“Existing farms are close to communities with poverty and if people are being offered money, not just farmers but also owners of forestland or other habitat, you end up destroying the ecosystem,” she says. “I would be concerned,” she said of the future of hearts of palm. The next step when demand grows further are large mega-farms and extensive monocropping practices, “which can disrupt or destroy the biodiversity of an area, from the soil all the way up to large wildlife species," she says.
![hearts of palm hearts of palm](https://thesoccermomblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Hearts-of-Palm-Artichoke-Salad.jpg)
What Canavan has seen with those crops is a loss of local farming practices, including crop rotations.
![hearts of palm hearts of palm](https://media.fooducate.com/comments/images/5FB94211-30BA-CFC0-472C-8014181B336C-24838.jpeg)
Canavan said the explosive growth of hearts of palm reminds her of other worrisome trendy foods, such as avocados and quinoa. Karla Canavan, the World Wildlife Fund’s vice president of commodity trade and finance, works with the biggest brands in the world to help them build sustainable supply chains. Palm trees are found wild in the jungle, on the land of smallholder farmers, and now on large farms in order to meet demand.
![hearts of palm hearts of palm](https://modernfarmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/04_13_Harts-of-Palm-2.jpg)
(Palm trees put out new shoots at the bottom that can be harvested later.) The crown is debarked to get to the inner core and then cut into different lengths or styles and typically processed by heating and adding salt. To get to the edible part, the crown of the tree trunk is cut down-but not the entire tree. Many types of palms produce a soft vegetable core that becomes what we know of as hearts of palm. Hearts of palm grows commercially in the U.S., but much of what we eat comes from South America, and Ecuador is a top exporter.