Palm Oil (General problems) > Reviews (1)

THIS REVIEW IS NOW IN THE RIGHT PLACE....

I WROTE THIS GENERAL REPORT ABOUT PALM OIL A FEW YEARS AGO AND I THOUGHT IT'D BE INTERESTING TO ADD IT TO CIAO TO SEE WHAT CIAO-USERS THOUGHT OF IT AND HOW AWARE PEOPLE ARE OF PALM OIL IN GENERAL. I SEEM TO HAVE A FEW REGULAR READERS OF MY FILM REVIEWS (THANKS!!) AND JUST THOUGHT IT WOULD BE INTERESTING TO POST THIS.

SOME OF IT IS SLIGHTLY OUT OF DATE... THINGS ARE ALWAYS CHANGING.... HOWEVER I HOPE YOU MIGHT FIND THIS OF INTEREST. I'D BE HAPPY TO ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS THAT CIAO USERS MIGHT HAVE IF I CAN....

I'VE REMOVED REFERENCES TO SPECIFIC COMPANIES.

WHAT IS PALM OIL?
Palm oil, a derivative of the oil palm fruit, is one of the world’s most traded commodities. Over 40 million tonnes of palm oil is being produced worldwide every year. Tasteless and sometimes virtually colourless it is found in 10 per cent of our supermarket products. Often unidentified, or simply labelled as ‘vegetable oil’, it may sound innocuous but palm oil is a hidden killer. There are a myriad of ugly side effects related to palm oil cultivation making the use of palm oil a real problem.

The continuing growth of palm oil plantations, that already cover almost 10 million hectares of Malaysia and Indonesia, is quickly pushing the region’s native species towards extinction. Human rights abuse, worker exploitation and violent conflicts over land rights are also serious problems.

UK supermarkets are the major end-users of palm oil but public awareness of the issue is low. Palm oil is an ingredient in a variety of common processed foods and washing products. Yet many consumers in the UK are unaware of the damage that it is doing or that they are actually unwittingly part of the problem.

DESTRUCTION OF HABITAT – ENDANGERED SPECIES
Illegal logging and clearing of forests to make way for palm oil plantations has put orang-utans and other species such as the Sumatran tiger on the critically endangered list. Loss of habitat also puts these animals at risk from starvation or from poachers that profit from selling young orang-utans to the pet trade. The WWF reports that orang-utans - seen as agricultural pests - are often killed or maimed by plantation workers. Pressure group The Ape Alliance suggests that if nothing is done to prevent the current situation from continuing, the orang-utan will become extinct in the wild within the next 12 years.

DESTRUCTION OF RAINFOREST – CO2
The forests and peatlands within the region are the world’s largest terrestrial carbon stores. Deforestation, legal or illegal, releases carbon into the atmosphere and also reduces the forest’s capacity to act as a carbon sink, both of which negatively contribute to global climate change. The fires of 1997 and 1998 that destroyed five million hectares of forest were environmentally devastating (clearing a hectare of tropical forest releases between 500 and 900 tonnes of CO2) and also wiped out an estimated one third of the orang-utan population.

Although the peatlands have been under threat for some time, demand for palm oil production for bio-fuels is a new additional threat.

The sad irony is that the carbon released into the atmosphere by draining the peatlands would take hundreds of years to be recovered by any bio-fuel savings, questioning the environmental merit of such activity.

EXPOITATION OF WORKERS
When properly managed, the palm oil industry can be a good source of income for the indigenous people of Malaysia and Indonesia. Unfortunately it is not always the case. Work often pays below the minimum wage and conditions can be harsh. Violent conflicts over land rights are also commonplace.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?
The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is an international, multi-stakeholder, voluntary organisation that seeks to promote the development and use of sustainable palm oil. It is made up of palm oil producers, distributors, processors and end users.

The RSPO’s two-year trial, that began in November 2005, involving 14 plantation companies across the world, to prove the feasibility of certified palm oil, is now complete. Formal independent ISO 14000 auditors are being trained and appointed to assess any plantation that wishes to be RSPO certified to produce certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO). It is however virtually impossible to forecast volumes due to the many factors at play such as how many plantations seek to be included and how many gain certification. However now that the process is underway the RSPO expects to have the first batches of CSPO available by July 2008 with quantities between 100,000 to 500,000 tonnes being produced throughout 2008.

Once plantations are certified the RSPO say that there are two workable options for delivering CSPO to the European market. Firstly palm oil that is fully segregated and traceable back to the plantation. This is a very expensive option, but practical because products could then carry the claim that they were made with RSPO certified palm oil.

Or secondly, a ‘book and claim’ system dubbed ‘GreenPalm’ that would be similar to buying green electricity, in the sense that the company could then claim that its products ‘support the production of RSPO certified palm oil’. Companies would buy non-sustainably certified palm oil from the normal supply chain but, for every tonne, they would also buy a certificate stating that they helped to encourage the growth of CSPO by rewarding the plantation directly.

DEMAND FOR CERTIFIED SUSTAINABLE PALM OIL
It is possible for the RSPO to make positive changes within the palm oil industry. It is supported by the WWF and with CSPO almost available a breakthrough may be in sight, although just how powerful the CSPO mark can become remains to be seen. The idea that it might become as well recognised as the FSC label is doubtful because palm oil is largely used as an ingredient as opposed to it being a standalone product.

So can consumers play a part in helping to bring CSPO to the market any faster? Can increasing public awareness help to push the issue up the political agenda of the organisations involved? It could be difficult and it’s fairly unlikely.

However organisations such as LUSH recently tried to increase awareness of the problem and also promised never to use palm oil in its products.

PAINFULLY SLOW PROGRESS
However, despite the fact that the RSPO claims that no other organisation has made as much progress with a certification scheme involving tropical edible oils, its progress in delivering CSPO to market has been painfully slow.

There are however other problems with the RSPO. Can we be sure that members are genuinely working towards change in the palm oil industry? Can we be sure that they are not using their membership merely as a public relations exercise to divert attention from the real issues? As a voluntary organisation the RSPO has no real power – demonstrated by its failure to enforce a moratorium of all forest degradation for palm oil upon its members.

CONCLUSION
It is often the case with commodities such as edible oils, coffee, or crude oil that due to bulk importing and a lack of transparency in the supply chain, consumers are distanced from the social and environmental impacts of the products that they buy. A lot of responsibility is placed upon ethical consumers to understand what they are buying and what effect it is having upon the environment.

Without adequate labelling or commitments from supermarkets, manufacturers, and governments consumers do not have the ability to make informed choices about the products that they buy. Companies have a responsibility to inform consumers about issues that might affect them but this rarely happens without some form of consumer pressure. Consumers need to let supermarkets and manufacturers know that they want them to make information on palm oil more readily available as well as demanding that they do not source palm oil from forest destruction and instead source sustainably produced palm oil.

The GreenPalm scheme would not be a fully sustainable scheme and would therefore not be an entirely appropriate solution. Consumers need to demonstrate that they do not want to be implicated in the death of endangered species, the destruction of ancient rainforests or the abuse of workers by sending a message down the supply chain that only fully segregated, fully traceable sustainable palm oil is acceptable.

If this becomes a reality and the RSPO can deliver it to the global market in high enough quantities it is possible that the undesirable issues caused by non-sustainable palm oil production could be halted or even stopped. There will always be plantation owners that don’t care about sustainability and that will not join up to the RSPO but hopefully demand for fully sustainable palm oil will drive them out of business.