Fuelling a carbon crisis

This year the Indonesian Government will officially hold a new Guinness World Record - the fastest pace of deforestation. They must be so proud. Between 2000 and 2005 Indonesia lost two percent of its forest each year, representing an area of wildlife rich tropical forest the size of Wales. That's three hundred football pitches of forest per hour. Illegal logging is certainly a big driver but there is another more sinister cause - the meticulously planned clearance of rainforest to make way for the expansion of oil palm plantations. There are now over 6 million hectares of oil palm in Indonesia and the Government is handing out concessions to triple this area by 2020.

The damage from the oil palm industry was recently brought into stark relief by Weltands International who found that Indonesia was the third biggest source of greenhouse gases in the world, taking into account forest destruction, forest fires and the destruction of the peat swamps. They calculated that emissions tied to a litre of palm oil sourced from an area converted from peat forest are between 3 and 10 times more polluting than a litre of conventional diesel.

And it's not just the environmental impacts we should be concerned about. New research from Friends of the Earth has found that in Indonesia the majority of communities affected by oil palm plantation development are horrifically exploited. They are cheated, lied to and abused. This then is the face of the biofuel industry when it goes wrong. And it is going wrong in many developing countries all over the world. Nightmare biofuel development stories are unfolding in Latin America and Africa too. If done badly, biofuels can not only raise food prices for the poor, destroy livelihoods and annihilate the most biodiverse habitat on Earth, they can increase carbon emissions too.

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