American Oil Palm

American Oil Palm is typically set out as transplanted seedlings into rich, wet soils under warm, humid conditions, the same growing conditions favored by its African relative. In the wild it is found along lowland rainforest floodplains and riverbanks, and it develops slowly into a stout, sometimes reclining trunk with long, arching fronds.

American Oil Palm is notable among oil palms for its resistance to Ganoderma stem rot, a disease that causes serious losses in plantations of the African oil palm.

The fruit are oval drupes roughly 2 to 3 centimeters long that ripen from green to a bright orange-red, a color change that signals they are ready to be picked. Each fruit carries a fleshy, oil-rich mesocarp that is processed after harvest to yield oil.

Industrial and culinary: American Oil Palm fruit yields an oil used in cooking, cosmetics and industrial products, and it can also be processed into biodiesel.

Ornamental: its shorter, spreading habit and gracefully recurving fronds make it a garden subject in tropical landscape plantings.

Medicinal: in traditional practice its oil has been applied topically for skin conditions and other plant parts have been used in local herbal remedies, with such uses varying by community.

American Oil Palm is native to Central and South America, ranging from Honduras to northern Brazil. Unlike the African oil palm, it has rarely been grown as a commercial crop in its own right; in parts of the Amazon its occurrence is patchy and closely tied to human settlements, suggesting it may have been carried and planted there by people rather than occurring purely as a wild stand.