Cooking the rainforests
Palm oil is the world’s second most popular edible oil after soybean oil, and is used by food and cosmetics companies around the world. It’s a cash crop for several South-East Asian countries, grown in rainforest areas. It’s also a product that leaves a huge trail of environmental destruction, and we need to seriously look at alternatives.
What is palm oil?
Palm oil comes from, you guessed it, the fruit of the palm tree. Palm trees are from West Africa, but will grow anywhere tropical, and makes a great perennial crop in areas that don’t grow other crops very well.
It’s got a great shelf life, blends well with other oils, is solid at room temperature but melts with very little extra heat. This makes it very convenient to use in all sorts of mass-produced food.
For example, it’s used in many of your favourite snack foods: Tim Tams, Pringles, and Kit-kats. It’s also used to make some margarines, and in plenty of non-food items like soaps and paints. You can find out more about it at Wikipedia.
So what’s the problem? It seems like a great product!
Copyright Hatchling Productions, courtesy of PalmOilAction.org.au
The problem is that to grow it, many countries are clearing huge amounts of irreplaceable rainforest. In Malaysia and Indonesia, these rainforests are home to endangered orang-utans, as well as sun-bears and clouded leopard. These animals cannot live in the plantations that replace their homes.
The rainforests are cleared by burning, which is cheaper than bulldozing. This is the cause of the fires across south-east Asia that you hear about in the news each year.
The remaining topsoil is very thin and easily washed away when the trees are removed. The new palm trees then suck out the remaining nutrients and leave the area depleted. And because plantations are a monoculture, they also require huge amounts of pesticide and herbicide to keep them alive. These chemicals create a run-off during the rainy season which then pollutes the waterways. As you can see, deforestation has a knock-on effect that destroys local eco-systems while increasing global warming.
Ok, that sounds bad. But aren’t there people relying on the money from palm oil?
Sort of – the companies who own the plantations employ local people, and supply them with seedlings, fertilisers, equipment and so on. But the workers aren’t paid well, and customary land boundaries are ignored by foreign-owned businesses. There’s no land left for farming, but the workers don’t make enough money to buy food from supermarkets, so they’re left in worse poverty than when they started. The economic implications are complex, but while the governments and businesses supporting palm oil are doing well out of it, local villagers are having their way of life wrecked.
What can I do about this?
The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is a group of companies who produce and use palm oil, and they’re promising to change their practices to only include oil from well-managed plantations. However, they seem to be taking their sweet time about it, and there’s some evidence that by the time their 2015 target rolls around, there won’t be any rainforest left to protect! See Fred Pearce’s article The Slippery Business of Palm Oil to find out more about this.
The Palm Oil Action Group has the following suggestions:
- write to supermarkets asking them to stock products that use alternatives to palm oil, or to politicians to let them know you’re concerned (sample letters);
- find out how to avoid buying palm oil products;
- learning more about the issue through their website and send the info on to your friends.
The Australian Orangutan Project also suggests asking for better labelling of palm oil on food and cosmetics, and opposing the use of palm oil to make biofuels (which is slowly becoming more common).
If you’re very keen, I’d strongly recommend reading the Greenpeace report Cooking the Climate (pdf) to get the full picture.
5 Comments
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You can also find a list of products which don’t contain palm oil on the BOS Australia website. Here’s the link: http://www.orangutans.com.au/Orangutans-Survival-Information/Helping-you-buy-responsibly-Palm-oil-free-alternatives.aspx which will provide information about some of the worst categories such as biscuits and snack foods. Please let us know if you’ve got any more products which you know are palm oil free and we’ll add to the list for the benefit of everyone. Thanks
Thanks so much for the link, Rebecca, very useful!
Thanks for this comprhensive review! Off to check out the links. Thanks! Cheers, Tricia
Although straightforward and brief, your post packs a surprising wallop. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of salient points you were able to introduce to support your argument, and gleefully availed myself of all the thoughtfully-provided links to external sources. An educational, easy-to-read, pocket-sized gem.
I do have a quibble though. Not to be a pedant, but palm oil is not a “product that leaves a huge trail of environmental destruction”. Its mass cultivation is the alleged problem. And as you all-too-obliquely imply, palm oil cultivation does not inherently require the rapacious appropriation of rainforest in the way you outlined – using degraded land, and reusing plantations after their 20-year cycles would be just as feasible. I cite http://www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com and http://www.palmoilconsumer.com as sources of information on this.
I appreciate that you’re more concerned with looking at things as (you think) they are, rather than how they ought to be, and are pragmatically exploring ways to immediately ameliorate the problem. But I think it’s important to approach the issue from the standpoint that sustainable palm oil cultivation IS possible – and it’s something we should continue hoping and pressing for. The RSPO, a relatively new body which oversees a huge, still-developing far-flung industry, should be engaged and supported – not dismissed as being irrelevant, ineffectual or on the side of the enemy.
I understand that you feel time is not on our side, and drastic measures must be taken NOW before rainforests disappear. But if you subscribe to Fred Pearce’s cited prediction that “there won’t be any rainforest left to protect” in SIX SHORT YEARS, then what good would boycotting products containing palm oil do?
Thanks for letting me comment.
Andi4
Thanks for taking the time to respond, Andi. A boycott is often one of the few ways citizens have to indicate their unhappiness with the status quo. By itself, a boycott won’t save the rainforests, but it will put pressure on producers to source sustainable palm oil when available or switch to alternatives if it’s not. And it means that an individual isn’t paying money for the privilege of contributing to rainforest destruction. I work hard for my money, and giving it to people who don’t care about the fate of orangutans and climate change is never my first choice.
I think sustainable palm oil is *possible*, absolutely. But whether or not it’s *probable* depends largely on CEOs who haven’t shown much interest in it so far. Greenwash is easier and cheaper than making real changes to production, and is the first resort of people who put personal profits first and long-term global benefits last. That’s their right, but it’s not something I want to support or condone.