Oil Palm

A tree crop, Elaeis guineensis, native to the tropical lowlands of West and Central Africa, where it was traditionally harvested and cultivated on a small scale for centuries before industrial plantation agriculture developed. European colonial administrations introduced the oil palm to Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century, and Indonesia and Malaysia, rather than Africa, became the dominant producers of palm oil, the vegetable oil pressed from the fruit, which is now the most widely produced and consumed vegetable oil in the world. Modern oil palm cultivation is also associated with large-scale tropical deforestation and habitat loss in Indonesia and Malaysia, a documented environmental cost of the crop's rapid plantation expansion since the late twentieth century.