Word: palme
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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CONTEXT On Nov. 14, Joe Horn, 61, of Pasadena, Texas, killed two men he saw robbing his neighbor's house. On Nov. 22, 19-year-old William Wilkerson Jr. killed a man who was threatening Wilkerson and his girlfriend as they sat in his car in Palm Beach...
...ambles off to the fields to work. Suranto isn't a local; he has come from northern Sumatra because there are jobs in Riau. The forests and peatlands of the area are being transformed into plantations, and workers are being paid to plant tens of thousands of young oil-palm trees in fields stripped bare of their native vegetation by burning. As Suranto stoops and digs one hole after another amid the blackened stumps of an old tropical forest, he looks like a camp follower picking through the detritus of a still-smoldering battlefield...
...Which is exactly what Riau province is, in a way. Roughly the size of Taiwan, the area has become the focus of a green-versus-green tussle pitting environmentalists trying to protect Indonesia's disappearing forests against a fast-growing alternative-energy business. Palm oil, a byproduct of the oil-palm tree such as those being planted in Riau, is used for cooking and as a food additive. Growing it has long been a big business in Southeast Asia. But it can also be used in the production of a relatively clean-burning alternative fuel: biodiesel. As oil prices have...
...annually for the past 10 years, a deforestation rate that is among the fastest in the world. In other words, razing forests is a big business - and carbon credits might not provide an adequate substitute for the profits that come from converting fallow land to income-producing ventures like palm-oil plantations...
...That may be so - but as long as there is demand for biodiesel, it seems unrealistic to expect Indonesia to stop converting forests into plantations. These days, Riau's main highway is clogged with trucks carting processed palm oil from local refineries to the Sumatran port town of Dumai. Outside one house, not far from the provincial capital of Pekanbaru, a woman weighing out heavy red palm fruit on a scale in her front yard says her family used to only sell fruit from their 200 palm trees. But with the high prices palm oil fetches these days, she says...