Pastel, yeah. It's a nasty business. Not really here to bag it and get on the high horse and may even get bagged for this but... got a story if your interested - not a nice one.
Couple of years back was working in Kalimantan for an aid organisation. The gvt moved 40,000 people who had been displaced by conflict (all rice farmers) out to the jungle 3 hrs by speedboat (10 by other river transport) from the city. Gave each household 200sqm of dense forest, a wooden shack 3x6m, a few tools, a sack of rice every 3 months, some vegie seeds and cooking utensils. No water or sanitation, no fuel, no infrastructure, no health care, no schools, unfarmable peat on the outskirts. Each told if they clear the land and plant palm, after 10 years, they would get 2.5% of the annual profit which is monopolised and sale ceilings set very low - no earnings before then. They did not own the land, the companies and the gvt owned the land. They were given no choice as they were displaced.
This is like dense jungle. Watched them cut it down on a promise, after cut they would set fire to it and the peat would burn and smoulder for months. All the kids (adults too) had major respitory illness, TB, malaria, malnutrition was massive and child maternal death through the roof. Life expectancy was about 40. One day we went in there and there was a little boy who 10 days previously had run into the forest and the forest floor fell out from under him and he fell into a pit of smouldering embers - already had gangrene in the burns on his feet. We carried him out, back to the city. He survived but lost his legs.
And that's just one area - Palm plantations are so poorly regulated, co-opted interests everywhere, well known as one of the most insidious exploiters of labour across the world - not to mention the forests.
Irony is the international community (AusAID included) is now putting billions into trying to rehabilitate the peat and replant the forest from ex-palm plantations in this area as part of the Climate Change agreements. And you see new plantations come in right next door. It's extraordinary really.
I've no doubt those invested will make a whack of money on it in the coming years - just the human, environmental and political costs do my head in.
