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I really feel like the solution here has nothing to do with Palm oil, or any other specific commodity. The solution is for rich countries to pay people in poor

I really feel like the solution here has nothing to do with Palm oil, or any other specific commodity. The solution is for rich countries to pay people in poor countries to take care of their forests. If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive. If the inverse is true, the forest will be destroyed. If we want people in less developed countries to not exploit their natural resources, we're going to have to pay them more then they could get otherwise, or the resources will be extracted and sold.

chrisseaton 7y ago
We already pay a lot of people in the west to maintain land for ecological reasons, such as farmers, so it's not an unusual thing to do.
- roel_v 7y ago
  And it's mostly not working (see today's EC reports on farmer subsidies for nature preservation). Spoiler: the money is spend and happily pocketed by the target audience, who then find ways to do the other economically profitable thing as well.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > it's mostly not working...: the money is spend and happily pocketed by the target audience, who then find ways to do the other economically profitable thing as well. err... isn't that the intended outcome? The money is getting to who we wanted it to get to and it's not stopping them running their businesses and creating value. That's all good isn't it? We'd love to be able to pay people in the Amazon to protect the forests and still develop themselves economically.
    - roel_v 7y ago
      Not by having them do the exact thing we pay them not to do. In the EC case, we pay them to develop bird habitat, yet that habitat doesn't get developed. If we'd pay people to not grow palm trees, we expect that there isn't some metric loophole like that makes it so that we don't achieve the goals set out. I mean, it's a matter of clearly defining goals and KPIs of course, but that's easier said than done.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        > having them do the exact thing we pay them not to do. Well you left that bit out of your comment! You just said they took the money and managed to make money with their land anyway while meeting the agreement, which sounded like a perfect situation!
        jasonkester 7y ago
        > Well you left that bit out of your comment! It’s funny watching people talk past each other on the internet. You actually quoted that bit of his comment above.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        I thought 'the other' meant an unrelated thing, so it wasn't clear.
        roel_v 7y ago
        I said the other thing profitable, i.e. the thing we don't want them to do, I didn't say another.
wwweston 7y ago
> If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive. If the inverse is true, the forest will be destroyed. More precisely: if the market value of palm oil is greater than that of healthy forest, there will be incentives to destroy the forest. That only translates to "the forest will be destroyed" where people / societies have no other values in play beyond their incentives. Incentives matter, for sure, and using them as a tool to encourage preservation is a good arrow to consider stocking the quiver with. But something important is lost if we assume they're the only things that matter; it's essentially an acceptance of the idea there are no values besides incentives. [edited "More precisely" conditional sentence to actually make sense, I accidentally swapped the hypothetical and asserted consequence when I typed it out the first time]
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > if the market value of a healthy forest is greater than that of palm oil, there will be incentives to destroy the forest No the idea is the opposite - if the market value of healthy forest is greater than that of palm oil the idea is people will be incentivised to not destroy the forest because it's worth more than the palm oil.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    I think they just made a typo and meant to say the opposite statement.
    - wwweston 7y ago
      Correct, edited the statement to actually make sense.
- shawnz 7y ago
  > people / societies have [...] other values in play beyond their incentives. Isn't that basically just a non-monetary incentive?
  - 7y ago
andy_ppp 7y ago
How much would it cost and who do I start giving money to regularly to do this?
- bduerst 7y ago
  Stop buying foods with palm oil for starters.
- petdog 7y ago
  I contribute to https://www.coolearth.org/ https://www.coolearth.org/ which seems to be one of the best options following this approach
- tren 7y ago
  Although not exactly what you're describing, these guys are a fairly good option https://www.worldlandtrust.org/ https://www.worldlandtrust.org/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
octodog 7y ago
This is what the UN's REDD+ program does. The program has been running for a while now with some success but there are some major challenges: 1. The program relies on enforcement of property rights and environmental regulation so that illegal deforestation doesn't increase to compensate 2. "Leakage". Forest A is protected but Forest B is then logged instead. 3. Indigenous rights need to be respected and frequently aren't. This bloke [1] for example bought 50% of the carbon rights from indigenous Peruvians who can't even read or write. 4. There are concerns about greenwashing. [2] Norway is by far the biggest contributor to REDD+ with over $2.5bn contributed... but they are also the world's 5th biggest oil exporter. These challenges can probably be overcome with better oversight and greater commitment from the international community, but the desire just doesn't seem to be there. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121113114554/http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/stories/8495029/the-carbon-cowboy https://web.archive.org/web/20121113114554/http://sixtyminut... [2] https://redd-monitor.org/2019/01/08/norways-support-for-redd-the-new-colonialism-and-the-failure-of-democracy/ https://redd-monitor.org/2019/01/08/norways-support-for-redd...
lenkite 7y ago
Without oversight and enforcement of that oversight, all that will happen is fraud. There will be lots of pretty wild forest/natural lands on paper and lots of Palm oil trees in reality.
xbmcuser 7y ago
So what are the 2-3 billion people use as cooking oil. The biggest problem the world has is it's human population. Just stopping them from doing 1 thing is not going to solve the problem. We need to give economical alternates that work as replacement. Solar and wind power started getting bigger adoption once it provided an economic advantage. If Palm oil production goes down it will be replaced with canola or some other seed oil. That will result in forests being razed in some other part of the world for growing those crops. In my opinion the world needs an open sourced gmo grain crops that produce the most the most amount of oil for the least amount of land use.
- nixonpjoshua1 7y ago
  I think it is worth noting palm is already incredibly productive as a crop, replacing it with oilseed crops isn't even close to using the same amount of land per amount of productivity. You would be hard pressed to beat its productivity by modifying a grain crop. http://theconversation.com/palm-oil-scourge-of-the-earth-or-wonder-crop-42165 http://theconversation.com/palm-oil-scourge-of-the-earth-or-...
hdjcyshdlksb 7y ago
I actually agree with the logic of this argument but it still seems misguided. I agree with all of what you said, but I also think that the problem is still that palm oil actually is worth more than the forest. It's correct to lay the responsibility with the more developed economies imo because they're the ones identifying the problem and best positioned to solve it, but I don't think this line of reasoning has political potential. What average person is going to feel responsible for environmental ills in other countries? The French protestors whose breaking straw was a gas tax? The broader USA with its ethos of personal responsibility? We need a new strategy that isn't just screaming at people or guilting them.
pvaldes 7y ago
> If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive. Sadly, It does not work like that. Alive African lions have a economic value in tourism, they are still being decimated by external companies that hire local furtives to do the job. You could send every children in poor countries at the university and Translational companies and mafias still would kill the last lions and probably a few rangers to sell its bones in the black market. If you pay poor countries to not distroy the forest you are just building a blackmailing system. First, a lot of this money will never reach poor people. Local people will be increasily frustrated, and in a couple of years the question will be: "Keep paying me or somebody will burn the forest". We would be funding accelerating the pressure to distroy rainforests (because you are funding the people that will distroy nature at the exact second that you will quit the area). The same is happening in Europe, with modern environmental laws and millions of euro invested in saving big predators. Norway has like 50 wolves. Spain is paying farmers for not killing big predators (being paid for agreeing to respect the law, none less!), in national parks!. We don't have stable populations of wolves in any of our national parks in fact and talking about reintroduction is taboo, even when we have evident problems with the explosion of populations of wild ungulates and invasion of national parks by cattle. After millions of money raining over this areas, we still find decapitated wolves hanging from trafic stops or floating in public pools "goodfather style, and people more angry than ever about wolves and asking for more money each month. We had the exact same mathusalem cow killed "by wolves" four times in four different places, and being paid four times. Is a scam. Support conservationists or environmental police instead. This will trow much better results in the end.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  Another proof. The forests in Gran Canary island started burning today by multiple fires. Same as in 2019 It seems that the same people that burned most forests the last year will return to finish the job this year, or in 2021 if some trees still remain. Until killing the last tree and the last blue finch. Is just too easy for criminals.
hrktb 7y ago
I am not sure to understand what your solution is. We’re in this situation because powerful commercial entities created a market unbalance for decades, if not centuries, taking advantage of weaker/poorer countries. Your argument seems to be come down to “let’s stop doing that”, when basically none of the parties involved in tipping the balance seem to care about the issue in the first place. What entity would you see having incentives and the power to change the current situation ? Reading the article, it seems it’s just complicated with no clear cut way out.

chrisseaton 7y ago

We already pay a lot of people in the west to maintain land for ecological reasons, such as farmers, so it's not an unusual thing to do.

roel_v 7y ago
And it's mostly not working (see today's EC reports on farmer subsidies for nature preservation). Spoiler: the money is spend and happily pocketed by the target audience, who then find ways to do the other economically profitable thing as well.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > it's mostly not working...: the money is spend and happily pocketed by the target audience, who then find ways to do the other economically profitable thing as well. err... isn't that the intended outcome? The money is getting to who we wanted it to get to and it's not stopping them running their businesses and creating value. That's all good isn't it? We'd love to be able to pay people in the Amazon to protect the forests and still develop themselves economically.
  - roel_v 7y ago
    Not by having them do the exact thing we pay them not to do. In the EC case, we pay them to develop bird habitat, yet that habitat doesn't get developed. If we'd pay people to not grow palm trees, we expect that there isn't some metric loophole like that makes it so that we don't achieve the goals set out. I mean, it's a matter of clearly defining goals and KPIs of course, but that's easier said than done.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > having them do the exact thing we pay them not to do. Well you left that bit out of your comment! You just said they took the money and managed to make money with their land anyway while meeting the agreement, which sounded like a perfect situation!
      - jasonkester 7y ago
        > Well you left that bit out of your comment! It’s funny watching people talk past each other on the internet. You actually quoted that bit of his comment above.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        I thought 'the other' meant an unrelated thing, so it wasn't clear.
      - roel_v 7y ago
        I said the other thing profitable, i.e. the thing we don't want them to do, I didn't say another.

wwweston 7y ago

> If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive. If the inverse is true, the forest will be destroyed. More precisely: if the market value of palm oil is greater than that of healthy forest, there will be incentives to destroy the forest. That only translates to "the forest will be destroyed" where people / societies have no other values in play beyond their incentives. Incentives matter, for sure, and using them as a tool to encourage preservation is a good arrow to consider stocking the quiver with. But something important is lost if we assume they're the only things that matter; it's essentially an acceptance of the idea there are no values besides incentives. [edited "More precisely" conditional sentence to actually make sense, I accidentally swapped the hypothetical and asserted consequence when I typed it out the first time]

chrisseaton 7y ago
> if the market value of a healthy forest is greater than that of palm oil, there will be incentives to destroy the forest No the idea is the opposite - if the market value of healthy forest is greater than that of palm oil the idea is people will be incentivised to not destroy the forest because it's worth more than the palm oil.
- shawnz 7y ago
  I think they just made a typo and meant to say the opposite statement.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    Correct, edited the statement to actually make sense.
shawnz 7y ago
> people / societies have [...] other values in play beyond their incentives. Isn't that basically just a non-monetary incentive?
- 7y ago

andy_ppp 7y ago

How much would it cost and who do I start giving money to regularly to do this?

bduerst 7y ago
Stop buying foods with palm oil for starters.
petdog 7y ago
I contribute to https://www.coolearth.org/ https://www.coolearth.org/ which seems to be one of the best options following this approach
tren 7y ago
Although not exactly what you're describing, these guys are a fairly good option https://www.worldlandtrust.org/ https://www.worldlandtrust.org/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

octodog 7y ago

This is what the UN's REDD+ program does. The program has been running for a while now with some success but there are some major challenges: 1. The program relies on enforcement of property rights and environmental regulation so that illegal deforestation doesn't increase to compensate 2. "Leakage". Forest A is protected but Forest B is then logged instead. 3. Indigenous rights need to be respected and frequently aren't. This bloke [1] for example bought 50% of the carbon rights from indigenous Peruvians who can't even read or write. 4. There are concerns about greenwashing. [2] Norway is by far the biggest contributor to REDD+ with over $2.5bn contributed... but they are also the world's 5th biggest oil exporter. These challenges can probably be overcome with better oversight and greater commitment from the international community, but the desire just doesn't seem to be there. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20121113114554/http://sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au/stories/8495029/the-carbon-cowboy https://web.archive.org/web/20121113114554/http://sixtyminut... [2] https://redd-monitor.org/2019/01/08/norways-support-for-redd-the-new-colonialism-and-the-failure-of-democracy/ https://redd-monitor.org/2019/01/08/norways-support-for-redd...

lenkite 7y ago

Without oversight and enforcement of that oversight, all that will happen is fraud. There will be lots of pretty wild forest/natural lands on paper and lots of Palm oil trees in reality.

xbmcuser 7y ago

So what are the 2-3 billion people use as cooking oil. The biggest problem the world has is it's human population. Just stopping them from doing 1 thing is not going to solve the problem. We need to give economical alternates that work as replacement. Solar and wind power started getting bigger adoption once it provided an economic advantage. If Palm oil production goes down it will be replaced with canola or some other seed oil. That will result in forests being razed in some other part of the world for growing those crops. In my opinion the world needs an open sourced gmo grain crops that produce the most the most amount of oil for the least amount of land use.

nixonpjoshua1 7y ago
I think it is worth noting palm is already incredibly productive as a crop, replacing it with oilseed crops isn't even close to using the same amount of land per amount of productivity. You would be hard pressed to beat its productivity by modifying a grain crop. http://theconversation.com/palm-oil-scourge-of-the-earth-or-wonder-crop-42165 http://theconversation.com/palm-oil-scourge-of-the-earth-or-...

hdjcyshdlksb 7y ago

I actually agree with the logic of this argument but it still seems misguided. I agree with all of what you said, but I also think that the problem is still that palm oil actually is worth more than the forest. It's correct to lay the responsibility with the more developed economies imo because they're the ones identifying the problem and best positioned to solve it, but I don't think this line of reasoning has political potential. What average person is going to feel responsible for environmental ills in other countries? The French protestors whose breaking straw was a gas tax? The broader USA with its ethos of personal responsibility? We need a new strategy that isn't just screaming at people or guilting them.

pvaldes 7y ago

> If the market value of a healthy forest is greater then that of palm oil, the forest will survive. Sadly, It does not work like that. Alive African lions have a economic value in tourism, they are still being decimated by external companies that hire local furtives to do the job. You could send every children in poor countries at the university and Translational companies and mafias still would kill the last lions and probably a few rangers to sell its bones in the black market. If you pay poor countries to not distroy the forest you are just building a blackmailing system. First, a lot of this money will never reach poor people. Local people will be increasily frustrated, and in a couple of years the question will be: "Keep paying me or somebody will burn the forest". We would be funding accelerating the pressure to distroy rainforests (because you are funding the people that will distroy nature at the exact second that you will quit the area). The same is happening in Europe, with modern environmental laws and millions of euro invested in saving big predators. Norway has like 50 wolves. Spain is paying farmers for not killing big predators (being paid for agreeing to respect the law, none less!), in national parks!. We don't have stable populations of wolves in any of our national parks in fact and talking about reintroduction is taboo, even when we have evident problems with the explosion of populations of wild ungulates and invasion of national parks by cattle. After millions of money raining over this areas, we still find decapitated wolves hanging from trafic stops or floating in public pools "goodfather style, and people more angry than ever about wolves and asking for more money each month. We had the exact same mathusalem cow killed "by wolves" four times in four different places, and being paid four times. Is a scam. Support conservationists or environmental police instead. This will trow much better results in the end.

pvaldes 7y ago
Another proof. The forests in Gran Canary island started burning today by multiple fires. Same as in 2019 It seems that the same people that burned most forests the last year will return to finish the job this year, or in 2021 if some trees still remain. Until killing the last tree and the last blue finch. Is just too easy for criminals.

hrktb 7y ago

I am not sure to understand what your solution is. We’re in this situation because powerful commercial entities created a market unbalance for decades, if not centuries, taking advantage of weaker/poorer countries. Your argument seems to be come down to “let’s stop doing that”, when basically none of the parties involved in tipping the balance seem to care about the issue in the first place. What entity would you see having incentives and the power to change the current situation ? Reading the article, it seems it’s just complicated with no clear cut way out.