On the first week of May, President Lula visited the city of Tomé-Açu, in Pará, with a mission to launch the Oil Palm Sustainable Production Program, with a goal to increase the production of dendê in the country under the banner of sustainability.

An Agricultural and Ecological Zoning (ZAE) effort created in partnership with Embrapa (Brazil’s Agriculture and Livestock Breeding Research Agency) defines plantation for degraded or deforested areas in 14 States: Alagoas, Bahia, Pernambuco and Sergipe in the Northeast, Rio de Janeiro and Espírito Santo in the Southeast and Acre, Amazonas, Amapá, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia and Roraima (all belonging to the Legal Amazon region).

Some 31.8 million hectares were identified for planting, more than double the area in the world, a fact which clearly demonstrates the magnitude of this program. However, to flood Brazil with dendê is something that for some is hardly feasible. “To say that 32 million hectares are ready for planting does not mean that it will actually be done throughout this entire area”, informs José Manuel Cabral, head of communications and business for Embrapa Agroenergia.

“Brazil will not jump to a million hectares overnight. If it is very well handled, it will take some 15 years”, states João Meirelles, director of the Peabiru Institute, and one of the people in charge of the Sustainable Dendê program, conducted in partnership with the Agropalma Group, the largest private company producing dendê in Latin America, with headquarters in Pará.

In order to encourage production, the government foresees lines of credit for small, average and major planters. Aside from that, it will invest in technical training, technological innovation and seed improvements (in this case, with some R$ 60 million derived from public resources). The production of dendê can meet the country’s domestic demand, generate jobs and strengthen family agriculture, while a hectare of mature palm stores 26 tons of carbon. However...

Keeping an eye on risks

Of the almost 32 million hectares identified, 28 million are in the Legal Amazon, the major part in Pará. According to Valmir Ortega, of Conservation International (CI), the extensive monoculture of dendê can cause several impacts in the region.

To name a few, the change in the use of the soil, a risk of real estate concentration, loss of biodiversity, the dissemination of pests and sicknesses, plus the degradation of the soil and water, aside from the migration of populations from rural zones and workers from other regions which would put pressure on the infrastructure and the capacity of local public services to meet these needs. “Supposing that for every 10 hectares of palm, we have direct labor, we would reach the figure of almost 3 million people – where would we locate all these people in the Amazon?”, asks Marcello Brito, commercial director of the Agropalma Group.

The increase in the production of dendê in the Amazon can also result in new deforesting by the hands of livestock farmers, soy farmers and the like. “Forcing the change of the use of the soil, especially through the introduction of extensive monocultures poses the great risk of promoting the displacement of activities that currently occur in these regions, stimulating further deforesting. In the case of the Amazon, this is doubtless a major concern and one which is even more difficult to monitor”, states Valmir.

In order to avoid this state of affairs, the government defined a series of mechanisms. For starters, only products that have managed to maintain their credit current in the Rural Environmental Records (CAR) will have access to credit. Plantation will be forbidden along deforested areas after 2008 and a Bill to block further deforesting for dendê planting and stop environmental licensing in areas not indicated by the ZAE was sent to the Congress, but no one knows when it will actually become a law.

Dendê-giving palms cannot be planted within protected areas – “everything which is a country asset in terms of conservation of the biodiversity and protection of the indigenous people is excluded from the process”, stated the Minister of the Environment.

Such strategies would legally bar the progress of deforesting, but “the implementation of the law will be a great challenge”, says Marcello Brito. “The adopted measures are fundamental, but insufficient, especially if we consider that environmental control, the licensing of projects and the monitoring of impacts will be conducted by State environmental agencies, in their majority underequipped to meet current demands, and therefore with a low capacity to control the expansion of new activities that generate impact and/or degradation”, says Ortega in closing. According to him, the monitoring of this program must be done with public transparency, monitoring the expansion of planting and evaluating risks of new deforesting and of social impacts on local communities.

The sustainable plantation of oil palms in Brazil is a mix of both positive aspects and great risks. We still have to know if this new government enterprise, strategically launched in an election year will not increase deforesting in the Amazon. When Lula took the stand in a political manifestation in Tomé-Açu, he stated that it will be forbidden to fell a single tree to plant palm trees.” Only time will tell.

The market of dendê Dendê is a palm tree of African origin. Its oil is used in the food industry, in the production of cosmetics and in the chemical industry where it is also found in the composition of biofuels. From 1998 to 2009, its use jumped from 17 to 45 million tons, and today it is one of the most largely produced oils on the planet. Research has shown that countries of the European Union, China and India will increase the use of biofuels in the following years, which will demand, as from now, greater plantations of dendê palms, since they only bear fruit three years from planting. It so happens that this new world agricultural Eldorado does quite well in humid tropical climates with heavy rains. It grows so well in tropical forests that it has become the nightmare of environmentalists that fight for the preservation of Asiatic forests – if in the Amazon what most pushes deforesting further into the forest is cattle, in Asia it is dendê. It’s no coincidence then that Indonesia and Malaysia are two of the major producers in the world, followed by Thailand. Colombia comes in fourth and is the number one producer in Latin America, followed in second and third place by Ecuador and Brazil, respectively. According to the National Federation of Oil Palm Planters (Fedepalma) of Colombia, the country’s plantation does not result in deforesting, “since we occupy territories formerly used for other agricultural and livestock breeding activities”. In Ecuador, in spite of the advance of the agricultural frontier being located among the main causes of deforesting, according to Rodrigo Sierra, PhD, researcher of the Ecuadorian organization EcoCiencia and of the Latin American Studies Institute of the University of Texas, “most of the dendê plantations are located in the so-called ‘humid Pacific coast’, therefore not within the Amazon Rainforest”.

*Karina Miotto is an environment journalist
based in Belém do Pará, a conferencist
on Amazon-related subjects and the
author of the blog Eco-Repórter-Eco