Oil palm (Elaeis guineeiisis Jacq.) is
indigenous to West Africa (Zeven 1965,
Hartley 1967) where it grows wild in a
320-480 km coastal belt from Gambia to
Angola (Moe and Mohtadi 1971) E. guineensis
var. tennera, with thinner shelled fruits,
is a hybrid of ‘dura’- a wild variety with
thicker shell and ‘piscifera’ with no shell
(Rahman et al 1979). It is an exotic high
oil yielding fruit crop from Malaysia and
introduced in Bangladesh in 1978-79 with
a view to developing the domestic nonconventional
source of vegetable oil to
meet the demand of both edible and industrial
oils of the country. As such, Bangladesh
Forest Department initiated raising 4047
ha of oil palm plantation in the high
rainfall regions like Chittagong, Chittagong
Hill Tracts, Cox’s Bazar and Sylhct Forest