A Plantation Road in North Sumatra, 1900s

Photo: Carl Josef Kleingrothe/National Gallery of Australia

The photo above is a road at a plantation in North Sumatra circa 1900's. You can see rows of palm trees on either side of the road, but only to decorate the road.

At first, palm oil was not popular, people preferred to use coconut which could be processed for various purposes. Palm trees were brought to the Dutch East Indies by the colonial government in the mid-19th century and planted in what is now the Bogor Botanical Gardens. The seeds they produced were distributed in various areas for cultivation trials.

Some areas produced good and fast palm trees, other areas were less suitable for this crop. But mostly, palm trees were only used as a roadside ornamental plant. It can still be found in several places today.

When the industrial demand for vegetable oil increased, then the prestige of palm oil increased and became an export commodity of the Dutch East Indies. Butter and soap industries that require palm oil as raw material have also begun to emerge in Java. This happened before the outbreak of World War I. Before that palm oil was relatively unknown.