Palm Oil: Don’t Turn Your Back On The Rain Forests
Making a statement about palm oil has become something of a business necessity. If major brands are not buying certificates to offset their use, they’re announcing plans to buy certified sustainable palm oil. Others are ordering supplies from sustainable plantations in countries that are not large-scale producers of palm oil.
They’re responding to demand from consumers and campaigners who are keen to stop the damage caused by palm oil production in Malaysia and Indonesia, as rain forests are cleared to make way for plantations, emitting greenhouse gases and destroying the habitats of extinction-threatened orang-utans.
It’s a laudable stance and it makes a cute Tweet. But if anyone tries to tell you stopping, reducing or cleaning up Europe’s supply of palm oil will solve the problem, they are misleading you. The issues in Malaysia and Indonesia will still continue.
Firstly, neither of those countries can afford to lose palm oil as an industry – more than a million people in Malaysia and Indonesia depend on palm oil for an income. And about 40 to 45% of plantations in those countries are smallholdings, not large corporations whose oil is shipped abroad.
Secondly, if every company in Europe stopped buying from those countries, it wouldn’t make any difference. The consumption of markets such as China and India would more than absorb the shortfall.
The third point is that demanding sustainable palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia gives producers an incentive to invest in responsible practices and the audits and certification to prove it. Shun them, and the cost and effort of working sustainably will no longer be worthwhile.
Most critically, palm oil itself is not the problem. No crop grows as fast or yields as much product as the oil palm, and most crops need 10 times more land. As the world’s population continues to grow beyond its resources, a stop to all palm oil production would have an even greater environmental impact as less productive and more expensive plantations replaced palm.
8. The point is this: the palm oil problem is not about you. It’s not about headlines, image or policy statements. It’s not about saving the orang-utan by boycotting chocolate with palm oil in it. It’s about tackling the problems and playing a part in making ethical, sustainable production the norm.
It’s easy to grab plaudits by boycotting palm oil or buying it from a country not associated with the problems. But don’t forget that if you shun Malaysia and Indonesia, you turn your back on the orang-utan, the rain forests and the people whose lives depend on palm oil.
To read more about sustainable palm oil, visit the GreenPalm page about sustainable palm oil and see how you can back sustainable production.
