Palm oil has been hitting the headlines for years now, but the issue isn’t as black and white as it might seem
Words Victoria Williams
It is fair to say that palm oil has become a highly charged topic in environmental circles in recent years, with many different arguments swirling around its use and impact on precious habitats. Yet while the debate may have only entered the spotlight in the last few years, the oil at the centre of it has been around for a long time.
The African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is native to West Africa, and the oil made from its fruit pulp and kernel has been used by humans for at least 5,000 years; oil discovered in an ancient Egyptian tomb suggests that palms and fruit were being transported and traded by people as far back as 3,000 BCE.
Although oil has been extracted from this tree for millennia, the story of today’s mass production really begins just over 100 years ago. Two British men first introduced oil palms to Malaysia in 1910, and plantations started to spring up soon after when the ease and yield of the crop was realised.
Today, 85 per cent of the world’s palm oil comes from Malaysia, where almost 14 per cent of the country’s total area is made up of oil palm plantations. The plant is easy to grow and care for, making it an ideal crop for both small-scale farmers and large plantations. The oil has many properties that make it useful; it’s smooth, virtually tasteless and semi-solid at room temperature, and it contains vitamins A and E. Both the pulp and kernel of the fruit can be processed to produce oil ready for use in food, soap, cosmetics and fuel. Most importantly, it’s extremely land-efficient and yields up to 30 times more oil per hectare than other vegetable oil crops.
Efficient, useful and versatile, palm oil sounds like the perfect product, so why has it become the subject of such controversy? Much of the debate surrounds the deforestation caused by the palm oil industry. While the crop requires less land than other oil-producing plants, it does still need somewhere to grow, and the rocketing demand has resulted in the clearing – both legally and illegally – of vast areas of rainforest.
From 1989 to 2000 the area of land converted for palm oil more than tripled in Indonesia, and Malaysia lost an average of 0.65 per cent of its forests annually between 2000 and 2007. Clearing this established habitat hugely reduces the biodiversity of an area and destroys the homes of the precious species living there. Displaced animals wandering into plantations in search of food or shelter can often find themselves in trouble, as farmers will hurt or even kill them in order to defend their source of income. Some shocking predictions give orangutans and Sumatran tigers just a few more years of life in their natural wild habitats if deforestation continues a
