To understand the drivers of this issue, we need to grasp the long-term rise of a booming global commodity: palm oil. In response to growing global demand, over the past 20 years Indonesia and Malaysia converted nearly 12m hectares of land to oil palm. This is the biggest and fastest rural transformation either country has seen. And nearly half of this expansion involved some form of forest destruction. This rapid landscape change also had untold effects on remote rural hamlets across the region.