FELDA, the Malaysian land development authority, has announced plans to collaborate with the Brazilian Environment Minister, Carlos Minc, in the creation of a plan that would establish massive plantations of palm oil trees in Brazil and allow local farmers to count the non-native vegetation toward their quota of “legal forest reserve.” While many environmental groups object, the plan has massive potential to further Brazil’s status as a world leader in biofuel production.

One of the world’s great ecological ironies is that the soil that supports such tremendous biodiversity in the rainforest is incredibly nutrient-poor.  A repercussion of this fact in the rainforest-rich nation of Brazil is that biofuels crops common to the region, such as sugar cane and soybeans, have provided relatively little monetary incentive for added deforestation.

But the combined effort between Brazil and Malaysia, dubbed “Floresta Zero,” could make use of some 2.3 million square kilometers of land, roughly 18% more than could be used for sugar cane cultivation, and nearly seven times the area suitable for soy. In addition to the massively increased capacity, palm oil plantations could also slash unemployment in the South American nation, as they require around one farmhand for every tenth of a square kilometer.  

However, these massive economic gains could be coming at some dire environmental expense.  Allowing farmers to plant non-native species in depleted rainforest lands, while still counting them as renewed rainforest could have a domino effect, as palm oil trees force out the native species, pushing depleted lands further into the rainforest. 

On a more global scale, this destruction of rainforest habitat, combined with the energy required to grow, maintain, harvest and process the palm oil plants may make the payback time on any biofuels created from these plantations prohibitively long. Greenpeace, for example, has been particularly adamant in expressing this position. Diminished or non-existent carbon savings would dramatically reduce the value of palm oil biofuels in a potentially carbon-capped global market, reversing many of the economic gains that Floresta Zero offers.

While Minc insists that the economic benefits are well worth the environmental impacts, the best solution might be to study a smaller-scale implementation of palm oil plants first, before giving the go-ahead to a larger project.  Rather than the initial 100,000 hectare plot already approved, a tiny trial plantation would provide real-world data to allow a fair and quantitative comparison of the costs and benefits of this project, without making an irrevocable impact on the slowly recovering ecology of the nearby rainforest. 

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Biodiesel Grows Below Equator
Did Environmentalists Cause the Food Crisis?

Photo by Flickr user Nicky Fernandes