24/11/2009 (Palm Oil Truth Foundation) - Demand for palm oil is growing unabated as biofuel and biodiesel demand is growing steadily. In response to this demand, the palm oil industry strategy is to improve the oil yield from the oil palm tree. For this purpose strong research and development efforts are going on across the major palm oil producing countries.

Palm oil comes from the fruit of the oil palm tree, a tropical species that originated in West Africa, but now is being grown as a hybrid in many parts of the world, including South East Asia and Central America.  The relatively low priced oil is used for a variety of purposes.

In the last two decades at least, the world demand for palm oil has soared, first for its use in food, consumer products and more recently as the raw material for the production of biofuel.

The growing affluence of India and China, the worlds top two importing nations, will increase demand of edible vegetable oils.  In the US, a recent wave of dietary focus on the trans-fat issues has led to increased consumption as well.

In an attempt to halt the growth of palm oil, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth with their “beggar thy neighbor” campaigns against palm oil continue to act as a thorn in the flesh for an industry that is already the most sustainable of all oilseed crops on account of its inherent high productivity.

Extremely efficient in land use, palm oil has the highest productivity and thus most efficient land use factor amongst all edible oilseeds. With a yield of close to ten times the yield of other oilseed crops, palm oil requires ten times less land to produce the same unit of edible oil as its nearest competitor.

This explains why, Malaysia, which had been the world’s largest producer of palm oil for over a century still has an enviable forest cover of more than 55%, which is one of the highest forest cover prevailing in the world today.

Further, palm oil cultivation takes up less than 1% of the total world agricultural area, with Malaysian palm oil plantations occupying less than 0.5% of it. How can it then be credible to claim that palm oil is causing “massive deforestation” and is responsible for 20% of global carbon emission?

If conservation is truly a concern, these green NGOs should propose that palm oil be cultivated in place of the current oilseed crops such as soy, corn, sunflower and rapeseed (weather permitting) in view of its superior efficient land use! 

It is obvious that if palm oil cultivation is curtailed or taken away altogether from the trade equation, the world would be scrambling for more oil which , in turn, would see ten times more land being opened up for other oilseed cultivation to fill the gap left by palm oil.

Further, the recent sequencing of palm tree genomes will, in all probability transform the productivity landscape for palm oil and increase yields yet further.

Says Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB) director-general Datuk Mohd Basri Wahid: “Having access to the genome information will speed up researchers’ quest to boost the existing oil palm yields efficiency and add value to the oil characteristics for the production of food, animal feed and biofuel.”

Basri said the MPOB genome sequencing initiative had generated the most comprehensive genetic and transcriptional maps to date of the important crop.

MPOB and its partners would also be introducing the second genetic code of the oil palm genomes, which is associated with “the silencing” of the genes by the middle of 2010, he added.

(The First genetic code is the existing DNA information on the palm tree. The Second genetic code is anything that could manipulate changes in DNA due to environmental factors such as tissue culture process, etc.)

The silencing of the genes would enable the production of new “targets” for the oil palm tree.

Meanwhile, Dr Mohd Arif Manaf, one of the MPOB ABBC scientists said that it was paramount for the genome project to target the improvement in oil palm quality in terms of yields, resistance to diseases and pests, tissue culture amenity traits among others.

In fact, he said there was an agreement between MPOB and its consortium partners to ensure that the level of MPOB genome sequencing project should be on par with the genome sequencing technologies of its partners.

In addition to the sequencing and assembling the genomes of the three palm varieties, the consortium sequenced the express genes (transcriptome) from multiple tissue types. “The transcriptome sequence will aid oil palm researchers as they seek to understand the genes responsible for yield, disease resistance and resistance to environmental stress,” Arif said.

Oil palm plantations on average already produce 4-5 metric tonnes of oil per ha per year, nearly 10 times more than other productive oil bearing crops like soybean, rapeseed and sunflower.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, this development offers the exciting prospect of a super high yielding palm oil variety that would obviate the need to open new land, as the new strain of oil palm seedlings could be grown on existing oil palm plantations. This would remove the raison d’etre of the anti-palm oil campaigns which is based on the already tenuous premise that palm oil is causing massive deforestation. It would be interesting then to see what new strategem the anti-palm oil lobby would employ to rein in the most popular edible oil in the world.