Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

Samuel Avaala shakes his head as he dips his fork into a bowl of red-red, a traditional Ghanaian stew that gets its color – and name – in part from red palm oil. “It doesn’t make sense,” he says. “Oil palm evolved here. It’s in our food; it’s in our medicine; but we built an economy on cocoa with little attention to oil palm.” Oil palm is the tree that gives us palm oil, and the people of Western and Central Africa have been cultivating it for millennia – harvesting and processing the fruit for vitamin-rich oil, used in food and soap, tapping the trunks for palm wine that is distilled into medicinal alcohol, and using the biomass for green power generation. Over the past half-century, the rest of the world has discovered palm oil, too, and today it’s a $60 billion-per-year market that provides material for everything from fuels to food to face paint. But that money isn’t flowing into Western and Central Africa. The Great Crop Swap Instead, thanks to a fluke of history, it’s flowing into Indonesia and Malaysia