The rapid expansion of the industry has alarmed environmental groups and some island residents. The World Wildlife Fund, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace have mounted campaigns to slow or stop the growth. They decry the slash and burn expansion of a crop that has replaced tribal homelands, animal habitat and tropical rainforest across Malaysia and Indonesia.

At stake, they say, are the last remaining populations of wild orangutans, as well as rainforest and peatlands that store massive quantities of heat-trapping carbon gasses. Indonesia now ranks as the world's third-largest producer of carbon, behind the United States and China, because of farmers' practices of burning down rainforest to plant oil palm.

Even growers themselves have taken a stand, creating in 2004 a Roundtable on Sustainable Oil Palm Development, which this month delivered to Europe its first batch of "sustainable" oil, a tag the industry awards to oils produced without the abuses of rainforest land and endangered animals that have enraged palm oil critics. Food giant Unilever said last year that by 2015 it wants all palm oil that it purchases to be certified sustainable.

Asimba knows environmental groups have reservations about more oil palm, but he sees little else that can benefit local people. Palm oil is the reason he's been able to send his eight children to school.

The groups "can stop the project, but at the same time, they need to see the other side of it, because people need to improve their living conditions," he said.

Up the road from Asimba, Lynette Hambuga dedicates some of her 10 acres to oil palm, which she also sells to Cargill. Unlike Asimba though, she is more conflicted about her country's growing industry.

Sitting in the shadows of her home, which rests between a mountain and a coastline teeming with brilliant coral reefs, the graying grandmother says she fears global pressure to grow more oil palm for food and fuel will destroy the land for Cargill's benefit. "They're our resources. Not theirs."

Last fall, she traveled to Cargill's Minnetonka headquarters to express concerns about water contaminated from fertilizer runoff in a trip organized by Rainforest Action Network.

"Are you fit to drink the polluted water?" she says she asked Cargill officials at the meeting in Minnetonka. "Everybody shook their head."

The meeting was unusual for Cargill, which doesn't often meet with "what would be considered an activist campaign group," said Mark Murphy, a company spokesman. Nevertheless, the meeting lasted for more than an hour as Hambuga and two other farmers from Paraguay and Brazil, where Cargill has operations, listed their concerns. Murphy said the company remains in contact with the rainforest group.

Growing more

But with world populations surging and increasingly adapting a western diet, the breakneck growth of palm oil production seems unlikely to slow. New plantations are planned in Brazil. South Korea, meanwhile, announced recently that it purchased rights to half of the available farm land of Madagascar, much of it rainforest, for corn and oil palm plantations.

"We've got an expanding world population, we have limited natural resources and increasing competition for those natural resources," said Mary Thompson, a spokeswoman at the Farm Foundation, an agricultural think tank based in Oak Brook, Ill. "People have to understand agriculture doesn't operate in a vacuum. It's a combination of markets and resources and consumer demands. When you push one way you impact another."

Cargill, too, citing strong demand from its growth markets in China and India, as well as its food company customers who want trans-fat free oils, continues to expand. At this plantation alone, funded by the World Bank, it soon will add another 7,400 acres by working with another 1,200 small farmers. That gives it 7,000 smallholders here. Plus, it will rent 4,900 more acres from nearby farmers.

Asimba continues to do his part. Much of the money he's earned on palm oil, he's plowed back into the business. He has paid back his initial loan and is buying more land.

After palm oil prices tripled, he sent his sons with their machetes to his farm's edge, where they began clearing the jungle to grow more.

Matt McKinney --612-673-7329

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