India’s ambitious drive to expand domestic palm oil production fails to consider the subcontinent’s changing climate, analysis shows. It’s an oversight which may derail the country’s plans to become self-sufficient in the oil.
With US$9.6 billion worth imported in 2021, India is the world’s biggest buyer of palm oil, mostly from Indonesia and Malaysia. It hopes to shift part of the present and future revenues of this market to the pockets of its farmers, by increasing the country’s cultivated area of oil palm to 1 million hectares by 2026, up from 350,000 hectares in 2019.
Once established, palms take three to four years to become productive, and will bear fruit for 20 to 25 years. Researchers have been working with the government to identify the most suitable ecosystems for such a long-term undertaking. In the past, these could have been effectively identified by observing historical climate data to predict rainfall, among other factors. But as climate change alters weather and water patterns across the globe, such information tells only part of the story.
