Tuesday, September 04, 2007

A strange solution for preserving biodiversity

FromNature:
" The rapid expansion of oil-palm crops in equatorial regions has raised concerns about its potential detrimental effects on southeast Asia's biodiversity, leading to intense media debates between environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the oil-palm industry.
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We think that this debate has been fuelled, on the one hand, by the NGOs' lack of awareness of the socioeconomic realities in countries that produce palm oil, and, on the other, by the crop growers' failure to appreciate both the threat to southeast Asia's unique biodiversity, and the conservation potential of non-pristine habitats. To break this agriculture–biodiversity deadlock, we suggest a new strategy of using revenue from oil-palm agriculture to fund the acquisition of land for the establishment of private nature reserves.
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In our view, because the oil palm is such a high yielding and lucrative crop, a unique opportunity exists for NGOs to acquire relatively small tracts of existing oil-palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia and use the revenue generated to establish a network of privately owned nature reserves for biodiversity conservation."

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