Amid the fastest rural transformation Malaysia and Indonesia have ever seen, big business is pushing back against efforts to overhaul the palm oil industry In April, two very different public figures made declarations that reignited fevered discussion of Indonesia's oil palm issue. First, fresh from accepting an Oscar for best actor, Leonardo DiCaprio posted a blog panning the management of Sumatra's forests. Shortly afterwards, the country's president, Joko Widodo, revealed plans for a moratorium on new oil palm concessions. This comes after an estimated one million hectares of Indonesia's peatlands went up in flames last year. This was partly due to the clearance of peatland and forests for oil palm plantations, and produced acrid smoke, a surge in carbon emissions and cost Indonesia more than the 2004 tsunami. To understand the drivers of this issue, we need to long-term rise of booming global commodity: palm oil. In response to growing global demand, over the past 20 years Indonesia and Malaysia converted nearly 12m hectares to oil palm. This is the biggest and fastest rural of land transformation either country has seen. And nearly half of this expansion involved some form of forest destruction. This landscape change had untold effects on remote rural hamlets acros the region Indonesia and Malaysia have emerged as the world's top producers of palm oil, sharing 84% of glo production. The boom has witnessed the rapid rise in the wealth and the power of large state-ow and private agribusiness corporations In 1961, US President Dwight Eisenhower pointed to "the total influence of a vast arms in which he famously called the military-industrial complex. He argued that the complex has influence on US policy. Making use of, for most part, Indonesian land and labour, Indone Malaysian companies have created a comparable oil palm 'complex' that pu well of people or planet. In the shadow of this complex, we can identify three major Inhhied the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia to ensu of low-cost land