coconut tree and its three effects on environment
Answers
Answer:
Coconuts trees are a species of palm tree that produces large fruits called coconuts. They can live for about 80 to 120 years, but they don’t start to produce coconuts until they are about four. Once they start, they make about 50 a year — it takes about a year for each coconut to mature enough to be cultivated. Coconut trees produce fruit year-round.
Coconut trees (like coffee plants) thrive in tropical climates and are most plentiful along the coast of southeast Asia. The main coconut exporting countries are Indonesia and the Philippines. Indonesia produces about 183 million tons of coconuts every year and the Philippines is close behind at about 154 million tons per year. To put that in perspective, each coconut weighs about 2.5 kilograms and there are about 907 kilograms in a ton. That’s roughly 363 coconuts per ton, which already would require over four coconut trees to produce in a year. Multiply that by 183 million, and that is a lot of coconut trees needed.
It’s common to see fields filled with one crop. This is known as monocropping, and on the surface, it makes economic sense to create a surplus of one demanded crop. But farming the same plant over and over again on the same soil plot decreases the nutritious value of the soil, which weakens the immune system of plants that grow on it. To make up for this, farmers have begun increasing their use of chemical fertilizers to maintain healthy coconut trees, which is a much cheaper option than revamping the agriculture industry sector. Yet, chemical fertilizers then leak into the watershed and pollute the freshwater in that area.
Monocropping also greatly reduces the amount of biodiversity in an area, which weakens the overall ecosystem. Yet increased demand of the products has forced farmers to choose pay over the environment.
The increase in demand of coconut products has mounted pressures on farmers to increase their yields and replace aging trees. Both require help from their governments to pay for new plants and provide services to educate and equip farmers properly. Indonesia has done a better job at helping to improve its agricultural industry than the Philippines, which has a history of ignoring its farmers. Many governments chose to subsidize chemical fertilizers too, rather than decreasing the monocrop culture, which further exacerbates local environmental issues.