What’s all the fuss about palm oil?

Friends of the Earth says that almost 90% of orangutan habitat has now disappeared because of oil palm expansion. It warns that Asia’s great ape could become extinct in just 12 years. “In reality it’s over for the tiger, the elephant and the orangutan,” says Willie Smits, who founded the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, “their entire lowland forest habitat is essentially gone already.” Our consumption of palm oil in the U.K. and throughout the world is rocketing: compared to levels in 2000, demand is predicted to more than double by 2030 and to triple by 2050. A lot ends up in food, from margarine and chocolate to cream cheese, crisps and oven chips - it's also used in cosmetics and increasingly, for use in biodiesel. The cost to the environment and the global climate is devastating - to feed this demand, tropical rainforests and peatlands in South East Asia are being torn up to provide land for oil palm plantations. Malaysia and Indonesia, home to more than 4% of the world's rainforests, produce nearly 85% of total palm oil on 6 million hectares of palm plantations and has plans for another 4 million by 2015, dedicated to biofuel production alone. Greenpeace says that in Indonesia, between 2000 and 2005, an area of forest equivalent to 300 soccer pitches was destroyed every hour to clear land for plantations.

Biofuel is seen as an easy quick fix to cut emissions from transport, but as a result of deforestation and land conversion overall emissions could actually increase. This hasn't stopped several governments setting biofuel targets: by 2012, 20% of diesel in India will be biodiesel, while by 2020 the EU and China want their biofuel levels to rise to 10 and 15% respectively. Biofuels are meant to reduce emissions but their role has been greatly overexaggerated. Friends of the Earth say, “using biofuels containing palm oil to tackle climate change is like using a can of petrol to put out a fire”. This is not just a problem for Indonesia, it's a global problem. The international trade in palm oil means companies in the UK (and elsewhere) can have a huge influence on how suppliers operate, and by refusing to deal with those they know to be destroying forest areas, they can change industry practices.

What’s the solution?
The RSPO (Round table on Sustainable Palm Oil) was established in 2004 as a market-led initiative to reform the way palm oil is produced, processed and used, with clear standards on the production of sustainable palm oil: commitments to preserve rainforest and wildlife, avoid conflicts with indigenous people and improve palm oil yields. A certification process designed to allow palm oil producers that meet environmental standards to label their products as eco-friendly was launched late last year. The round table is made up of producers, such as Unilever and Procter and Gamble, consumers and environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth and WWF.

Just recently, Sainsbury's announced a ban on palm oil from unsustainable sources in its own-brand food. It follows a move last summer by The Body Shop and Asda to cut their use of palm oil from unsustainable sources. Unfortunately the certification is no guarantee that the oil is truly sustainable. An investigation by FoE in the Netherlands linked several Indonesian suppliers, which were certified as sustainable, to illegal burning, habitat destruction and unapproved plantation development. Hannah Griffiths, FoE campaigner said, "The two major problems with the RSPO certification scheme are that it is very difficult to enforce and it does allow some deforestation to take place”. The cosmetics company Lush, taking on board environmentalists' concerns about so-called sustainable palm oil, is eliminating the ingredient from all its products. "It seemed clear to us that the only way we could properly address the enormous problems created by the growth in palm oil production was to cut our use of the material and encourage others to do the same," said Lush's head of creative buying, Simon Constantine. Fantastic, but it does beg the rather cynical question, ‘how much palm oil did they use.’

Our major wholesalers Suma and Infinity Foods - both vegetarian worker co-ops - have informed us that all the palm oil in the food they sell to us has RSPO certification. So there’s a start - but it is by no means perfect when you consider the FoE investigation and the fact that palm oil is often listed as vegetable oil on ingredients’ lists. We are in the process of contacting all our smaller suppliers to find out if they are using palm oil from a ‘sustainable’ source. In the mean time take a look at the box on the right and watch this space. Friends of the Earth and other like minded organisations propose a funding mechanism to transfer money for forest protection from rich countries to poor ones, including Indonesia, and this needs to happen alongside deep cuts in emissions in the UK and other developed nations. A moratorium on converting forest and peatland into oil palm plantations will provide breathing space to allow long-term solutions to be developed, while restoring deforested and degraded peatland provides a relatively cheap, cost effective way to make huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in Indonesia. Governments around the world have to recognise the role deforestation plays in climate change, providing funds to help countries with tropical forests to protect their resources as well as reducing their own CO2 emissions. Indonesia, as a developing country, believes Europe must help out financially if it wants the safeguards against the downside of palm oil production that will assist in cutting greenhouse gas. "The Indonesian government simply doesn't have the capability or the capacity to do this alone without the support of the Europeans, the US, Japanese, or whoever," said Alhilal Hamdi, chief executive of Indonesia's Biofuels Development Board. "It's no good other countries looking to us to help cut their CO2 emissions without helping to support us in that effort."

What can you do?
Because there's virtually no way of telling whether the palm oil in any particular product has been grown on deforested land, there are no practical steps you can take right now. It can be difficult to avoid palm oil, as on ingredients’ lists it is often listed as 'vegetable oil'. *Grow your own food - palm oil isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last product in the food hall of shame *Try not to buy convenience foods and limit your intake of fatty foods *Find out which companies have signed up to RSPO and boycott those who don’t *Use butter instead of margarine *Write to your MEP through Friends of the Earth Europe’s website *Tell us what you think - email brenda@eighth-day.co.uk.

Information from Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and The Soil Association.

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