As well as its unique chemistry, palm oil is cheap. And it’s cheap because oil palm is something of a wonder crop – it grows relatively quickly, is easy to harvest, and is spectacularly productive. A hectare of oil palm can reliably produce four tonnes of vegetable oil every year, compared to 0.67 tonnes for rapeseed, 0.48 tonnes for sunflowers, and just 0.38 tonnes for soy beans. Under ideal conditions, high-yield oil palm cultivars can produce more than 25 times as much oil as soy can for the same area of farmland. Thus, ironically, a ban on palm oil would lead to a catastrophic increase in deforestation, as anything we replace it with will need much more land to grow on.
But it is possible to grow oil palm in a way that limits its impact on the environment. Most companies in the West purchase palm oil that is certified by the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RPSO). But demand for sustainable palm oil, and the willingness to pay a price premium for it, is limited. The market for sustainable palm oil is already over-supplied, leading to producers selling certified oil unlabelled on the wider market. And the RPSO has been criticised as opaque and ineffectual, with little power to compel change among growers.
“People from the Malaysian Palm Oil Board talk about sustainable palm oil, but I struggle to see how they’re selling anything as sustainable,” says Kyle Reynolds, a crop scientist who until recently worked at Australia's CSIRO research centre.
Oil palm only grows within 20 degrees of the equator – an area which also happens to be where rainforests grow and is home to 80% of all species in the world. What if we could reduce the pressure on tropical rainforests by creating a plant that was just as productive as oil palm, but could grow anywhere? That’s what Reynolds and his colleagues have been working on.
"palm" - Google News
January 09, 2020 at 03:00PM
https://ift.tt/2QQ36YX
How do we go palm oil free? - BBC News
"palm" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2WAayZw
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
0 Comments:
Post a Comment