Palm Oil in Southeast Asia

Palm oil is a product in wide use in much of Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia as a common cooking ingredient. It's easily available, especially so in Southeast Asia (namely Singapore), making it a cheap product. Couple that with it's natural durability, and one can see why people would go to great lengths to harvest palm oil in the most efficient manner, despite it harming the environment, and the people living in the area.

The article linked below goes into detail about a "haze" that lingers around Singapore. It isn't consistent, it comes periodically throughout the year. Now, we might think this is the infamous "toxic clouds" that we hear of in China, but no, this is different. This haze is created by the burning of peatlands (that's a form of decayed vegetation), which then gets cleared to grow trees to produce the palm oil. The scary thing is, no one knows the health risks of this haze because it hasn't been studied. Unlike car emissions, or industrial exhaust (that has some regulations but let's be honest there really isn't much), peatland burning has absolutely no regulations, and no one understands the dangers of it because it (before the commercialization of palm oil) hadn't happened near an urban landscape.

With the cultivation of palm oil, a highly sought out after cooking product is made. However, with that, comes health risks such as heart failure, asthma, and other respiratory issues that we find out over time. Habitats for animals native to these lands are being destroyed as it's cleared for palm oil crops. Are the extra profits really worth the destruction of the lands? Are they worth the potential health risks that we're learning with time because we simply "don't know" what will happen? This problem isn't isolated to just Southeast Asia, Singapore or Indonesia. It's a problem in any developing country, and we saw it in the past with the industrialization of the West. The question is, will Asia repeat history, or will they refine industrialization and paint it with a cleaner picture than the fog and haze that currently inhabits our imagination as we ponder what industrialization looks like.

Sources:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150123-the-killer-haze-choking-asia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil