Oil Palm — Achievements and Potential

By M. B. Wahid, S. Abdullah, I. Henson. 2005

224 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Cultivation of the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis Jacq.) has expanded tremendously in recent years such that it is now second only to soybean as a major source of the world supply of oils and fats. Presently, Southeast Asia is the dominant region of production with Malaysia being the leading producer and exporter of palm oil. This paper reviews the various factors that have led to oil palm occupying its present position, including biological, technical, managerial, environmental, and socio-political aspects. Biological features recognised as critical to the high productivity of the crop are examined. These include its perennial and evergreen nature (giving a continuous year-round canopy cover intercepting a high proportion of incoming radiation), the year-round production of fruit bunches and the high partition of total assimilates into harvested product. Scientific and managerial aspects contributing to the success of the crop include the significant genetic improvements and production of high quality planting materials, the development and application of finely-tuned agronomic practices, the appropriate scale and efficient organisation of oil palm plantations and the continuous R&D and good infra-structural support provided in the main producing countries. The programmes of crop improvement through the utilisation of traditional breeding and selection methods, the development and benefits of vegetative propagation techniques using tissue culture and ongoing efforts to apply molecular and genetic engineering techniques to improve and modify oil composition, are reviewed. Finally, the nutritional qualities of palm oil as a healthy component of diet are briefly described.

Subfields: Demography, Ecology, Inorganic Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82a550f84da0f81756241a254f7e436ea92dc3c2

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Citations in the corpus

The impacts and opportunities of oil palm in Southeast Asia: What do we know and what do we need to know? (2009, background): “As well as increasing the amount of oil, breeding can also improve the types of oil produced by the palms10 and boost nutritional values (increasing the levels of carotenoids, vitamin E and iodine) (Wahid et al. 2005).”
Use of UK-DMC 2 and ALOS PALSAR for studying the age of oil palm trees in southern peninsular Malaysia (2013, background): “Oil palm is a perennial monocotyledonous tree crop which originated from West Africa and which follows a C31 photosynthesis pathway (Wahid, Abdullah, and Henson 2005).”
Support vector machine to map oil palm in a heterogeneous environment (2014, background): “Oil palm is a monocytyledonous perennial crop with minimal water deficits compared with the dicotyledonous nature of forest, shrub, and other crops (Wahid, Abdullah, and Henson 2005).”
Mapping and identifying basal stem rot disease in oil palms in North Sumatra with QuickBird imagery (2011, background): “There have been several discussions on the possible adoption of precision agriculture in the oil palm industry (Robert 2002; Wahid et al. 2004; McBratney et al. 2005).”