Starting up a project: Sustainable Palm Oil Expert

Out of 6500 languages that were spoken at the start of the 21st century, half are expected to be extinct by the year 2100. Languages die when speakers stop transmitting them to the next generation. When parents decide that their children have a better future speaking the dominant language. Language loss goes hand in hand with loss of culture, identity and traditional ecological knowledge.

Deforestation

The speakers of most endangered languages depend on the forest to meet their needs. Tropical forests especially are language hotspots. Ethnologue lists 731 languages for Indonesia, 234 for Brazil, 219 for Congo, 505 for Nigeria and 832 for Papua New Guinea. These are also countries where forest disappears to make room for agriculture, logging and mining. When the forest is gone, and the land privatised, what becomes of the indigenous people? Lose the forest, lose the livelihood, lose the culture? Forced urbanisation and assimilation?

Sustainable agriculture

As the world population increases to 9 billion by 2050, can we feed all these mouths without cutting down more forests? Where and how will we grow soy, rice, cassava and oil palms? Since I visit Malaysia every year, it seems easiest for me to focus on the latter.

My goal for 2015

Starting today, I want to study everything there is to know about sustainable palm oil. Please join me on my learning curve as I collect all the pieces of the puzzle, read all that is written and seek to understand what motivates all stakeholders. I hardly know anything today, but on December 31st 2015 I will be an Expert on sustainable palm oil.