Sustainable Oil-Palm Cultivation: We Need to Use Gene Technology to Boost Palm-Oil Production

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 Bhore SJ. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Vegetable oil and fats are very essential in our daily life. There are several oil-producing crops, but mainly 8 crops (oil-palm, soybean, canola, sunflower, peanut, cotton, coconut and olive) contributes in the world market of the vegetable oil and fats [1]. Out of these 8 oil-producing crops, oil-palm [Elaeis guineensis Jacq (Tenera)] is the number one in the sense of its total yield per unit area (5 tonnes/hectare/ year) of cultivation and total supply in the world market of vegetable oil and fats. There are three fruit forms in E. guineensis, namely, ‘Dura’ (thick-shelled), ‘Pisifera’ (shell-less) and ‘Tenera’ (thin-shelled) [2,3]. Tenera form is a hybrid between Dura (♀) and Pisifera (♂). This E. guineensis Tenera is cultivated commercially in several countries due to its high oil yielding trait; but, Indonesia and Malaysia are the major producers and exporters of the palm-oil [1]. As of August 22, 2013, the world human population was 7.173 billion, and the demand for the vegetable oil and fats is steadily increasing. Currently, the market share of the palm-oil in the world market of vegetable oil and fats is about 34% [1]. Oil-palm does have a great potential to meet increasing demand of vegetable oil and fats [4,5]. In addition, palm-oil is also considered as a suitable raw material for biodiesel production [6,7]. Oil-palm cultivation is a good profitable business; hence, small, medium and large plantation companies are enthusiastically investing in the oil-palm plantations. Therefore, oil-palm plantation are rapidly expanding in the oil-palm growing countries. Yes, we do need to cultivate oil-palm for the production of palm-oil to meet the continuously growing demand for vegetable oil and fats. But, a growing body of research is clearly indicating that palm-oil farming can cause damaging deforestation and reduce biodiversity [8]. A huge amount of forest land is being converted into oil-palm plantations in the oil-palm growing countries, and it’s alarming. We cannot afford deforestation forever to make forest land available to expand oil-palm plantations.