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Palm oil production is often associated with negative environmental and social impacts related to land-use change (LUC) particularly deforestation of tropical rainforest. Most consumers are located far away from production, LUC, and its impacts so that impacts are not felt or even perceived. This chapter investigates the underlying factors that shape the connections and land use for palm oil production. Possible ways to minimize undesired impacts of LUC are identified: better land-use zoning and use of degraded land for new plantations, increasing palm oil yields and applying production schemes that are more beneficial to local communities. In addition, decision making that is not made at the local level (e.g., by actors in distant places, through interactions between different markets) must be understood. A global perspective on land use and land-use governance is needed. For example, a global cap on LUC-related emissions for all countries could provide better governance of LUC and minimize the displacement of land use and associated emissions. Consumers could be made more responsible for LUC-related emissions by allocating these emissions to consuming countries or by placing a carbon tax on products with high LUC-induced greenhouse gas emissions. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

An introduction to oil palm and its uses is provided, beginning with its origins in Africa and its transformation in Southeast Asia into one of the world’s most important crops. Major production and processing systems, and technological milestones in the crop’s development are discussed. Cases studies of oil palm development in West Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Colombia highlight the primary differences in the production systems and value chains resulting from economic factors, policy incentives, and final use. Also described are the major economic and sustainability challenges. Last, a review of investments in research and development and future prospects for productivity growth is provided.

This chapter examines how the food industry meets the challenge of deforestation. Forests are not only important in moderating the pace of climate change; they are also the home to many of the Earth’s species, and are key to the planet’s legacy of biodiversity. Deforestation, burning, and land clearing, mostly of tropical rain forests, contribute 17 percent of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture, especially palm oil, is the single most important factor of deforestation. As demand for palm oil increased, so too did the backlash from environmentalists and consumers, angry that the demand for palm oil was fueling the destruction of tropical rainforests. This led to the inauguration of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil in 2004, which mandated a set of prescribed practices among palm oil growers that ranged from prohibitions on planting on recently cleared forestland and peat bogs to requirements for sustainable farming practices, such as water and pest management, and minimization of soil erosion.

Evidence is provided to demonstrated that the tropical oil crops sector has been the most dynamic sector in world agriculture and trade since 1990. Similar to the earlier green revolution, the oil crop sector was led by only two crops: oil palm and soybeans. However, unlike the green revolution, it has been based on huge expansion of crop area often at the expense of forest in a few countries, focused on global markets and led by agribusiness. The oil crops sector embraces many of today’s controversies about food and agriculture—debates about genetically modified organisms, food versus feed and biofuel, diet and health, globalization, land grabs, deforestation, and monocropping.

Despite the dangers and risks, as this chapter demonstrates some international NGOs are continuing to challenge oil, mining, and timber companies with confrontational, direct-action campaigns. Chapter 10 opens with the story of the Greenpeace campaign against oil drilling in the Arctic, once again demonstrating the courage and conviction of “eco-warriors,” to use the phrase of Greenpeace founder Bob Hunter. Yet, as this chapter also reveals, Greenpeace is increasingly turning to social media activism, employing humorous videos to call on consumers to boycott well-known brands, such as Kit Kat, Barbie, and Head & Shoulders. In response, some brand manufacturers and retailers, including Nestlé, Mattel, and Procter & Gamble, have discontinued contracts with a few suppliers (such as ones caught clearing tropical forests to produce cardboard or grow oil palm). What Greenpeace is telling consumers is a “victory,” however – such as getting Mattel to package Barbie in a different box – is revealing of how limited eco-consumerism is as a force of global environmental reform.

This chapter describes the specific configuration of the political and agrarian structure in Aceh during the civil war and after. It presents two analysis. The first is an analysis of the general land politics in Aceh during and after the war, tracing the Free Aceh Movement's (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) development from a rebel movement with a nationalist and popular base to a political party with a rent-seeking practice and an interest in the palm oil economy. The second is an analysis of the institutional mechanisms of dispossession through land-lease allocations. Empirical documentation from two different locations in Aceh illustrates the smallholder plantation land conflicts. By turning space into a frontier under weak claims, new actors were able to seize it through violence, political power, and the paperwork of legalization.

Ayrson Heráclito is a university-trained, multimedia artist from Bahia. This chapter uses several examples of his installations and performances to demonstrate how Heráclito draws from many of the familiar signs and themes of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, while taking a more conceptual approach to the subject matter. He often incorporates culinary elements with local significance to reference Bahia’s regional history and makes transnational references to Africa and its influences on Brazilian society through his use of palm oil, sugar, and dried beef. The chapter reveals how, although highly-involved in Afro-Brazilian religion, Heráclito is rather ambivalent about the Afro-Brazilian art label with regard to his own artistic identity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the artworks are linked to African cultures and practices in some form, though not through the ubiquitous regional signifiers of “blackness” that have come to be expected from black art and culture in Bahia.

The ruler of Dahomey from 1797 (up until possibly 1818) was Adandozan. But his reign has been erased from oral memory and the local tradition. Why this is so, constitutes another mystery in Dahomean history. In any case, his reign and that of his successors saw the official but slow and tortuous disentanglement of the European and American powers from slavery, the slave trade, and the Slave Coast (until the colonial conquest). As the locals were opposed to the abolition of the slave trade, the result was for a while a moderately thriving so-called illegal slave trade with the connivance of the Brazilian authorities. In addition, a trade in palm-oil developed. If we add the final collapse of Oyo and the subsequent eruption of the Yoruba wars, we could say that prospects looked fairly promising for Dahomey. Dahomey was eclipsed, and in fact defeated at times, by the polities (some new) of the Yoruba in the east, principally Lagos and Abeokuta.

This chapter contains a detailed record of seven Liverpool-based families and their involvement in the city’s historical maritime economy. The report focuses on the social and economic lives of the Cropper, Earle, Crosbie-Oates, Danson, Stubbs, Mather and Laird families, and uses the family’s business and social affairs to provide an insight into slave trade; abolition; maritime law; shipping trade; the palm oil trade with West Africa; and emigration to Ireland and America. Resources featured include letters; minutes taken; estate deeds and family papers; business papers; newspaper clippings; accounts; diary extracts and travel journals; scrapbooks; and printed pamphlets.

This chapter examines the importance of integrating archaeological perspectives within contemporary environmental anthropology. It does this through exposing key questions raised by environmental anthropologists concerning West African relations with soil and forests that can only be addressed through collaboration with archaeological investigation (see also Balée, Chapter 3 this volume). Environmental anthropological research has been particularly important in revealing the ecological knowledge and environmental practices of land users and how these practices interplay with ecological and economic processes in the shaping of landscapes. This research has systematically undermined a paradigm of environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’, ‘equilibrial’, or ‘pristine’ environments (whether of soils, forests, or faunal assemblages). Whilst equilibrial ecology is apparently no longer upheld in ecological sciences either, in its shift to non-equilibrium ecology and recognition of path dependency, and whilst nature is no longer so easily configured simply as the absence of people, assumptions rooted in such simplistic ideas of nature still strongly inform and mislead the way West African environments are understood and problematized. Anthropologically derived critiques of the way landscapes are understood have been associated with a rereading of the history of those landscapes. Yet given how oral historical and anthropologically derived historical evidence can so easily be delegitimized and dismissed by apparently ‘harder’ sciences, environmental archaeology becomes a crucial player in these debates. In this brief chapter I shall focus on two key debates which can only be resolved (or reconceptualized) through environmental archaeology. The first of these concerns the degradation (or otherwise) of soils and vegetation linked to farming in West Africa’s Guinea savannah and forest-savannah transition zones. The second concerns the legacy of past land use on current ‘old growth’ forest in the Central and West African humid forest zones. These are not only interesting debates, but are at the heart of sustainable development policy deliberation in West Africa. The continued power of the paradigm in environmental reasoning that equates land use with the progressive degradation of otherwise ‘natural’ or ‘pristine’ environments is visible in the way that landscape features are often interpreted uncritically as ‘relicts’ of that nature.

The intricate coastline of Southeast Asia, and its many islands and island groups—Indonesia alone has over 17 500 islands—contains 32 per cent (91 700 km2) of the world’s shallow coral reefs (Spalding, Ravilious, and Green 2001). While sedimentary regimes appear to restrict reef development in the East China Sea, the Gulf of Thailand, the South China Sea, and around the island of Borneo, reefs are well developed elsewhere. Fringing reefs characterize island coastlines, and there are also barrier reefs and, in the deeper waters of the South China Sea and to the east, atoll-like reef structures. Although the region has a distinguished history of reef studies—in which the pioneering work of R. B. Seymour Sewell, J. H. F. Umbgrove, and Ph. H. Kuenen on the Snellius expedition (1929–30) come particularly to mind—the lack of detailed information about many areas remains considerable. The coral reefs, and their associated shallow-water ecosystems, within this region are the product of both historical and contemporary processes. A wide range of hypotheses to explain coral distributions have been proposed. These include the importance of the widespread availability of suitable shallow substrates for coral growth with submergence histories determined by regional tectonic and sea-level dynamics (e.g. Hall and Holloway 1998), the variety of habitats present (e.g. Wallace and Wolstenholme 1998), and the more contemporary roles of high sea-surface temperatures and ocean current circulation patterns, including the dynamics of western Pacific Ocean–eastern Indian Ocean connectivity (Tomascik et al. 1997a). Both sets of controls show wide variation across the region. Thus, for example, geological settings range from tectonically stable platforms to rapidly uplifting plate collision zones of considerable seismic and volcanic activity. Present-day environments vary from equable, tranquil interior seas to cycloneand swell wave-dominated environments on the region’s margins. Added to these controls are the perturbations introduced by, for example, periodic coral bleaching and biological catastrophes (e.g. Crown of Thorns starfish infestations; Lane 1996). Taken as a whole, therefore, the coral reefs of Southeast Asia demonstrate enormous complexity and considerable dynamism. These reef resources are, however, under considerable pressure from large, and growing, populations and economic development.

This chapter presents the involvement of Liverpool in the slave trade. As the European port most involved in slaving during the eighteenth century, much of Liverpool’s prosperity was due to the trade, which meant that there was no part of the whole port of Liverpool that went untouched by slavery. This chapter outlines the role of the city and its citizens in the slave trade by offering a breakdown of slavery records in the form of registers and archives that detail Liverpool slaving vessels and its masters and owners. It also discusses the effects of abolition and Liverpool’s subsequent trade with West Africa and America.

Periodic attempts to plot global distribution of erosion and sedimentation usually attribute most of Southeast Asia with a very high sediment yield (Milliman and Meade 1983). The erosion rates and sediment yield figures are especially high for maritime Southeast Asia. Milliman and Syvitski (1992), for example, listed 3000 t km−2 yr−1 for the archipelagos and peninsulas of Southeast Asia. They provided a number of natural explanations for the high erosion rate: location near active plate margins, pyroclastic eruptions, steep slopes, and mass movements. This is also a region with considerable annual rainfall, a very substantial percentage of which tends to be concentrated in a few months and falls with high intensity. Part of Southeast Asia (the Philippines, Viet Nam, Timor) is visited by tropical cyclones with heavy, intense rainfall and possible associated wind damage to existing vegetation. The fans at the foot of slopes, the large volume of sediment stored in the channel and floodplain of the rivers, and the size of deltas all indicate a high rate of erosion and episodic sediment transfer. This episodic erosion and sediment transfer used to be controlled for most of the region by the thick cover of vegetation that once masked the slopes. When vegetation is removed soil and regolith de-structured, and natural slopes altered, the erosion rates and sediment yield reach high figures. Parts of Southeast Asia display striking anthropogenic alteration of the landscape, although the resulting accelerated erosion may be only temporary, operating on a scale of several years. Over time the affected zones shift, and slugs of sediment continue to arrive in a river but from different parts of its drainage basin. The combination of anthropogenic alteration and fragile landforms may give rise to very high local yields. Sediment yields of more than 15 000 t km−2 yr−1 have been estimated from such areas (Ruslan and Menam, cited in Lal 1987). This is undoubtedly towards the upper extreme, but current destruction of the vegetation cover due to deforestation, expansion of agriculture, mining, urbanization, and implementation of large-scale resettlement schemes has increased the sediment yield from < 102 to > 103 t km−2 yr−1.

This chapter looks specifically at the pressures imposed by urbanization on the physical environment in Southeast Asia, leading to its degradation and a decline in the quality of life. This is followed by a discussion on the management responses highlighting some common concerns that need to be addressed in order to plan and manage urban systems better. Like many of their counterparts in the developing world, levels of urbanization in Southeast Asia are low by world standards. However, the growth rates of the urban population are high: 3–5 per cent per annum (Jones 1993). The relatively low levels of urbanization, nevertheless, are by no means a reflection of the failure of cities in the region to reach substantial sizes. Indeed, three of the very large cities of Southeast Asia, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Manila, carry 10 million people. The current trends and direction of urban growth are expected to continue, although the rates are likely to be somewhat retarded within these few years owing to the economic downturn recently experienced by the Southeast Asian countries. Such continued growth and rapid urbanization can only result in greater burdens to the already very strained urban systems, in terms of both the provision of an urban infrastructure and social services and the biophysical environment. One notable consequence of urban growth and population concentration in Southeast Asian cities is the pressure they generate on the provision of an infrastructure and essential services that eventually affects the environment, health, and quality of life. Here, the problems of providing an adequate infrastructure are immense, especially given the budgetary constraints. Policy response is often highly inadequate compared to the scale of the problems. Singapore’s special position as a city-state has enabled it to overcome problems that other Southeast Asian cities have not been able to cope with, particularly as it is not affected by the perennial problem of rural–urban migration. One major problem which is shared by many Southeast Asian cities is overcrowding and lack of proper shelter. Virtually all major cities have squatters. Squatters are basically illegal occupants of urban land that belongs to the government or private individuals.