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Planet is paying for palm oil profits
September 3, 2016
Planet is paying for palm oil profits
September 3, 2016, by Paul Brown
LONDON, 3 September, 2016 – Palm oil makes a big contribution to modern life as one of the most-widely used substances in food, cooking, cosmetics, medicines and a range of chemicals. But the industry that produces it is seriously harming the planet.
That is the conclusion of a study of nearly 1,000 scientific papers about oil palm plantations, published in Biological Reviews journal.
Over the last few decades, the scale of destruction of forests and peat lands so as to expand the highly-profitable oil palm plantations − mainly in southeast Asia − has been immense.
Although deliberately starting fires to clear pristine forests for plantations is illegal, the practice still continues and has contributed to serious air pollution across the region, causing breathing difficulties.
Oil palms are now a highly-profitable cash crop grown throughout the humid tropical lowlands in 43 countries, with 18.1million hectares in cultivation. Indonesia (7.1m ha) and Malaysia (4.6m ha) account for 85% of global production, and the number of their plantations is steadily increasing.
Read more at Climate News Network.
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