Malaysia is greatly concerned by the negative campaigns targeted at the palm
oil industry especially with regard to the distorting views on carbon debt, said
Minister of Plantation Industries and Commodities, Peter Chin Fah Kui.
He said it was not fair to arbitrarily specify a cut-off point for calculation
purposes and in the process shackle developing countries to incur carbon debt
Speaking at the two-day International Palm Oil Sustainability Conference
beginning here today, he said biased calculations on oil palm and carbon debt
leading to distorting conclusions had emerged from Europe in an attempt to
tarnish the image of the industry.
Chin said carbon emissions for palm oil plantation were often calculated based
on carbon stocks of pristine rain forests as the starting point.
However, he said although carbon stocks in the oil palm ecosystem were high,
they had been totally ignored in these studies.
As such, he said these studies had proclaimed that palm oil cultivation would
create a huge carbon debt that would take many years to settle in order to make
the industry carbon neutral.
"In reality, every piece of land has a carbon sink capacity. Any piece of
forested land with high carbon stock, once converted to agriculture, would
automatically carry a carbon debt since agricultural land use usually carries a
lower carbon stock than a pristine forest. This principle applies whenever any
forested land is converted to agricultural land.
"If you think about it, how many farms exist today that was not a forest many,
many years ago, irrespective of whether that farm is situated in a temperate or
tropical country" "Whatever happened to the carbon debt the farm incurred when
the forest was first felled for agricultural development" he asked.
Chin said an oil palm plantation, as a planted forest, drew many similarities
with that of a forest in the production of oxygen, absorption of carbon dioxide
and served as a habitat for various forms of biodiveristy to thrive in.
Referring to the Malaysian palm oil industry, he said that contrary to the
current perception that large tracts of virgin jungles were bulldozed to make
way for oil palm plantations and this eventually deprived endangered specifies
of their natural habitat and pushed them to the brink of extinction, this was
not happening in the country.
"Oil palm cultivation is Malaysia is strictly regulated and can only be
developed on legally designated agricultural land and does not encroach on
protected virgin rainforests. Moreover when oil palm is planted on degraded land
that was previously used for other commercial activities, the planting of oil
palms rehabilitates the land and converts it to a green lung," he said.
More importantly, he said oil palm being a perennial crop could be sustainably
produced for 25 years or more with minimum disturbance to the environment
compared to th cultivation of other oil seeds that needed annual harvesting and
large land preparation, usually with the use of machinery.
In addition, he said Malaysian plantations took serious care of their
"The Malaysian palm oil industry adopts good agricultural practices such as zero
burning in platations and the utilisation of waste -- for example fresh fruit
bunches are converted to organic fertilisers," he said.
"The industry is environmentally-friendly where the waste water that flows out
of the treatment ponds are not harmful to aquatic life that live downstream. All
these practices ensure that the palm oil industry operates in a sustainable