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Oil Palm And Palm Oil

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Since its establishment in the beginning of twentieth century, oil palm plantation management has evolved rapidly in terms of efficiency and productivity. Oil palm is a versatile plant that almost every single part of it proven to be useful (Figure 1). Oil palm produced two types of oil: palm oil and palm kernel oil. They are both extracted from mesocarp and the seed or kernel (hard-shell mesocarp) by delicate separation at certain phases in palm oil factory/milling processes (Basiron 2007). The two oils have different uses for different market niches. While palm oil is mainly used as food material, palm kernel oil is usually used as raw material in oleochemical industry such as detergents, toiletry, and cosmetics products. Therefore, almost 50% of products that can be found in the supermarket contains oil palm and its derivative (WWF 2009) Figure 1. The versatility of oil palm. Apart from the produced oil and its derivatives, oil palm biomass is a valuable commodity. Taken from IOPRI (2009)
According to Basiron (2007), oil palm produced a significant amount of fibrous products such as empty fruit bunches and fruit mesocarp fibres, which have been reused in the plantations and in the mills as soil mulch and material to be burnt in boiler to produce energy, respectively. Further use of this fibrous biomass will be second-generation biofuel which based on fibre conversion into a liquid fuel.
In plantation practice, oil palm has been used integrated pest management

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