ABSTRACT
In West and Central Africa, initiatives to set up organized oil palm plantations were reported as early as the nineteenth century (Berger and Martin, 2000). However, the first modern plantations to contribute significantly to oil and fat production only appeared after World War II in the Belgian Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon (Corley and Tinker, 2016). The first plantations in Southeast Asia were created between 1910 and 1920. The areas increased rapidly and, after World War II, Malaysia and Indonesia were definitively the leading region in the world in terms of areas planted (Rival and Levang, 2014). In Latin America, plantations started appearing in the 1950s in Colombia and Ecuador, and more recently in Brazil and Central America.
