Why is Palm oil so bad?

It’s not new news that our Rainforests are being destroyed because of the human need & consumption of Palm Oil. Everyone has seen the scene in Wolf of Wallstreet, right? It’s called supply & demand! We need to tackle both.

Why? Well, because amongst lots of things, the last wild orangutans & great apes & many more natural species are being pushed to the brink of extinction.
The problem is, that palm oil is found in roughly half the products sold in all grocery stores and is a major cause of rainforest destruction and human rights abuses.

Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil derived from the mesocarp of the fruit of the oil palms, primarily the African oil palm Elaeis guineensis.
It is a basic source of income for many farmers (in South East Asia, Central and West Africa, and Central America) and is locally used as cooking oil. It is also widely used & exported for use in much commercial food and personal care products and is even converted into biofuel in most grocery products across the western world.
The reason it is so lucrative, it that it produces up to 10 times more oil per unit area than alternatives such as soybeans. Rapeseed or sunflowers, but all have a lesser impact on the environment and can be used to replace palm oil

The affects are so dramatic that they have resulted already in the loss of carbon-sequestering, biodiverse forest land and we have even caused the disruption of indigenous colonies and animal populations due to palm oil cultivation.

According to a 2007 report published by UNEP, at the rate of deforestation at that time, an estimated 98 percent of Indonesian forest would be destroyed by 2022 due to legal and illegal logging, forest fires and the development of palm oil plantations (Source: Wikipedia)
This is one example, and we’re currently in 2020!

Change has started, but it isn’t quick enough. In 2004, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was founded. It works to promote the production of sustainably sourced palm oil through involvement with growers, processors, food companies, investors and NGOs. Any palm oil that meets RSPO introduced standards has since been designated “certified sustainable palm oil” (CSPO)

This means that sustainable palm oil uses less chemicals and treats all its waste waters before being released back into our rivers and oceans, as agrochemicals and the waste waters from palm oil refineries are one major cause of water pollution, but it still is released back into the water & it still is harmful to the environment in addition to the felling of the trees.

Certified members of RSPO also have to register their physical sales and processing activities of palm oil or its derivatives but this sadly doesn’t stop all companies breaching this, as you may have seen in the press.