Oil Palm’s African Origins: What Industrial Extraction Stole — and What Smallholder Communities Are Reclaiming

ANCESTRAL WISDOM · COMMUNITY POWER · PUBLIC HEALTH

“The oil palm did not become destructive in Africa. It became destructive when it was separated from African community stewardship and handed to industrial capital. The difference between extraction and cultivation is not a tree. It is who holds the land.”

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The Oil Palm Belongs to Africa

For millennia before the word “commodity” existed, West and Central African communities cultivated the oil palm as a food, a medicine, and a cultural material. Red palm oil — rich in carotenoids and vitamin E (PROTA, Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) — was a nutritional foundation across the region. Palm wine, tapped from the tree, has long been produced across West Africa. The fibrous fronds were woven into baskets, roofing, and rope. The kernel shells fueled fires. Every part of the tree served the community that tended it.

This was not incidental use. It was sophisticated, intergenerational land stewardship — the kind of relationship with a plant species that develops over thousands of years of careful observation and reciprocal care. African smallholder farmers have long intercropped oil palms with food crops, sustaining their communities. The tree thrived because the people who grew it understood it as a member of a living community, not a unit of production.

This distinction — between a crop in relationship with a community and a crop extracted for global markets — is the central tension in every conversation about palm oil today. And it begins with acknowledging that the oil palm’s origins are African, and that the crisis surrounding it is not.

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How Colonialism Turned a Community Crop into a Global Commodity

European colonial powers recognized the oil palm’s value early. In the nineteenth century, the trade in palm oil and kernels between West Africa and Europe was substantial, and it depended on the produce of semi-wild palm groves tended by African communities (PROTA, Elaeis guineensis Jacq.).

As the colonial economy deepened, British, Dutch, and Belgian interests began transplanting oil palm cultivation to their colonies in Southeast Asia and Central Africa — Malaya, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and the Belgian Congo — where land could be seized, labor could be coerced, and production could be scaled without the negotiating friction of African trading networks. The oil palm arrived in Southeast Asia in 1848, when four seedlings were planted at the Bogor Botanical Garden in Java (PROTA, Elaeis guineensis Jacq.). Within a century, the region would become the world’s dominant producer, and the ecological catastrophe we now associate with palm oil would follow.

The lesson is not that the oil palm is dangerous. It is that industrial monoculture, imposed on landscapes without community consent or ecological accountability, is dangerous — regardless of the crop. The same pattern that devastated Southeast Asian rainforests is now appearing in parts of Central and West Africa as large-scale plantation investment accelerates. History is being repeated, on the same continent where it was first written.

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What Southeast Asia’s Deforestation Crisis Reveals

The scale of ecological destruction wrought by industrial palm oil in Southeast Asia is well documented. In Indonesia, about 54 percent of the sampled oil palm area was forest in 1989 (Vijay et al., 2016, The impacts of oil palm on recent deforestation and biodiversity loss). In Malaysia, about 40 percent of oil palm area was forest in 1989 (Vijay et al., 2016). A 2018 study found that Borneo lost more than 100,000 orangutans between 1999 and 2015, as logging, deforestation, plantations and hunting converged on their habitat (Voigt et al., 2018, Global demand for natural resources eliminated more than 100,000 Bornean orangutans). The Bornean orangutan is listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN (IUCN, 2016).

Beyond wildlife, the human communities that depended on those forests — Indigenous peoples whose land rights were rarely recognized in the plantation expansion — have been displaced, their traditional food systems severed and their territorial sovereignty ignored. The environmental devastation and the human rights crisis are not separate stories. They are the same story: industrial capital claiming land that was never surrendered, disrupting ecologies that were never consulted.

Palm oil is in a large share of supermarket products — up to about 40 percent in one 2025 study of three Western supermarket chains, often hidden under other names (Meijaard et al., 2025, Does palm oil really rule the supermarket?). The supply chains connecting Southeast Asian plantations to global consumer goods are long, complex, and often opaque. Consumer awareness matters. But it is not sufficient on its own to address the structural forces driving the crisis.

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The African Smallholder as Model, Not Afterthought

The contrast between industrial palm oil and African smallholder cultivation is not merely a rhetorical point. In West Africa, small farmers have long intercropped oil palm with food crops (PROTA, Elaeis guineensis Jacq.), a practice rooted in community knowledge rather than imposed monoculture. A tree grown in relationship with food crops and the community that tends it looks very different from one planted as an industrial monoculture.

Several producers in Africa have built certified supply chains that meet international sustainability standards. In Ghana, the Benso Oil Palm Plantation, a Wilmar subsidiary and the first operation in Ghana to be RSPO-certified (in 2014), holds RSPO certification and operates under a No Deforestation, No Peat, No Exploitation (NDPE) policy. It is a plantation company, not a smallholder model, and it appears here as an example of certification rather than of smallholder cultivation. In Sierra Leone, Natural Habitats is an RSPO member with certified organic palm oil, working in part through smallholder schemes.

These examples sit alongside a much older cultivation tradition that has existed on this continent for thousands of years. What is exceptional is that the global palm oil industry took so long to recognize that tradition as a model — and that the primary framing of “African palm oil” in Western environmental discourse is still as a potential future threat rather than an existing source of best practice. That framing reflects whose knowledge counts, and whose doesn’t.

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What Certification Gets Right — and What It Still Misses

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), founded in 2004, was established to create a credible market signal for palm oil produced without deforestation, peat destruction, or human rights violations. Approximately 20 percent of global palm oil production now meets RSPO standards (RSPO, 2024, ACOP 2024: RSPO market trends resilient despite global challenges) — a meaningful but insufficient share. Within the RSPO framework, “RSPO Segregated” and “RSPO Identity Preserved” represent the strongest tiers of traceability, tracking oil from a specific certified mill or certified farms respectively. These labels carry real accountability — when they are properly enforced.

The limits of certification are also real. RSPO standards have been criticized for weak enforcement, insufficient attention to smallholder inclusion, and inadequate protection of Indigenous land rights. Certification can launder reputations without fundamentally changing practices. And no certification framework fully addresses the structural problem: that global commodity markets incentivize expansion at the expense of forest and community, and that the cost of that expansion is borne by people and ecosystems that have no seat at the pricing table.

Consumers can support transparency by favoring brands that publish their palm oil sourcing policies and supplier mill lists — and by choosing products with RSPO Segregated or Identity Preserved certification where available. The Rainforest Alliance certification provides an additional layer of ecological verification. But purchasing decisions are downstream of policy decisions. Advocacy for stronger import standards, mandatory supply chain due diligence, and meaningful FPIC (Free Prior and Informed Consent) protections for Indigenous and traditional communities is the upstream work that makes downstream consumer choices meaningful.

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Community Land Sovereignty Is the Real Solution

The ecological crisis of industrial palm oil is, at its root, a land sovereignty crisis. When communities hold meaningful, legally recognized rights to their land — when no plantation can be established without genuine community consent, when land cannot be leased or sold out from under the people who have cultivated it for generations — the conditions for extractive devastation do not exist. The forests of Borneo and Sumatra were not simply cleared. They were cleared because the communities whose relationship with those forests was the primary protection for them had no legal recourse when plantation companies arrived with government concessions.

In Africa, the same risk is present and growing. As global demand for palm oil continues and Southeast Asian land becomes more constrained, investment pressure on the Congo Basin and West African forests is increasing. The African Palm Oil Initiative, coordinated by Proforest, has worked to establish principles for responsible investment that center community rights and ecological integrity. But principles without enforcement, and enforcement without political will, are not sufficient against the scale of capital moving into the region.

Ubuntu Village’s work in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria is grounded in the understanding that community sovereignty — over land, over food systems, over the knowledge embedded in ancestral agricultural practice — is the foundation from which ecological and human health both flow. The oil palm, in its African home, does not need to be saved from itself. It needs the communities that have always known how to grow it to be protected in their right to keep doing so. That is not an environmental argument. It is a justice argument. And it is the same argument.

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Does your community have a relationship with oil palm — as food, as tradition, as land? We’d love to hear in the comments.

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Sources & Research

• ‣ Vijay, V., Pimm, S. L., Jenkins, C. N., & Smith, S. J. (2016). The impacts of oil palm on recent deforestation and biodiversity loss. PLOS ONE, 11(7), e0159668. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0159668.
• ‣ Voigt, M., Wich, S. A., Ancrenaz, M., et al. (2018). Global demand for natural resources eliminated more than 100,000 Bornean orangutans. Current Biology, 28(5). doi:10.1016/j.cub.2018.01.053.
• ‣ Meijaard, E., et al. (2025). Does palm oil really rule the supermarket?. Environmental Research: Food Systems.
• ‣ PROTA. Elaeis guineensis Jacq.. Plant Resources of Tropical Africa.
• ‣ IUCN (2016). Whale sharks, winghead sharks and Bornean orangutans slide towards extinction.
• ‣ RSPO (2024). ACOP 2024: RSPO market trends resilient despite global challenges.
• ‣ RSPO (2017). New Planting Procedure notification: Natural Habitats.
• ‣ RSPO. Summary of Assessments: Wilmar Benso OPP.
• ‣ Byerlee, D. (2014). The fall and rise again of plantations in tropical Asia: History repeated? Land, 3(3), 574–597.
• ‣ Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil. RSPO Standards and Certification.
• ‣ Proforest / African Palm Oil Initiative. Principles for Responsible Investment in African Palm Oil.
• ‣ Rainforest Alliance. What Is Palm Oil? A Complex Commodity.

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Related Reading

• ‣ Palm Oil’s Toll on Asia’s Rainforests and Wildlife
• ‣ What Industrial Agriculture Has Done to Our Bodies — And What Our Ancestors Already Knew
• ‣ Food Deserts Are Spiritual Violence: Reclaiming Nourishment as a Sacred Act
• ‣ Can Farmers Really Grow Enough Food to Feed the World?

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