Sustainable Palm Oil: Rainforest Savior or Fig Leaf?

The spoof advertisement could scarcely have been nastier for the chocolate firm Nestle. It showed a worker taking a break at the office and eating a Kit Kat bar that turns into the finger of a baby orangutan, with blood oozing everywhere. The online video, which appeared early this year, helped persuade Nestle to change its policy on the use of palm oil grown – so campaigners claim — on land that once nurtured forested orangutan habitat.

It also encouraged the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a coalition of environmentalists and palm oil growers, traders and users, to launch its trademarked logo for certified sustainable palm oil to be put on food and cosmetics packaging beginning in early 2011. And it raised afresh the question of whether consumer pressure on big companies can deliver major environmental improvement.

Can we tame the corporate giants of consumerism? Or are we deluding ourselves that we can put the fright into the likes of Nestle, Wal-Mart and BP? And even if some green-minded Westerners can successfully demand that these multinational companies clean up their act, surely the rapacious new consumers across Asia will undermine our efforts?

The fate of palm oil in the marketplace is rapidly become a test case for green consumers. And despite some setbacks and plenty of skepticism, I think there are causes for optimism.

Palm oil has overtaken soya as the world’s number one source of vegetable oil. It is found in everything from biscuits to biodiesel, detergents to potato chips, cookies to shampoo, and candy and cosmetics. In fact, palm oil is now found in about half of all packaged goods on the shelves.

Palm oil is squeezed from the red fruit of the oil palm tree, primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia. Demand has doubled in the last decade because it delivers more vegetable oil per-hectare than rival oils like soya or sunflower, and because of health concerns about these other fats. Palm oil is free of trans fats. Its two major producing nations are riding the wave of an industry that now produces 50 million tons a year valued at roughly $40 billion.

But palm oil is usually grown on former rainforest land — sometimes recently-cleared land. Palm oil plantations cover 30,000 square kilometers of former forests in Indonesia alone, wiping out habitat for elephants, tigers, rhinos, orangutans and much else, and triggering enormous releases of carbon dioxide from lost forests and drained peat lands. By some counts Indonesia is, as a result, the world’s third-largest CO2 emitter, after China and the U.S.

With industry analysts predicting that palm oil is likely to require an extra 30,000 to 70,000 square kilometers in the coming decade, the stakes are immensely high. This is especially true as the palm oil juggernaut is now moving on to the forests of central and west Africa.

Can the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) stop this rolling leviathan of environmental destruction? The RSPO was formed in 2003 by the environmental group WWF, the Anglo-Dutch foods and toiletries company Unilever, which is the world’s biggest buyer of palm oil, and other companies and industry organizations. Members today include growers, food manufacturers, commodity traders, retailers, and environmental groups.

Its aim is no less than “to make all the world’s palm oil production sustainable.” To that end, in November 2008, the first shipload of certified sustainable palm oil docked at Rotterdam in the Netherlands. At its recent meeting in Jakarta, the RSPO announced what could be its most important move — the creation of a “sustainable palm oil” trademark that it says “will be carried by thousands of consumer products worldwide.” The logo should start appearing on products in early 2011. It will, says the RSPO president, Unilever’s Jan Kees Vis, show that the product “does not contribute to the sustained destruction of valuable tropical forests or damage the interests of people in the regions where the palms are grown.”