The use of palm oil is a very controversial topic. It is harmful in many ways, but it also has some benefits. I think that our goal shouldn’t be to stop using palm oil completely, but to find and support the proper ways to make the planting of oil palms less harmful to the environment. (Wikipedia, 2023)

Let’s start by clarifying what palm oil is. It is an edible vegetable oil derived from oil palms. Palm oil is highly saturated and is therefore solid at room temperature. It is used as a cheap substitute of butter. It is red in its unprocessed form. Red palm oil is used for cooking. If procced and refined the oil becomes white. White palm oil is used in a lot of processed food. It is also used as a replacement ingredient for hydrogen fats in fried and baked products. The oil palms are grown in tropic areas. It is used in food manufacturing (the process of taking raw edible materials and creating food products), in beauty products and even as biofuel. An average person consumed 7,7 kg of palm oil in 2015. A third of all oils produced from oil crops in 2014 was palm oil. The problem with palm oil is that in order to make space for palm oil plantations large parts of tropic forests are sacrificed. (Wikipedia, 2023)

Palm oil is commonly used in cleaning and personal care products. In fact, it is almost impossible to avoid it. 70% of all personal care products contain ingredients that originate from palm oil. It is commonly used to foam soap, detergent and shampoo. But it doesn’t seem like the producers are very prod of those facts. There are over 200 names for the used palm oil ingredients and only 10% precent include the word palm. (Wikipedia, 2023)

Palm oil can also be used as biofuel (in a form of methyl ester or biodiesel). There is also almost no waste in this kind of usage. The organic waste can used to create pallets. Palm oil that has been used for cooking can also be used to create biodiesel. At first this seems like a pretty good alternative to fossil fuels. I was shocked to learn that biodiesels made from palm oil create carbon emissions that are three times bigger compered to fossil fuels. They actually more harmful than fossil fuels. From 2018 half of all palm oil in Europe is used as biodiesel. The Indonesian government plans to completely replace fossil fuels with palm oil biodiesel and in order to do that, they need to find around 15 million hectares of space. That is where the oil palm plantations will be. There has been some debate over the use of biodiesel concerning food. In the end it was concluded, that both can be produced without hurting each other’s production. (Wikipedia, 2023)

Oil palm plantations cause some social issues as well. These plantations have also violated human rights and they continue to do so. There is exposure to dangerous pesticides (the used pesticides have been linked with cancer and Parkinson’s disease), unsafe carrying loads, child labor, sexual assault and rape. These violations presumably appear more frequently because the workers, some of which are illegal immigrants, are afraid of their bosses. Oil palm plantations also hurt indigenous people, whose land is unfairly and illegally taken. In some countries such as Guatemala, palm oil plantations have control of the local police and have caused disregarding land claims, breaking up protests with force and even murdering local leaders. The plantations are also benefiting from political corruption. Consequently, there is almost no government oversight of those plantations and the laws, which were created to protect indigenous land, are not enforced. On the other hand, they also produce a lot of jobs and food. It has been proven to reduce poverty, improve infrastructure and social services. (Wikipedia, 2023)

An argument in favor of palm oil is the undeniable efficiency of oil palm plantations. Sunflower oils generate 0.56 metric tons per hectare. Palm oils generate 4.17 metric tons per hectare. This means that the smaller place required to grow the palms allows better biodiversity. But that isn’t really the case, since they burn down tropic forests to make space for the palms. Another thing that confirms this efficiency is the fact that palm oil represents 38% of all vegetable oil, but only requires 5% of the vegetable oil farmland. (Wikipedia, 2023)

However, the space that is used is taken from topic forests. With the use of slash and burn techniques, the orangutan and Sumatran tiger have become endangered. In 2019 in just a few months (from January to September) 857000 hectares of land was burned in Indonesia. (Wikipedia, 2023)

Almost every country that produces palm oil is in a different situation. Indonesia, the world’s largest producer is using most of its oil itself, while the second largest producer Malaysia is the world’s largest exporter. In Kenya the Food and Agriculture of the United Nations promoted the use of a hybrid variety of oil palm (which are also cold tolerant and high-yielding). Since Kenya has to buy two thirds of all oil from other countries, creatin more oil is good. They also claim that the crop has environmental benefits for the region, because it provides stabilization for the soil and does not compete with native vegetation. According to some studies, Columbia has the chance to produce sustainable palm oil without deforestation. Oil palms are also used as an alternative to illegal crops like coca. (Wikipedia, 2023)

Some efforts have been made to make the production of palm oil more environmentally friendly, but because environmentally harmful oil is cheaper and of the same quality it hasn’t seen great success. The Consumers Good Forum promised to decrease deforestation trough their palm oil supply to net zero to 2020, but that goal still hasn’t been met today. (Wikipedia, 2023)

As a side note palm oil is also considered unhealthy in food consumption. They increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases, which are all diseases connected to the heart and veins. (Wikipedia, 2023)

As I am sure you can see, the palm oil is a complicated situation. There is no one easy solution to this problem. I think we should be aware of this problem and not let companies sell us palm oil in secret. We also shouldn’t accept it as a replacement for fossil fuels. Rather that trying to eliminate all use of palm oil, we should encourage the regulation of oil palm plantations, expose corruption, and try to find better, more environmentally friendly methods to produce palm oil or even to try to find an alternative to palm oil. A study in 2018 by the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) concluded that palm oil is here to stay, but we should make its existence better (The IUCN also advocates better practices in the palm oil industry). (Wikipedia, 2023)

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