You’re heading to Berlin. It’s a short city-break, so no business hotel. You fancy getting off the beaten track, but where to stay? No problem: just log on and browse the listings. From Airbnb and VRBO to Love Home Swap and HouseTrip, there’s been an explosion in peer-to-peer rental services over recent years. “Sunny Studio in Prenzlauer Berg, £42 per night”. Click, book, sorted.

Only, now the regulator wants in on the game. Berlin’s lawmakers are currently weighing up a bill that would outlaw short-term rentals, which are blamed for pushing up living costs. New York is one step ahead. Recent rule changes ban residents from renting rooms for less than 30 days. This ‘illegal hotels law’ gained prominence in May when an Airbnb host was fined $2,400 for renting out his extra room to a Russian visitor.

The eye of the regulator is homing in on other areas of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ too. In the UK, for instance, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) is currently looking to set rules for peer-to-peer lenders such as Zopa, Funding Circle and RateSetter. Job outsourcing outfits such as TaskRabbit are gaining the attention of labour regulators as well.

‘Collaborative businesses’ (as they are also know) have enjoyed a relatively easy ride from lawmakers so far. The fleet-of-foot entrepreneurs who are driving the sector insist this is helping them to experiment, to innovate and, ultimately, to grow. That could be about to change.

Regulatory radar

Why the regulators’ sudden interest? Three main reasons. First is scale. The rule enforcers are beginning to twig just how big the collaborative marketplace is becoming.

Ryan Levitt, PR director at online holiday rental service HouseTrip, recalls how owners of holiday flats used to post ads in their local supermarket. “This [the sharing economy] isn’t new … but it’s exploded. It’s no longer the supermarket wall anymore. It has global reach”, he observes.

Rhydian Lewis, chief executive of RateSetter, concurs. In January 2012, his industry approached the FSA to discuss setting up a potential regulatory framework. The financial regulator wasn’t interested, he explains: “They said we were too small.” RateSetter is now issuing 8m new loans every month. “Now they’ve seen the growth and say, ‘yes, we do think it needs to be regulated.”

Another reason is cash. As collaborative start-ups begin to monetise, governments smell taxable revenue. It all boils down to money for the public purse, argues HouseTrip’s Levitt. .”

Last but not least, there’s the consumer to consider. Peer-to-peer platforms essentially provide a means for people to exchange services between themselves. But what if the Prenzlauer Berg’s studio turns out to be infested with cockroaches? Their contractual standing may be fragile, but consumers still need an element of legal protection, regulators say.

“Politicians are terrified of weakening the existing bricks and mortar-type regulation in a way that allows cowboys or fraudsters …to get at consumers currently protected by regulation”, notes Kevin Barrow, a partner at law firm Osbourne Clarke.

It’s not just consumers either. The freewheeling nature of peer-to-peer transactions mean the provider is often as exposed as the consumer. Back to the Prenzlauer Berg studio: what if the guest smashes the window? Suddenly the sharing economy looks slightly less sunny.

Reticence for rules

The industry’s response is predictably cautious. Like the typical go-getting entrepreneurs that they are, none want burdensome regulation.

The real purists in the movement argue that true collaborative firms operate primarily through bartering and exchange, with little or no money passing hands. In short, there’s not a whole lot to tax.

A good example is BlaBla. The lift-sharing service connects private car owners with passengers who are travelling to the same destination. The passenger gives money towards the fuel costs, but no profit is generated.

“The government is saying, ‘we want a share of the cake’, but there is no cake. It’s just that passengers and drivers are helping each other with the cake”, explains Vivian Schick, BlaBla’s head of community.

Regarding consumer protection, industry leaders maintain that a combination of verification and reviews weed out the worst examples of poor service and malpractice.

Take the house exchange service Love Home Swap. All users have to provide a range of personal data, which is then independently verified. Internet-based video messaging service Skype is also embedded within the company’s website, so participants can “look into the whites of each other’s eyes” before agreeing to any transaction.

Reviews play a similar role. The success or failure of collaborative businesses revolves around endorsements from users. That goes for negative reviews too, says HouseTrip’s Levitt. “It has to stay up there otherwise you completely lose the trust of users”, he says, adding that people must have stayed in the property to review it (unlike with TripAdviser).

He admits that the process isn’t “fail safe”. Consumers are naturally quicker to complain rather than compliment, for example. Furthermore, some review systems are “riddled with gaming”, he notes. The Prenzlauer Berg studio might have been great in reality, for instance, but the renter could post a bad review to prompt a price reduction.

A final argument against regulatory interference centres on market entrance. The beauty of online collaborative marketplaces is that they cost very little to set up. Peer-to-peer lenders probably need the most up-front investment, largely due to the loan guarantees required. RateSetter’s Lewis puts the figure at around £1m. That’s peanuts compared to a traditional bank, where a typical guarantee is likely to be closer to, say, £1bn. Changing the rules could shrink this “seismic” difference, he fears.

The trust test

Not all disagree that regulation is a necessarily bad thing. Many collaborative companies are currently operating in legal grey zones. “Internet-age businesses in bricks-and-mortar regulation” is how John Davidson-Kelly, a commercial partner with Osbourne Clarke, puts it. Potentially, this could leave their businesses caught unintentionally, but harmfully, within an existing law.

Davidson-Kelly’s is for collaborative start-ups to engage early with regulators to design appropriate rules and frameworks now, as the market is taking shape. That’s precisely the tack being adopted by the peer-to-peer lending sector. The Peer-to-Peer Finance Association, the sector’s nascent trade body, has proposed an eight-point framework, with requirements such as having provisions for bankruptcy.

In the final analysis, the sharing economy rests on trust. Regulation can help, but it’ll never be the whole answer. The formula for winning real trust, according to Lewis, is in fact far simpler: “Say what you’re going to do, and then do it.” That’s beyond any regulator, however savvy.

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Few environmentalists feel any fondness for the oil palm, with its connections to deforestation in the tropics. But the waxy orange pods the tree sprouts in vivid bunches generate 45 percent of the globe’s edible oil, and consuming this incredibly versatile product is almost unavoidable, for it goes into everything from chocolate and peanut butter, to biscuits and cereal. The debate over how to turn palm oil into a sustainable crop has consequently been a priority for some time.

Now, a duo of papers just published in Nature moves a step in that direction, suggesting that breeders could further boost oil palm yields, and in that way significantly reduce the competition between rainforests and palm oil plantations around the world.

In one of the two papers, the research team has made a fully sequenced palm oil genome available to the public for the very first time. But it’s the second, linked, paper that has sparked the most interest with its more specific discovery of a gene, called SHELL, that gives rise to the most productive and commercially valuable kinds of oil palm fruits.

Environmental concern motivated the research, says Rajinder Singh, an author on the paper and leader of the genomics group for the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB), the government entity that oversees the industry in Malaysia and which funded the research. “The first thing was to try and produce more oil palms with existing land,” he says. “The idea is not to encroach in new areas.”

Singh explains that the discovery equips farmers in the tropics with the ability to identify and plant only the most productive seeds, in turn reducing the pressure to expand into virgin rainforest. “It has implications in three continents.”

The African oil palm is the primary source of palm oil globally, and its domestication in Southeast Asia, South America, and West Africa now drives the industry. The trees produce three kinds of fruit—dura, pisifera, and tenera, the latter being the perfect hybrid of the other two, because it yields the most oil.

These plump ochre rounds are a farmer’s gold, producing 30 percent more oil than other types. Breeders try to control the output of tenera-yielding seeds by manually cross-pollinating the most suitable dura and pisifera plants. But getting a field that teems with tenera is still a challenge, because natural pollinators intervene.

Wind, birds, and insects can result in uncontrolled ‘contamination’—which just means that a dura plant’s pollen gets crossed with another dura for instance, and gives rise to plants that won’t produce the much sought-after tenera fruits. So while manual crossover works for the most part, “there’s an error rate associated with it that varies a lot, but it’s pretty high,’ says Robert Martienssen, a plant geneticist and author on the paper, who lectures at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Usually, farmers have to wait upwards of five years until palm oil plants bear fruiting bunches to figure out if they’re going to yield the desired tenera pods. Knowing the SHELL gene that triggers the production of these fruits, however, gives breeders a way to test things first.

“If you screen at the nursery stage you can select what you want to field plant,” Singh explains. Screening would work much the same way as a genetic test on a human. “Immediately with our tools you can check which are the seeds of the type you want,” adds Ravigadevi Sambanthamurthi, head of the Advanced Biotechnology and Breeding Center at the MPOB.

These fruits of the oil palm shows the Dura fruit on the left and the Tenera fruit on the right. Tenera fruits yield 30 percent more oil per fruit than Dura fruits. Photograph: Malaysian Palm Oil BoardThat puts years back on the clock, and gives farmers a sure way to increase production. “Now with proper quality control we might have contamination of less than ten percent,” Sambanthamurthi says. Currently, plantations in Malaysia yield four tons of oil per hectare per year. The research could go some way toward achieving the goal of six tons by 2020.

But talk of palm oil expansion raises hackles. Many people hear the phrase and mentally switch to the iconic orangutan, and for good reason, since forest clearance for plantations in Indonesia especially has resulted in death and displacement in orangutan populations.

Palm oil has become synonymous with illegal logging, and slash and burn tactics that leave virgin forest devastated. There are also allegations of worker abuse on plantations, and the destruction of indigenous peoples’ livelihoods.

Viewing the entire palm oil industry as one ungoverned force, however, springs from “misinformation,” says Choo Yuen May, the director general of the MPOB. In Malaysia “more than 50 percent of the land is [still] under forest cover,” she says. The government there has held a pledge since 1992 to maintain that 50 percent, and plantations are only supposed to expand onto land that had previously been cleared for crops like cocoa or rubber.

Plantations also generate income for thousands of workers. “It’s an avenue for poverty reduction…we cannot forget that there are people out there who are hungry,” Sambanthamurthi argues.

And ultimately, palm oil crops only use up five percent of total land area farmed for oil crops globally—yet they produce almost half of the world’s edible oil. But when they do infringe on natural habitat, it happens to be tropical rainforest, symbolic of the globe’s diversity and a plethora of charismatic species.

Palm oil remains contentious, yet its advance is inevitable. And mapping the genome is not going to solve the problem absolutely. “Our ultimate goal was to reduce the rainforest footprint; the damage that is done by these plantations,” says Martienssen. “But biology can only do so much. Policy has to be a big part of the equation.”

Speaking from the World Resources Institute (WRI) in a statement via email, Nigel Sizer, the Institute’s Global Forest Initiative director, said, “Increasing the productivity of existing oil palm plantations through better plants is promising, but the real issue is that we need better protections for forests and better alternatives for producers to grow their businesses.” Future standards should require that palm oil plantations only expand onto land that is already degraded instead of into untouched forest, he went on to say.

For Martienssen, the solution lies in tightening regulations, but also in motivating farmers with the practical solutions that this new research affords.

In the future, governments “will be able to offer farmers, and especially small holders, seeds that have much more predictable yields. The way I think about that is that that would be a strong incentive for those farmers to obey the law,” he says. “As much as possible you want the farmer to voluntarily take up those policies.”

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