Dark side of a hot biofuel

Regulators are increasingly uneasy. This week, European Union officials plan to propose a law to ban the import of biodiesel derived from crops grown on recently destroyed forests. California's own alternative fuels plan says palm oil should "come from plantations whose creation does not disrupt that habitat of rare species."

Wade Randlett, co-founder of NextFuels Inc., the San Francisco company that imported the 15 million gallons of palm oil to California, said his supplies – from Malaysia and Indonesia – meet that test.

"Every drop is from a sustainable source," he said. "Not one square foot of rain forest has been destroyed."

The difficulty of tracing palm oil – a bulk commodity blended and shipped in giant batches – to specific land management practices in the tropics makes some biofuel entrepreneurs wary.

"Palm-based biodiesel, practiced poorly, is an environmental disaster," said Eric Bowen, chairman of the California Biodiesel Alliance. "You've got orangutan populations under pressure. You've got deforestation going on."

Environmental concerns prompted food and biodiesel companies to join with conservation groups in 2003 to form the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which promotes more eco-friendly production, including sowing plantations on land already cleared for farming instead of in rain forests.

Not all environmentalists think the group can live up to its name.

"How can (palm oil) be sustainable if it's causing so much destruction?" said Leila Salazar-Lopez, agribusiness campaign director with the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco.

Expansion becomes disaster, critic says

The roots of Indonesia's palm oil expansion reach back 3 1/2 decades, when the government of former President Suharto set aside vast swaths of forest for logging and plantations. Overcutting caused widespread damage and continues to be a problem, according to Lisa Curran, a Yale University professor of tropical resources.

So little wood remains on legal timber concessions that companies log illegally inside national parks and other protected areas, Curran wrote in a 2004 article in the journal Science. Once forests are logged of valuable trees, they often are cleared for oil palm plantations, Curran noted.

"Oil palm is a disaster all the way around for biodiversity if converted from logged forest or peat swamp," Curran – the recipient of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award for her work on Indonesia's deforestation – wrote in an e-mail. "Oil palm is fine if they actually put it on totally degraded lands – but they don't."

Indonesia's government believes there is still plenty of land left for nature, said Riaz Saehu, a spokesman for the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, D.C. But, he said, in recent years it also has begun taking a more cautious approach toward oil palm plantations.

"There is an effort to reduce plantation expansion," Saehu said, pointing out that palm oil plantations now cover about 15 million acres – roughly the size of 20 Yosemite National Parks – up from 1.5 million acres in 1986. "What we do now is basically to promote sustainability."

Curran, who also directs Yale's Tropical Resources Institute, has her doubts. "After 23 years there I must say they can talk the talk but never walk the walk," she said.

And what about the palm oil industry? "It's wrong to say palm oil destroys the forest," said Siam Maksum, a safety officer for the sprawling Astra Agro Lestari plantation whom I met at a business exhibition in south-central Borneo. "We are not responsible for that."

Maksum showed me a movie about palm oil and gave me a brochure about the promise of biodiesel. His company is the largest palm oil producer in Indonesia and, he said, it brought jobs, schools and opportunity to the hinterlands.

Plantation destroys rain forest riches

My first glimpse of a palm oil plantation came on the back of a motor scooter flying along the mud-slick back roads of Sumatra with members of an indigenous tribe, the Kubu people. They drove, sometimes wildly. I hung on and hoped for the best.

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