Palm Oil’s Toll on Asia’s Rainforests and Wildlife

ANCESTRAL WISDOM · COMMUNITY POWER · PUBLIC HEALTH

“The question isn’t how the world can learn from Africa. The question is whether the world will stop undermining what Africa already knows.”

---

---

How Palm Oil Got to Southeast Asia

Palm oil has long been woven into the fabric of Asian economies, celebrated for its versatility and cost-efficiency. But its journey from African origins to cornerstone of Southeast Asian agriculture tells a story of extraction, not discovery. Initially transplanted to Malaysia and Indonesia by colonial powers who recognized its commercial value, palm oil quickly emerged as a lucrative export crop. This led to extensive deforestation to accommodate sprawling monoculture plantations — driven not by local need, but by burgeoning global demand for cheap, multi-purpose oil.

By 2020, millions of pristine forest acres had been converted. What were once biodiverse rainforests — among the most ecologically complex systems on earth — became monoculture palm plantations. According to Science Daily, growing global demand for palm oil has led to a rapid spread of oil palm monoculture plantations across Southeast Asia, stripping away the natural resilience of these ecosystems and releasing vast stores of carbon into the atmosphere. The parallels to how colonialism continues to shape global health policy are hard to ignore — the same logic that justified land extraction then drives ecosystem destruction today.

---

What Palm Oil Is Costing Borneo’s Wildlife

Borneo’s lush rainforests are a sanctuary for some of the planet’s most irreplaceable wildlife — including the orangutan, now perilously close to extinction with only an estimated 55,000 individuals remaining globally. The expansion of palm oil plantations fragments the rainforest, severing the ecological corridors that animals depend on for migration, feeding, and breeding. Isolated populations become more vulnerable to disease and genetic collapse. The forests of Myanmar have shrunk to roughly 7% of their original size; Indonesia’s to around 20%. As research confirms, oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia are consistently associated with the loss of habitats and biodiversity.

Beyond orangutans, pygmy elephants, clouded leopards, Sumatran tigers, and countless other species are losing ground. Each extinction is not just a loss of a species — it is the disruption of an ecological web. Orangutans disperse seeds that regenerate the forest. Without them, the natural cycle is broken. The rainforest becomes less resilient, less diverse, and ultimately less able to sustain the life — including human life — that depends on it.

---

Water, Communities, and the Hidden Cost

Deforestation driven by palm oil cultivation disrupts the natural water cycle. Rainforests absorb rainfall and gradually release it into rivers and streams. When monoculture plantations replace that canopy, the balance collapses — leading to increased runoff, soil erosion, and the degradation of water quality that local communities depend on for drinking, agriculture, and fishing. The large-scale fires used to clear land further contaminate water supplies and release pollutants that affect respiratory health across entire regions.

The communities bearing the greatest burden of these disruptions are not the ones profiting from global palm oil demand. They are Indigenous peoples whose territorial rights were rarely honored in the plantation expansion, and rural farming communities whose land, water, and livelihoods have been systematically displaced. The environmental crisis and the human rights crisis are not separate stories. They are the same story.

---

Africa Didn’t Need to Be Fixed — It Remembered

The oil palm is African. Elaeis guineensis originated in West and Central Africa, where communities have cultivated it for millennia — not as a commodity, but as a living relationship. The land was never simply a resource to extract. It was kin.

In the communities Ubuntu Village works alongside in Kenya and Uganda, this relationship isn’t historical — it’s present. Farmers who maintain buffer zones around water sources aren’t following a sustainability protocol; they are practicing what their grandmothers practiced, rooted in the understanding that the land’s health and the community’s health are the same thing. Intercropping, agroforestry, seed-saving — these are not quaint “traditional techniques” awaiting outside validation. They are sophisticated knowledge systems that predate the palm oil industry by centuries.

This is the distinction the global market tends to miss: African smallholder farming is not a model for the world to adopt and scale on its terms. It is a living inheritance that belongs to the communities who hold it. When large-scale industrial plantations arrive in Africa — as they increasingly do, driven by the same global demand that cleared Borneo — they don’t just clear trees. They clear that inheritance.

The question isn’t how the world can learn from Africa. The question is whether the world will stop undermining what Africa already knows.

The story of palm oil is ultimately a story about whose knowledge counts, whose land is considered expendable, and who gets to define “sustainable.” The orangutans of Borneo and the farmers of West Africa are both living inside the consequences of a global system that chose extraction over relationship. African agricultural traditions are not an alternative to industrial farming waiting to be discovered. They are evidence that a different relationship with land has always existed. It was colonization, not inevitability, that pushed the world away from it. We can find our way back.

---

What do you think the world owes to the communities whose land and knowledge sustain it? We’d love to hear in the comments.

Not receiving our emails? Re-subscribe here.

---

References

• ‣ Fitzherbert, E. B., et al. (2008). How will oil palm expansion affect biodiversity? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23(10), 538–545.
• ‣ Vijay, V., et al. (2016). The impacts of oil palm on recent deforestation and biodiversity loss. PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0159668.
• ‣ Growing global demand for palm oil: Rapid spread of oil palm monoculture plantations. Science Daily, 2024.
• ‣ WWF. Palm Oil: The Hidden Ingredient Destroying Our Rainforests.

---

Related Reading

• ‣ Colonialism and Global Health Policy
• ‣ Reparations and Healing: A Public Health Argument
• ‣ What Forest Networks Teach Us About Community
• ‣ What Industrial Agriculture Has Done to Our Bodies — And What Our Ancestors Already Knew

---