Article
The Future of Indonesian Palm Oil
The world's fourth-most-populous nation is under immense pressure to curb forest and peatland clearing—for the sake of endangered species, livelihoods and reduced carbon emissions...many foreign companies are moving ahead with individual promises to use only sustainable palm oil by 2015—Nestle, McDonald's and Anglo-Dutch consumer giant Unilever among them...But the industry has far to go. Indeed, fewer than 50 percent of all companies are now certifiable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil...Perhaps most disconcerting of all is the direct human cost: population displacement among Indonesia's 17,500 islands.