Sustainable palm oil production in Sabah, Borneo.
Holes are drilled to put charcoal in the ground around the trees to deter microbes and insects from attacking the trees. Madam Nisa is a smallholder palm oil farmer. She is one of Malaysia’s 300.000 smallholders and with the help of Preferred by Nature’s partner, a local NGO, Wild Asia she has turned her 13 hectares of land into a laboratory for sustainable palm oil production. By recycling palm waste as compost, replacing chemical fertilizer with biodynamic material and planting other crops such as ginger and chili between the oil palm Madam Nisa and her family are able to produce a higher and healthier yield. Much of the original rain forest in Sabah, the Malaysian side of Borneo, has been turned into palm oil production on an industrial scale. Palm oil is in nearly everything – it’s in close to 50% of the packaged products we find in supermarkets, everything from pizza, doughnuts and chocolate, to deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste and lipstick. Palm oil has been and continues to be a major driver of deforestation of some of the world's most biodiverse forests, destroying the habitat of already endangered species.
