Characterizing commercial oil palm expansion in Latin America: land use change and trade
By P. Furumo, T. Mitchell Aide. 2017
182 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Commodity crop expansion has increased with the globalization of production systems and consumer demand, linking distant socio-ecological systems. Oil palm plantations are expanding in the tropics to satisfy growing oilseed and biofuel markets, and much of this expansion has caused extensive deforestation, especially in Asia. In Latin America, palm oil output has doubled since 2001, and the majority of expansion seems to be occurring on non-forested lands. We used MODIS satellite imagery (250 m resolution) to map current oil palm plantations in Latin America and determined prior land use and land cover (LULC) using high-resolution images in Google Earth. In addition, we compiled trade data to determine where Latin American palm oil flows, in order to better understand the underlying drivers of expansion in the region. Based on a sample of 342 032 ha of oil palm plantations across Latin America, we found that 79% replaced previously intervened lands (e.g. pastures, croplands, bananas), primarily cattle pastures (56%). The remaining 21% came from areas that were classified as woody vegetation (e.g. forests), most notably in the Amazon and the Petén region in northern Guatemala. Latin America is a net exporter of palm oil but the majority of palm oil exports (70%) stayed within the region, with Mexico importing about half. Growth of the oil palm sector may be driven by global factors, but environmental and economic outcomes vary between regions (i.e. Asia and Latin America), within regions (i.e. Colombia and Peru), and within single countries (i.e. Guatemala), suggesting that local conditions are influential. The present trend of oil palm expanding onto previously cleared lands, guided by roundtable certifications programs, provides an opportunity for more sustainable development of the oil palm sector in Latin America.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1fcb0697f13012a8b49d7de126396360b57e62e7
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Ecology
- Kibrom T. Sibhatu
- I. Grass
- M. Qaim
- Hermanto Siregar
- P. Hulme
- Petr Pyšek
- R. Epanchin‐Niell
- D. Richardson
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Environmental, Economic, and Social Consequences of the Oil Palm Boom (2020, background): “While overall deforestation rates have been high in many Latin American countries, around 80% of the regional oil palm expansion occurred not at the expense of forests but on abandoned pastures and other land-use systems (Furumo & Aide 2017).”
- Trade-offs between environment and livelihoods: Bridging the global land use and food security discussions (2017, unknown): “…different interventions to increase income have to be accompanied by other interventions to control land use expansion, in order to neutralize potential rebound effects and achieve land sparing, and channel residual expansion towards land with the most favorable trade-offs (Furumo and Aide 2017).”
- Unwelcome exchange: International trade as a direct and indirect driver of biological invasions worldwide (2021, background): “as in the case of the expansion of oil palm plantations in Latin America, which has occurred at the expense of other land uses including tropical forests.(96) Deforestation is a primary contributor to climate change, but the resulting fragmentation of tropical forests also increases their vulnerabil”