David Reyes plunges his hand into a black smelly liquid at the bottom of a cut-off plastic jug tied around a palm tree and pulls out a dead horned beetle. “We used to put insecticide on the bottom of these traps,” says Reyes, the agricultural manager of Hondupalma – a cooperative of small landowners in Honduras that produces palm oil. “Now we simply use alcohol with sugar cane molasses to kill off the bugs.” According to Reyes, these new measures saved the co-op $175,000 in pesticide costs over the past two years.
Hondupalma recently achieved a Rainforest Alliance certification for sustainable growth of African palms – the first cooperative in the world to feature the famous green frog seal on the cooking oil they sell. Palm oil (generically labeled as vegetable oil) is used in almost all consumer products on the market: from ice cream and ramen noodle soup to toothpaste and candles. Expanding oil palm plantations are among the top reasons for deforestation globally, along with cattle ranching, timber, and soy.
The improvements achieved by the cooperative extend beyond reduced chemical use.
Banner photo taken by Tanya Dimitrova. Original caption: Benigno Hernandez and Odair Canales from Hondupalma cooperative look out for a troop of monkeys in a former palm oil plantation, now set aside to regrow as a secondary forest. “This forest keeps our stream running, ” says Canales when asked why they stopped growing palms there.
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