Like orangutans? Yeah, me too.
Know what orangutans don’t like and neither should you? Palm oil.
The palm oil debate has been gaining traction at quite some speed over the last few years. Despite awareness of its destructive nature growing, the oil’s demand continues to rise. The urgency of taking sustainable measures to protect our tropical forests and exquisite wildlife is now more crucial than ever.
The issues with meat-eating and poaching are quite obvious. Killing animals means there will be fewer animals (disregarding the ethical side at the mo). Likewise, consuming and any animal product, be that milk or snakeskin, involves direct interaction with said animal. Well, kind of.
The point I’m (badly) trying to make is that some of the planet’s most destructive environmental issues are, seemingly, too many degrees of separation apart to be taken seriously enough. Palm oil is without doubt one of the biggest offenders in terms of the demise of our rainforests. It is literally everywhere. Most of us use it unknowingly every single day. Palm oil in shampoo, margarine…it’s even in Doritos.
It is an unsustainably built industry that relies heavily on a couple of common western society problems: addiction (to processed foods) and to-far-removed-from-the-problem syndrome.
Photo: Antara Foto/Reuters via http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/10/22/orangutans-are-dying-indonesia-burns
So, what actually is it?
Palm oil is a vegetable oil derived from the palm fruit of the African oil palm tree. At well over 60 million tonnes annually, it is now the most commonly produced vegetable oil. It’s low production cost and unique chemical properties means palm oil lends itself fondly to processed foods (hence, the addiction part).
Our capitalist, multinational cooperation-led, lets-destroy-everything culture means palm oil is used in approximately half of all supermarket products (in developed nations like Australia and the UK). If it’s not in your soap or biscuits, it’s almost definitely in your peanut butter.
It’s widely unknown that almost half of the palm oil imported into the EU is actuallty used as biofuel due to the mandatory blending of biofuels into motor vehicle fuels since 2009.
But biofuel is good, right? It’s marketed as the safe and sustainable alternative to fossil fuel – helping reduce emissions and combat climate change? Unfortunately, it’s not great when it comes dirtied with the cost of significant biodiversity and ecosystem loss.
Where do you find it?
Palm oil plantations span over 27 million hectares of the Earth’s surface, grown throughout Africa, Asia, North America, and South America, with 85% of all palm oil globally produced and exported from Indonesia and Malaysia. The warm, humid climate of the tropics offers perfect growth conditions for oil palms, but the production methods used are generally not sustainable.
A couple of the best-documented plantation areas are Borneo and Sumatra. Native endangered Indonesian species are now finding themselves at a very real risk of extinction in the near future in direct response to palm oil production.
And what are the problems?
Taking into consideration the extreme deforestation, habitation degradation and animal cruelty, this is just as much an animal welfare crisis as it is an environmental issue.
Slash and burn agriculture (literally cutting everything down and setting it all on fire) and bulldozing wipe out hectares at a time to make way for enormous monoculture oil palm plantations.
The resultant forest fires pump immense volumes of smoke, carbon and methane into the atmosphere. Supposedly “renewable” palm oil-based biofuels actually have three times the climate impact of traditional fossil fuels. Indonesia is, not exactly surprisingly, now the third highest greenhouse gas emitter in the world. The arid, fire-friendly conditions of the tropics mean these fires often sprawl further than the intended controlled area.
This large-scale deforestation robs already endangered wildlife from their homes–including rhinos, elephants and tigers–with the Sumatran orangutan now officially listed as critically endangered. Findings show that if nothing changes fast, precious species like the orangutan could become extinct in the wild within the next 5-10 years, and Sumatran tigers less than 3 years.
If displaced animals come out of it alive, many are left irreversibly injured, orphaned and severely unwell. Dehydration, malnourishment and (sometimes fatal) health problems from the smoke and polluted air, like respiratory tract infections, are common.
Flames and smoke are pushing the animals closer to human settlements, heightening their vulnerability in additional ways. It increases accessibility of animals to poachers who capture and sell wildlife as pets, use them for medicinal purposes or kill them for their body parts.
The impact of plantation expansion on local human populations is diverse; it does have the potential to increase jobs, sense of community and infrastructure, but in some cases has led to the eviction of forest-dwelling peoples. As locals are brutally driven from their land, what follows is serious social unrest, land conflicts and frequent human rights violations.
But what if it says it’s sustainable palm oil?
Lots of your food and cosmetic products will be labelled as sustainably-sourced palm oil, but things aren’t always as they seem. This is a opens a whole new can of worms, but, essentially, the systems used are still very much corrupt, breaching a whole load of human rights violations and putting animals at risk. Although it has potential for the future, most environmentalists feel at present this is just a “greenwashing scheme”. You can find out more here.
What can you do?
Talk.
Spread the word in the least pushy and guilt-trippy way you possibly can. It is essential that we collectively rank up the pressure on policymakers; that’s ultimately how a real difference can be made.
An easy change you can personally make right away is to be mindful of the products you are using for yer wash and nosh. As of Dec 2014, EU food products are legally required to declare if they contain palm oil. Prior to this, palm oil could be listed as “vegetable fat” or “vegetable oil” on food labels. That sounds like a sneaky little white lie to me.
There are loads of useful ways to help at the links below:
https://www.rainforest-rescue.org/topics/palm-oil#start
http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/palm_oil/
http://www.saynotopalmoil.com/action
If this hasn’t put you off eating palm oil yet, then plz let me just tell you this. It’s semi-solid at room temperature and highly saturated aka not healthy. Studies have shown it could increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, raise cholesterol and perhaps even ramp up your risk of a good, old-fashioned heart attack. So there we go, it’ll make you fat fat fat and maybe a little bit dead.
just a thought... 