Grease My Palm With Oil

 Via Al Jazeera English

Palm oil. Already a $40 bn/year industry. You can find its derivatives in chocolate, shampoo, toothpaste, detergent, ice cream, floor polish and a host of other products filling supermarket shelves. And, just as you'd expect, that kind of money brings with it capitalism, corruption, and colonialism.
Al Jazeera has produced a series on the effects expanding palm oil production is having in Africa. To quote from the article:

(...) palm oil cultivation does not come cost-free. If not done sustainably, say conservationists, it can have disastrous consequences for people and the environment. In Indonesia, for example, it has played a major role in deforestation which has seen the loss of more than 6 million hectares of primary forest over the last 15 years.
As rainforests are home to least half of this planet's species of plants, animals and insects, the negative impact on global biodiversity can only be imagined. In addition, indigenous communities are also destroyed as people who have lived happily off the forest's resources for generations, often do not own the land (at least not in a form recognised by governments, corporations and their lawyers) and are frequently displaced to make way for new plantations.

There's also the problem that as foreign corporations look to create oil palm plantations, they are finding that indigenous communities have much wider ranges than previously thought or understood, traditional use of territories frequently overlaps between different indigenous groups, and indigenous peoples are often more difficult to buy off or remove than originally thought. Precisely the same issues facing the exploitation of British Columbia's natural resources by multi-national corporations: First Nation's have been here all along, have claim to the land, and aren't really interested in making colonialists richer at their expense.
Having seen the "benefits" of forcing the Inuit off their land and into towns, and the exploitation of resources in the north, this Al Jazeera documentatry looks all too familiar.