Palangkaraya, April 13:

Sulur is 50 years old, delicately built, but strong as a bear. With high swings, the Indonesian slams his axe into the stem of an oil-palm fruit bunch two, three, four times. Then the bunch of black-orange, berry-like fruits falls to the ground.

He picks up the 10-kg bundle and carries it about 50 metres to a nearby road. Sulur wipes sweat off his forehead before examining the next oil palm, number 88 of the day.

His daily quota is to harvest 100 palms, but on some days, he manages to harvest 120 trees, which brings extra income.

As the palm-oil business booms and the oil mills in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo, are operating at full steam, deliveries that exceed the quota are always welcome.

Palm oil has long been used in a wide range of consumer products, from margarine to sweets and soaps to cosmetics. But since Europe and America have discovered palm oil as a “biofuel”, a cleaner-burning alternative to “dirty” mineral oil, business has taken off even more - with disastrous consequences for the environment.

Palm-oil consumption has more than doubled to more than 30 million tonnes each year in the past decade.

But the environmentally conscious people around the globe who have driven the demand “haven’t realized that they’re destroying Indonesia’s nature in the process,” said Iwan Wibisono of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Indonesia’s rainforest, already exploited and decimated for decades for its valuable hardwoods, is now slashed to make way for new oil-palm plantations.

By 2008, Indonesia’s government intends to expand the plantations over 8.4 million hectares, an area the size of Austria, from the 5.4 million hectares planted in 2004. Most of the new plantations are to be set up in Kalimantan.

Because of this expansion drive, the World Bank cautioned that Kalimantan’s lowland rainforest might disappear within the next three or four years. Indonesia, which together with Malaysia is responsible for 80 per cent of global palm-oil production, harbours high hopes for healthy profits in the years to come.

No other oil-yielding plant is as fruitful as the oil palm. Four to eight tonnes of oil per hectare make plantations into gold mines. But environmental experts warned that while palm oil brings a high price, it also exacts a high price.

Environmental scientists like German Florian Siegert have also established that the slash-and-burn method commonly used to clear forest causes more carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere than can be saved by burning biofuels like palm oil.