Controversy Of Palm Tree Essay

Before humans discovered agriculture, the forests and prairies, where animals and plants had their own stability, covered most of the Earth. Agricultural and farming activities broke this equilibrium, and humans started cutting down forests to satisfy their needs. Today, while the ecology has created a cultural dimension that seems the new human truth, a new alarm occurs: humans are destroying the last existing forests on the planet with a higher frequency and inconsiderateness than ever before. Large forests still cover extended regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America, where the most famous tropical forest in the world, the Amazon, takes place. Despite the increasing environmental awareness, humans keep destroying wide green areas. This

Furthermore, data show that farming activities occupy about 40% of lands (Ramankutty et al., 2008). In the East, palm oil cultivation has sparked many controversies. Destroying rain forests, to give space to oil palm plantations, threatens some of the most precious areas of the planet, especially in Papua New Guinea. The raw material that derives from the palm fruit pulp has grown in extended plantations especially in Southeast Asia. According to Searchinger et al. (2008), between 1990 and 2005, at least 1 million hectares of natural land in Malaysia and 1.8 million hectares in Indonesia were deforested to benefit palm oil cultivation. In addition to these two countries, palm oil plantations are increasing in Thailand, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea (Koh & Wilcove, 2008). Therefore, because of the intensive land exploitation, environmental damages, such as degradation of water quality, salinization and soil erosion, occur (IPCC, 2007). On top of this, recent data in Africa reported a rate of deforestation of 2.2% per year in the period between 2000 and 2010, especially in Ghana (FAO, 2010). In fact, in the southwestern part of Ghana, deforestation results mainly from the establishment of tree plantations such as coconut or cocoa in local and large-scale production (Chiti et al., 2013). Moreover, in Ghana, which plays a relevant role in the production of cocoa beans, extended areas

It was estimated that 21% of tropical worldwide forests were burnt down from 1981 to 2000 (Bawa et al., 2004). The main reason this occurs is that cities need infrastructures to communicate and support the rates of increasing populations, and this can only happen if forests are cut down (Mather, 1990). Therefore, the construction of roads, dams, and bridges contributes to the deforestation, not only by polluting the air with contaminating machineries, but also by allowing colonists to exploit land’s resources. Thus, if on one hand infrastructures help the export of agricultural products, on the other hand, they encourage eager colonists to exploit oil mines and hydropower dams (Wilkie et al., 2000). The development of these projects is of worldwide concern, if we consider that tropical forests help to clear about 20% of carbon emissions that globally destroy significant carbon sinks (Woodcock, 2002). Moreover, mining should be considered a cause too. According to the WWF Guianas (Staff, 2010), in Guyana the deforestation rates, due to mining activities, from 2000 to 2008 increased by 2.77 times. Besides the fact that mining causes intensive destruction of trees, the miners introduce large amounts of cyanide and mercury, used during the extraction of resources, and poison soils and