Given the harm and destruction wrought by the palm oil industry, what have countries like Indonesia and Malaysia done in response?
They have not done a lot. The changes have really come as a result of work by NGOs and the industry, and have also involved consumer-facing companies. That has gone much further than any reforms that the governments have put in place.
Many of the activists and organizations who are fighting to stop the encroachment of palm oil plantations on tropical forests are local to the areas most impacted. This goes against the narrative that it’s white Westerners who save the rainforests and help the animals.
I encountered them everywhere I went: in Honduras, where it’s very dangerous for them to speak out, in Guatemala, Liberia, certainly in Indonesia and Malaysia. They are the ones who watch their livelihoods and their cultures being destroyed. And they are very brave to speak out against it because these activists and journalists routinely get harassed, assaulted, and even murdered. What I also found out is that western organizations such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have really close connections with all of these grassroots activists on the ground. They meet with them, spend time with them, and they’re coordinating campaigns with them. Sometimes they help to bring them to testify in Washington. And while these Western organizations might have more money and can amplify the messages to Western audiences, they’re really taking their cues from the folks on the ground. One of the activists I met in Guatemala was getting death threats. He was very fearful. He was moving around, sleeping in different places every night because he knew that the palm oil industry was not happy with him.
India imports more palm oil than any other nation, and it also has seen an epidemic of obesity. Because it’s cheap, a lot of street vendors use it. It’s also the oil of choice for the processed food companies that have flooded the country over the past few years. You talk about this health disparity as an equity issue. Doesn’t it really point us to the elephant in the room, which is poverty?
Part of the irony here is that both in Indonesia and Malaysia the palm oil industries grew as a result of poverty alleviation schemes right after independence. The governments had these big, very poor populations and they had lots of forested land. So they cleared the land, moved people, gave them seedlings, and encouraged them to grow oil palm. [The governments also launched campaigns to promote domestic consumption of palm oil.] In 1965, palm oil accounted for just 2 percent of Indonesians’ cooking oil usage, and by 2010, it had soared to 94 percent. So, it grew as a result of these governments trying to figure out how to deal with all of their poor people. This is the problem with so many products and capitalism.
On the streets of Salvador, Brazil, frying up falafel-like Acarajé.
Part of the challenge in India is also that the country is being flooded with is all this processed food and fast food. In that context, I would say it’s the multinational corporations who are behind the dumping of this shit in these countries. That’s a very different issue from that of the street vendors, who are just poor people trying to get by, and they don’t have the luxury of using more expensive oils.
Palm oil is a common a replacement for partially hydrogenated vegetable oils. In 2015, the U.S. banned trans fats and that ban left a vacuum, which palm oil filled gladly. Can we really tackle the palm oil issue if we’re not tackling the exponential rise of junk food? Because junk food is reliant on cheap oil, and if we simply take palm oil away, the processed food industry will look for another replacement.
I totally agree. The growth of palm oil needs to be looked at holistically. We are on the verge of climate collapse and we have a finite amount of land, particularly tropical rainforests. And the oil supply in the global diet has gone up by an insane amount. We’re ingesting far more oil than we ever did and it has increased far more than sugar and other sweeteners. It’s not like we need all this oil in our diet. We’ve never needed it, and it’s part of the reason for the global obesity epidemic.
Developing countries such as Malaysia use the phrase “eco colonialism” to defend their support of large-scale palm oil production and say that Western activists have no right to encroach on developing economies. Should we, in the West, expect that poor countries like Malaysia or Liberia stop or slow down palm oil development, given that our own environmental records are so bad?
Western governments and societies can’t just sit over here saying, “You people are so terrible for chopping down your rainforests; you’ve got to stop doing that.” If we expect these governments to stop development, then we need to compensate them because it’s in our interest. We need to start legislating on this side of the globe so that stuff happens.
I am a little bit optimistic that between the pandemic and climate change really coming on as a reality, people are starting to feel like we really need to change. The reality of it is finally coming home. I think corporations also are realizing this. It’s self-preservation. Time is running out, and [the people running] these companies are going to be as screwed as we are if the planet collapses. The LEAF [Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance] Coalition, a new initiative to lower emissions by protecting tropical forests, was announced during President Biden’s climate summit. It’s made up of governments, including the U.S., Britain, and Norway, and a group of large corporations like Amazon, Airbnb, Unilever and Nestle. The goal of this coalition is to create an international marketplace in which carbon credits can be sold in exchange for avoiding deforestation. It’s an improvement on a previous initiative called REDD+, a United Nations program that started in 2008 and has faced some challenges.
You mentioned the new initiative focused on preventing deforestation in exchange for carbon credits. I’m wondering if palm oil’s role in intensifying carbon emissions is becoming more of a flashpoint, and in particular the damage caused to peatlands in these tropical rainforests. Most people have never heard of peatlands, so can you talk about what they are and why there are so crucial to all of humanity?
Peatlands are basically soils formed over thousands of years through the accumulation of organic matter. But they’re waterlogged so they don’t decompose. In Indonesia, Borneo, and Sumatra, peatlands can be up to 60 feet deep . . . it’s basically coal in the making. When the palm oil companies want to establish plantations, they dig canals and use the waterways to bring in their excavators. Then they cut down all the trees, let the water drain out, and then set it all on fire. And because it’s so damp, these peat fires can smolder literally for years, even decades, while emitting carbon. It’s a carbon bomb. According to the Center for International Forestry Research, a forestry organization based in Indonesia, the annual carbon emissions from Indonesia’s forests and peatlands rival those of the entire state of California.
Palm fruit ready for processing at the Sapi oil palm mill, Malaysian Borneo.
In the mid 2000s, President Bush announced a new biofuels mandate [known as the Renewable Fuel Standard or the “ethanol mandate”]. The European Union also passed a similar mandate to get more biofuels from plants. It was hailed as this great opportunity for American farmers and for the environment, a way to curb our carbon emissions. But what we didn’t realize is that if you’re going to start using more soy and corn ethanol in this country to make fuels, then those crops are no longer going to be available in sufficient amounts for the food supply. And so either Americans will have to stop eating so much processed food or you’ll need to bring that oil from somewhere else. This was a disaster we created. The mandate basically gave a green light to palm oil companies to expand, chop down large swaths of tropical forests, and destroy the peatlands because they now had a new market. And in the European Union, unlike in the U.S., they were also using palm oil for biodiesel production.
The results of these policies were catastrophic. If you actually do the carbon calculation and you factor in the fact that companies are destroying tropical rainforests and burning the peatlands, leading to huge carbon emissions, you realize biofuel is not a sustainable fuel at all. In fact, it’s far worse than petroleum-based fuels. So the EU changed its mandate last year and you can no longer use palm oil in biofuels there. But the mandate in the U.S. has stayed the same, and we’re still importing more palm oil to fill that vacuum.
What about sustainable, certified palm oil that touts itself as socially and environmentally responsible? Should American consumers trust these claims?
