Palm oil juggernaut swats away industry reform efforts POSTI DON ily F McCarthy and Rob Crawl Amid the fastest rural ransror ation Malaysia and Indonesia have ever seen, big business is pushing back aguinst efrorts to overhaul the palm oil industry In April, two very different public figures made declarations that reignited fevered discussion of Indonesia's oil palni issue. fresh from accepling an Oscar for best actor, Leonardo DiCaprio posted a blog panning the m 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 names last year. This was partly due to the clearance of peatland and rorests for oil palm plantations, and produced acrid smoke, a surge in carbon emissions and cost Indonesia more than the 2004 usunami. 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 ycars Indonesia and Malaysia converted nearly 12m hectares of land to oil palm. This is the biggest and rastest 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 e on remote rural hamlevs across the region.