Frequently Asked Questions about Palm Oil
1. Why don't you oppose the use of palm oil altogether?
We believe that a boycott of products containing palm oil is not the answer to saving tropical forests, for a number of reasons. Palm oil is usually a hidden ingredient in food and cosmetic products, listed simply as ‘vegetable oil' on packaging, so it is currently almost impossible to make informed choices about what you buy at the supermarket. In Europe, this is soon set to change, thanks to the success of the Clear Labels, Not Forests campaign.
However, even armed with a palm-oil-free shopping list, protesting with your wallet may have some unintended consequences. Oil palms are the most productive oil seed in the world - one hectare of oil palms produces more than ten times as much oil than other oilseed crops. If companies are forced to switch to alternative oils, even more land could be put at risk. Soybeans, for example, tend to be grown under a similar model to oil palms: huge monocultures, often at the expense of tropical forests in South America. We do not want to export the problem - saving the Southeast Asian rainforests from conversion at the expense of the Brazilian Amazon, swallowing up even more forest in the process. We simply want forest conversion to stop.
Palm oil is an important commodity when it comes to meeting the huge global demand for vegetable oils, accounting for more than a third of the world's supply. Countries such as India and China rely on huge palm oil imports to meet the nutritional needs of their growing populations, bringing billions of dollars to top producer countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. As long as the world needs vegetable oil, there is no question that the palm oil industry will continue to grow; what we need to be concerned with is how this expansion happens.
2. What does palm oil have to do with orangutans?
The decline of the orangutan in Sumatra and Borneo in recent years symbolizes the devastation of one of the world's biodiversity hotspots - the lowland rainforests of Southeast Asia. Conversion to oil palm plantations is of course not the only threat facing these forests, but in Indonesia and Malaysia, the palm oil industry has been a significant driver of deforestation. The loss of these forests threatens many endangered and critically endangered species, including orangutans. Orangutans share their forest home with countless other species, including Sumatran tigers, elephants, and rhinos. More than 80% of agricultural expansion in the tropics between 1980 and 2000 came at the expense of forests. Agricultural expansion is also linked to other causes of biodiversity decline, including hunting, poaching, human-wildlife conflict, illegal logging, and forest fires. Tropical forests are also vitally important to everyone on the planet - they are incredible carbon sinks, so losing these habitats would be catastrophic in terms of the global fight to prevent dangerous climate change.
3. Won't restricting where oil palms can be grown put farmers out of business?
No. The development of new oil palm plantations does not need to entail forest destruction. While precious ecosystems are being devastated, millions of hectares of abandoned land lie idle, available for cultivation. It is estimated that the amount of land growing oil palms in Indonesia could quadruple without impacting forests, enabling the industry to grow whilst drastically reducing its environmental footprint.
In his keynote address at the Business for the Environment global summit held in Jakarta on 28th April 2011, Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono announced new policies and incentives for palm oil companies to "turn unproductive grasslands into high-yielding and productive assets". He stated that redirecting future expansion of the industry onto Indonesia's 30 million hectares of degraded land would be "critical to our success in pursuing a green economy".