ERL." href="http://images.iop.org/objects/erw/news/12/5/29/erlaa5892f2_hr.jpg">Oil-palm plantations
The research – which also revealed that most exported oil palm stays within the region – suggests that Latin America is a "major opportunity" for the sustainable palm-oil sector, according to the scientists.
"The oil-palm industry has faced enormous scrutiny because of destructive practices in Asia," said Paul Furumo of the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. "Our study reveals a different narrative of oil-palm expansion in Latin America, one in which cattle pastures and other previously intervened lands are the most significant source of new plantings instead of forests."
Oil palm has a bad reputation when it comes to sustainability. Particularly in Asia, oil palm has replaced large swathes of forest, sacrificing biodiversity, carbon storage and social structures for financial gain in the oilseed and biofuel market. Latin America has looked to be a quickly developing source of oil palm too, with its output doubling since 2001.
To understand how to influence the development of oil-palm plantations, says Furumo, it is important to understand the current drivers, including far-reaching market forces. For that reason Furumo and his colleague Mitchell Aide, also of the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, investigated where Latin American oil-palm plantations have been created, and whereabouts in the world the generated palm oil is flowing.
Furumo and Aide began with images taken from NASA's pair of MODIS satellites, and trained a piece of computer software to recognize different types of land cover – forest, cattle pasture, oil-palm plantation, urban areas, and so on – for 10 countries in Latin America. They then used another piece of software to identify clusters of pixels that represented commercial-scale oil-palm plantations of greater than 50 hectares, and to remove false detections.
The researchers found that nearly four-fifths of oil-palm plantations replaced previously intervened land, mostly cattle pasture; just 21% came from previously woody vegetation such as forests. An analysis of trade databases showed that Latin American countries were net exporters of palm oil. But to Furumo and Aide's surprise, 70% of the exports stayed in the region, going to Mexico in particular. Another surprise was that many of the oil-palm plantations in smaller countries were "quite old", said Furumo. "The palm-oil issue is thought of as a recent phenomenon, largely due to its recent rapid expansion, but commercial production of this crop has been going on in the region for over 50 years," he added.
Though not as good as forests, palm-oil plantations are thought to be better than pasture when it comes to biodiversity and carbon storage. And although the replacement of previously intervened land with palm oil is not wholly benign – developments can interfere with local food production, or displace farming to other areas, for example – Furumo said the results can be broadly considered "good news", as the trajectory could help to certify the region as sustainable.
If the region does become certified, according to Furumo, it may put "pressure on other regions for certified production, as companies try to remain competitive. We may also see more palm oil exports out of the Latin America region in the future as certified oil can fetch higher prices abroad".
The study is published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).
Related links
- Characterizing commercial oil palm expansion in Latin America: land use change and trade, Paul Richard Furumo and T Mitchell Aide 2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 024008
- ERL
- Paul Furumo, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras
- Mitchell Aide, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras