The human cost of palm oil development
The oil palm industry likes to present itself as a success story in fighting rural poverty in tropical countries, an image supported by a recent article in The Conversation. Is it true?
The oil palm industry likes to present itself as a success story in fighting rural poverty in tropical countries, an image supported by a recent article in The Conversation. Is it true?
A multinational team of researchers has identified countries where agriculture's increasing dependence on pollination, coupled with a lack of crop diversity, may threaten food security and economic stability. The study, which ...
Farmers are used to dealing with weather, but climate change is making it harder by altering temperature and rainfall patterns, as in this year's unusually cool and wet spring in the central U.S. In a recently published study, ...
Research carried out into the impact of changes to chimpanzee habitats found they have adapted to human developments in a number of ways—including learning how to cross roads safely and the best times to visit human habitats—but ...
The environmental impact of palm oil production has been well publicised. Found in everything from food to cosmetics, the deforestation, ecosystem decline and biodiversity loss associated with its use is a serious cause for ...
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists have developed a sustainable way to demonstrate a new genetic modification that can increase the yield of natural oil in seeds by up to 15 per cent in ...
A new strategy being rolled out in China relies on the idea that farmers can harvest much more than crops. The idea is that well-managed, diverse agricultural lands can provide flood control, water purification and climate ...
Test tubes holding plants line shelves in a Malaysian laboratory, the heart of a breeding programme for dwarf palm oil trees which scientists hope will cut costs and limit the environmental damage caused by the controversial ...
Imagine "carbon emissions", and what springs to mind? Most people tend to think of power stations belching out clouds of carbon dioxide or queues of vehicles burning up fossil fuels as they crawl, bumper-to-bumper, along ...
Soaring demand for durians in China is being blamed for a new wave of deforestation in Malaysia with environmentalists warning vast amounts of jungle is being cleared to make way for massive plantations of the spiky, pungent ...