bolivia, soy will expand by converting Chiquitano (dry) forests, while in Paraguay it will do so in the Atlantic forest. In Paraguay, although formally illegal or severely restricted, genetically modified soybeans are increasingly planted, a process which has also happened in Southern Brazil.

Soybean trading and crushing in the four South American soybean production countries is dominated by a limited number of large, international commodity trading companies, being Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, and Cargill (the three are based in the United States and control 80% of the European soybean crushing industry), and Louis Dreyfus, France. Although these trading companies usually don’t invest in soybean growing as such, their influence on the expansion of the sector is very large. Soybean farmers are often very dependent on these trading companies for seed, credit, and other inputs.

The financial stakeholders of the four main soy trading and crushing companies mentioned above are ABN AMRO Bank (The Netherlands), Bank of America (United States), BNP Paribas (France), Citigroup (United States), Commerzbank (Germany), Crédit Agricole (France), Crédit Lyonnais (France), Crédit Suisse (Switzerland), Deutsche Bank (Germany), HSBC Bank (United Kingdom), ING Bank (The Netherlands), IntesaBci (Italy), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co (United States), Rabobank (The Netherlands), Société Générale (France).

Oil palm is native to Central Africa, where its cultivation as a staple crop is central to the livelihoods of millions of small scale farmers. But elsewhere in the world it has become big business, grown mainly on large-scale plantations. Palm oil is a vegetable oil derived from oil palm. It is the world’s second most consumed edible oil (after soy), and has a huge range of uses –from shampoo to chips to frozen foods to cosmetics.

Commercial oil palm plantations have spread throughout the tropics, being most significant in South East Asia, particularly Malaysia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea, where it is a major driver of the destruction of tropical forests. Industry figures show that nearly half (48 per cent) of South East Asian oil palm plantations are created on some kind of primary or secondary forest land. The use of fire to clear that land was also a major cause of the forest fires that ravaged Indonesian forests and cast a devastating smog over the entire region in 1997.

Oil palm planting has also led to enormous human suffering and the destruction of forest lands that communities rely on. In Indonesia, oil palm plantations are associated with the displacement of forest peoples from their land. A serious imbalance of power exists between these communities --who have no formal right to their traditional land-- and the companies that are granted leave by the Government to convert the forest to plantations (see “The Bitter Fruit of Oil Palm”, at http://www.wrm.org.uy/plantations/material/oilpalm.html ).

According to the FAO, forest cover in Indonesia and Malaysia declined by 12 per cent in the 1990s. In the past much of this loss has been blamed on so-called slash-and-burn practices by local communities and on the activities of logging companies exploiting the forest for timber or pulpwood. The role of palm oil plantations has gone relatively unacknowledged also because industry sources argue that there is very little “direct” forest destruction involved in their operations since oil palm plantations are usually located in areas that have been logged previously.

Indeed, much of the forestland cleared to make way for oil palm plantations has been previously logged and may be viewed by outsiders as “degraded” and therefore valueless. This, however, ignores that those “degraded” forests often still provide a habitat for an array of species, which is destroyed when the forest is substituted by oil palm. Research has shown that an oil palm plantation can support only 0 – 20% of the species of mammals, reptiles and birds found in primary rainforest. Those species that are able to survive cannot find sources of food in the new environment of the plantation and frequently come into conflict with humans in and around the plantations. Workers and villagers encounter elephants, orangutans, tigers, porcupine and wild boar for some time after forest clearing. The results are often serious and sometimes fatal.

The global significance of forest destruction in terms of biodiversity and climate change should not be underestimated, but it is the local communities who most immediately feel the impact of its destruction. They depend on these forests, often managed under the community's traditional law, for their subsistence and cash income, as well as for cultural and religious practises. Deforestation completely overhauls their entire way of life.

Economies of scale demand that an oil palm plantation is at least 4,000 hectares in size in order to be able to feasibly operate a crude palm oil mill that processes the fresh fruit bunches from the plantation estates. In Southeast Asia an average individual plantation company manages a plantation area of 10,000 – 25,000 hectares. These companies are mostly part of larger agribusiness holdings, with plantation estates ranging from 100,000 to 600,000 hectares in several provinces and countries.

Apart from Malaysia, Indonesia and PNG, oil palm projects are developed in many other countries including the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, India, Solomon Islands, Kenya, Tanzania, Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, Liberia, Guinea, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Guyana, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Mexico.

Present concerns on the social and environmental impacts of soybean and oil palm plantations are being heightened by the fact that further growth of both crops in those and other countries is predicted.

Article based on information from: “Oil Palm and Soy: The Expanding Threat to Forests”, “Soy Expansion - Losing Forests to Fields”, WWF Forest Conversion Initiative, July 2003, http://www.wwf.ch/images/progneut/upload/WWF_OIL_PALM_AND_SOI.pdf ; “Accommodating Growth: Two scenarios for soybean production growth”, Jan Maarten Dros, AIDEnvironment, November 2003, http://www.wwf.ch/images/progneut/upload/1122_Soy_quick_scan_v6.pdf ; “Corporate actors in the South American soy production chain”, Jan Willem van Gelder, Jan Maarten Dros, November 2002, http://www.wwf.ch/images/progneut/upload/South%20American%20soybean
%20actors%20WWF%20021126.pdf ; “Greasy palms – palm oil, the environment and big business”, March 2004, http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/greasy_palms_summary.pdf ; “Greasy Palms - The social and ecological impacts of large-scale oil palm plantation development”, March 2004, http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/greasy_palms_impacts.pdf