Text and Photos By Henrylito D. Tacio
“Farmers need to see the big potential of this industry,” former Davao City Councilor Peter Laviña said in a recent forum.
He was referring to oil palm, known in the science world as Elaeis guineensis. An edible palm oil comes from its fruits. Palm oil can be separated into a wide range of distinct oils with different properties. This versatility has seen palm oil to replace animal and other vegetable oils in a wide variety of products.
According to him, palm oil has a huge demand not only in the Philippines but in other countries as well. After all, it has a variety of uses. Aside being used as cooking oil, palm oil is used in confectionary, ice cream, and ready-to-eat meals. It is the main ingredient for most margarine and the base for most liquid detergents, soaps, shampoos, lipstick, waxes, and polishes. It is also used as industrial lubricant.
Over the last decade, global production of palm oil has doubled. By 2000, palm oil was the most produced and traded vegetable oil accounting for 40 percent of all vegetable oils traded internationally, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). By 2006, the percentage had risen to 65 percent.
Worldwide demand for palm oil is expected to double again by 2020.
Laviña, a member of the Philippine Oil Palm Industry Development Council, said the country imported a total of P35 billion worth of palm oil from neighboring countries, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia.
Such huge amount, Laviña pointed out, could be saved if only local farmers in the rural areas start growing oil palm so the country won’t import palm oil anymore from other countries.
Actually, the oil palm is native to West Africa, where it was traditionally cultivated as a subsistence crop for food, fiber and medicine. Originally, trees were interplanted in traditional, small-scale agricultural production systems along with other annual and perennial crops.
However, rising demand for vegetable oils since the 1970s has seen oil palm cultivation shift to a large-scale plantations. Such plantations have become one of the fastest-growing monocropping plantations in the tropics of Africa, as well as in Asia and the Pacific region, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Much of the recent expansion has occurred in Malaysia and Indonesia. By 2000, these two countries accounted for just over half of the world’s total plantation area, and Nigeria settled for just over 30 percent, FAO reported.
The success of its neighboring countries made the Philippines to follow suit. “The Philippines is currently a minor producer of palm oil in the Southeast Asian region, but this is set to change with the country recently declaring ambitions to convert some eight million hectares of idle lands across the country into oil palm plantations,” reported journalist Elga Reyes.
Currently, about 70,000 hectares are planted to oil palm in the country. This supplies only 20 percent of the total local demand. “(Planting oil palm) will also benefit our farmers because it has a higher yield than coconut,” Laviña said.
Laviña gave this comparison between coconut and oil palm, as reported by Cheneen R. Capon in a recent issue of Edge Davao: A single hectare planted with 140 good variety of oil palm and good farm management can produce as much as 20 tons per year. On the other hand, coconut needs to have 3-4 hectares before it can produce the same amount.
There’s money in oil palm. Secretary Ramon Paje of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources reported that the 6 million hectares planted to oil palm in Indonesia reaps US$50 billion annually from this industry – an amount that is nearly the size of the 2014 national budget of the Philippines.
A noted Canadian agricultural scientist considers oil palm as the greatest crop in Southeast Asia. “The vegetable oil yield of oil palm is five times that of coconut and more than ten times that of soybeans, sunflower, and rapeseeds,” pointed out Dr. Pablito P. Pamplona, director and secretary of the Philippine Palm Oil Development Council.
Growing oil palm is an investment-friendly and easy-to-grow crop as proven by farmers from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand who grow it. “A typical oil palm cultivating two hectares or more is economically transformed and liberated from poverty in four to five years after planting,” Dr. Pamplona wrote in an article published in a national magazine.
Poverty incidence in the Philippines, at 25 percent, is among the highest among the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. In comparison, the poverty incidence in Indonesia is only 13.3 percent, 7.2 percent for Thailand, and 3.8 percent for Malaysia.
“Among these four countries, it is only the Philippines which will not be able to meet the UN Medium Term Development Goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015,” wrote Dr. Pamplona.
In 2012, a World Bank report cited the significant role of oil palm in helping overcoming poverty in Indonesia. The government of Thailand likewise credited oil palm to as having significantly helped the country overcome rural poverty, and the same was true for Malaysia.
“Large-scale oil palm plantations in these three neighboring countries have helped them become net food exporters, with vegetable oil in the form of palm oil being among their major export food products,” Dr. Pamplona wrote.
Should Mindanao farmers consider planting oil palm extensively? But before that happen, there should be planting materials which farmers could plant. Unfortunately, lack of planting materials has been cited as one of the main reasons why the industry is on a stand still.
“A single seedling can cost a farmer from P200 to P300 and that’s huge because a single hectare needs 140 pieces,” Laviña said.
It means that a farmer needs an initial investment of P28,000 to 42,000 per hectare for one hectare alone. What if he plants five hectares? The initial investment is from P140,000 to P210,000.
There are always two sides of a coin. While oil palm plantations can boost the country’s economy, it also has its liabilities side.
“Large areas of tropical forests and other ecosystems with high conservation values have been cleared to make room for vast monoculture oil palm plantations – destroying critical habitat for many endangered species, including rhinos, elephants and tigers,” the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) claimed. “In some cases, the expansion of plantations has led to the eviction of forest-dwelling peoples.”
Other impacts include: soil erosion, air pollution, soil and water pollution, and climate change.
“Given the rate of expansion of the palm oil industry and its impact on key ecosystems and species, a concerted effort is needed by all stakeholders to identify and adopt cost-effective
strategies to reduce the industry’s overall impact,” WWF suggested.
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