Palm Oil Dilemma

Palm oil, one of the world’s leading agricultural commodities, is widely used as a food ingredient and cooking oil. As the world is looking for fossil fuel alternatives, palm oil fits the “green oil” perfectly as biofuel. But how “green” is actually palm oil industry has to the environment? Further reading has lead to discovery on few environemtal studies on the palm oil “green fuel” impact to the environment.

The palm oil industry is forecast to be the world’s most produced and internationally traded edible oil by 2012. Our country Malaysia and neighbour Indonesia account for 83 percent of production and 89 percent of global exports (but ironically, at least once a year we will have cooking oil supply shortage). Oil palm is grown as an industrial plantation crop, often (especially in Indonesia) on newly cleared rainforest or peat-swamp forests rather than on already degraded land or disused agricultural land. Since the 1970s, the area planted with oil palm in Indonesia has grown over 30-fold to almost 12,000 square miles. While in our mother land, the area devoted to oil palm has increased 12-fold to 13,500 square miles. That is 11 percent of the total land area (about 62 percent of the total agricultural land). Companies sometimes profit from selling logs from the rainforest and then burn the area to make way for oil palms (this is when we have our annual haze episodes).

A study had reported that associated with the destruction of enormous tracts of tropical rainforest, are some of the world’s longest lists of threatened wildlife. Of the more than 400 land mammal species of Indonesia, 15 are critically endangered and another 125 threatened. Of Malaysia’s nearly 300 land mammal species, 6 are critically endangered and 41 threatened. The numbers of threatened species climb higher when terrestrial reptiles, amphibians, and birds are included. Among the these animals are the Sumatran tiger, Orangutans (the only great apes that exist outside of Africa), Asian elephant and the Sumatran rhinoceros. The associated road-building, soil erosion, air and water pollution, and chemical contamination also have contributed to the loss of wildlife habitat and the displacement of indigenous peoples.

Looking at these facts, i realised that being a consumer, i had (in a way) contributed to these unfortunate situation. By buying products that uses palm oil (almost all of it), i had generated more market and demand. But do i really have alternatives? Products that is really “eco friendly” can be not so friendly to my wallet instead. So in the end, its back to square one. In the name of rights for development and poverty, major companies ravages our forest and ecosystem for their own profit and growth while we busy thinking ways how to be eco friendly in a cheap way.

Here is a video from Greenpeace for some insights about the palm oil industry impact to the environment. Cheers