Why Palm Oil Isn't the Enemy

This post was written by John Buchanan and originally published on Conservation International‘s blog, Human Nature. It is in response to the premiere episode of Showtime’s new documentary series, Years of Living Dangerously, which addressed the problems of palm oil agriculture in Indonesia and the impacts the industry has on climate change.

If you watched Sunday’s premiere of Years of Living Dangerously, the new Showtime series about the impacts of climate change, you likely found yourself thinking palm oil’s pretty bad stuff.

As CI vice chair Harrison Ford flew over scorched patches of former forest being planted with palm oil and visited orphaned orangutans in Indonesia, it’s hard not to have a visceral reaction to this devastation.

So you may be surprised to hear an environmentalist say that palm oil itself isn’t the enemy — it’s where and how it’s grown that we need to change.

As far as edible oils go, palm oil is actually quite good. For starters, the oil palm tree, which is the source of palm oil, is highly productive. Oil palm yields 4–10 times more oil per hectare than other oilseed crops, including soybean and canola.

Put another way, this means more oil produced on less land. In fact, palm oil represents about 38% of the world’s supply of edible oil, but it’s grown on only 5% of the land dedicated to oilseed crops globally. With international demand for edible oils growing steadily, more oil from less land is a good thing.

Odds are you consume palm oil every day — you just don’t know it. In Asia, where the vast majority of palm oil is produced and consumed, it is a common cooking oil. Here in the U.S., it’s estimated that palm oil or ingredients derived from it are used in half of the products on the average supermarket shelf.

So yes, it’s in your cookies, your baked goods, your margarines, your lipsticks and skin lotions, your shampoo and toothpaste and a wide range of other packaged foods and personal care products. In part, that’s because palm oil is a highly versatile product that lends itself well to food products and processing, and is naturally free of trans fats. That’s good.

It’s also valuable. Palm oil generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue for producing countries, and is estimated to employ more than 6 million people globally. That’s good, too.

So, is it all good news? Definitely not.

Continue reading on Human Nature…

John Buchanan is senior director of sustainable food and agriculture markets in CI’s Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. He is also on the board of governors of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.