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A palm oil alternative could help save rainforests

173 points by williamsharris 6y ago

kleton 6y ago
Palm oil plantations are common because of the massive yield of the oil palm in the tropics. The only thing that comes near it is sugarcane. So it seems unlikely that you will economically put the palm plantations out of business with the process described.
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  Those issues were discussed at length in the article. Not that it contradicts anything you say though.
mrpopo 6y ago
You cannot just use alchemy to create matter. Here they use sugar to synthesize palm oil. Then where does the sugar come from? How would it be sustainable to have massive sugarcane plantations instead of massive palm tree plantations?
- captainredbeard 6y ago
  The palm oil land is being cleared from rainforest and has a limited growing range. Sugarcane, not so much.
  - zakki 6y ago
    So where the sugarcane for oil's land comes from? Current land for sugarcane is to produce sugar.
    - mrob 6y ago
      A substantial part of the global sugarcane crop is used to make ethanol for fuel. The world's biggest producer, Brazil, uses the majority of its crop for ethanol. (65% as of 2019, the most recent number I could find [0]). Wikipedia's "Sugarcane" article quotes a 2005 source to claim "solar energy-to-ethanol conversion efficiency is 0.13%". It might be slightly better now, but it's not going to match the 20% or more of a modern photovoltaic system, which could be used to power electric vehicles instead (an ideal use of solar energy, because electric vehicles need batteries anyway so there's no base load problem). [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/cofco-sugar-ethanol/cofco-expands-ethanol-capacity-in-brazil-sees-sugar-prices-flattened-idUSL2N27D0PK https://www.reuters.com/article/cofco-sugar-ethanol/cofco-ex...
  - krzat 6y ago
    Perhaps it would be efficient to to GMO palm tree that grows in wider range. Or make a yeast that can produce oil from garbage, that would be pretty useful.
  - scythe 6y ago
    >The palm oil land is being cleared from rainforest and has a limited growing range. I don't know where people got the idea that oil palms are limited to a tropical rainforest climate, but it's not true. Palms are dry-weather crops; that's why they're all over California. Historically, the largest oil palm producer was Nigeria; only a small fraction is a rainforest climate and those areas are urbanized anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#/media/File:Koppen-Geiger_Map_NGA_present.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#/media/File:Koppen-Gei... It simply happens that Indonesia and Malaysia hold a significant fraction of the world's rainforests and are developing high-productivity food crops in response to rapid population growth on the shores of the Indian Ocean and of course a popular will that demands economic growth.
    - sharaticku 6y ago
      There are thousands of different palm species, not all of which produce the oil palm fruit, which is the starting point for palm oil. The main palm tree species that produces oil palm fruit is Elaeis Guineensis. This species can only grow within 5-10 degrees of the equator. There are many palm species in California, but they do not produce oil palm fruit.
estaseuropano 6y ago
Palm oil is a nightmare in our food chain. It is horrible for the environment and horrible for the body (an aspect totally ignored in this article). And yet it has become near ubiquitous. Living in a big European city I can for instance buy 30+ types of margarine at my regular supermarket. But every single one is full of palm oil. Even supposedly healthy ones based on olive oil (looking at you Bertoli) are to a large degree palm. Even the bio/organic shop has nothing. It's nearly as bad for chocolate, spreads, cakes, veggie or non veggie charcuterie, ... Anything that's not a standardised/pure product is just palm. 2 years ago it was perfectly possible to avoid palm. Today I basically don't see any chance. Even organic and supposedly ethical products are full of palm, just under the pretense of some certification that sums up to 'the forest was killed 10 years ago so we are now able to call ourselves sustainable while the problem is shifted somewhere else'. Our food systems seem fundamentally broken. Unless I buy basics at the local market and cook everything from scratch I basically have to eat palm, glutamate, bamboo fibre, gelatine and whatnot other waste every day.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  Aren't some kinds of palm oil actually good for health?
  - JeromeLon 6y ago
    Palm oil is not unhealthy. Th reason it's bad is because the cheapest way to produce it is to destroy rainforest to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. UK consumers managed through campaigning to force the industry to source 50% of palm oil from non-tropical origins. When the worlwide demand for tropical palm oil drop enough, tropical deforestation will drop.
  - LoSboccacc 6y ago
    the health angle comes from the proportions of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated fats presented in the mix, but so does the mechanical angle that makes one mix more useful than another in recipes, i.e. spreads and biscuits; the saturated fats that are responsible for soft spreads and buttery biscuits are also the one that are bad for health. on the other hand palm oil is just a collection of acids, primarily the saturated palmitic acid, but while the naming stuck because it was firstly isolated there, most oil and fats contains a similar set of the same fatty acids in different proportions; pure butter contains like 15% of naturally occurring palmitic acid, and olive oil contains likewise 5-10% of the stuff. so well you can take any kind of oil, dilute or reinforce it with saturated / monounsaturated fats, and change it's healthiness in proportion of the rest of the recipe, but in doing so you also change their mechanical properties.
crispyporkbites 6y ago
I don’t know what the solution is or whether the article’s alternative is viable. But please do try and avoid buying products palm oil. It’s absolutely devastating and we will not get the land or the millions of species that we’re losing back. I once flew into a tiny airport in Borneo, from above it looked like a neat lush jungle, but as we descended the horror of millions upon millions of neatly lined up palm trees stretching for hundreds of miles became clear. The tiny scrap of jungle left was condensed around the river and all the large fauna had gathered there to escape. It’s tragic and the scale is unprecedented. I don’t know if not buying palm oil will stop them, but at least it sends a message that we need alternatives and raises awareness about one of the most visceral impacts we humans have on the earth.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  While you are busy boycotting palm oil, I would suggest you also stop flying if you are concerned about species extinction (unless your flight to Borneo was absolutely essential). Sorry if this sounds sarcastic. I don't mean it that way. Just couldn't help but notice the irony in your post.
  - crispyporkbites 6y ago
    I'm glad you wrote this - flying at scale is terrible for the environment. However it doesn't mean eating palm oil is ok. Whataboutism is even worse for the environment, there is always something you can do better and life has many facets. The danger of your comment is that people use this to justify not doing anything while continuing to fly and act irresponsibly, and pretend that they have some kind of moral high ground. Even a small change like one individual not eating palm oil can be the first step towards a sustainable planet.
- JeromeLon 6y ago
  Encouraging the use of products that don't contain any oil is indeed good for the rainforest. But be careful, the way you phrased it could encourage people to use products that use another vegetable oil, which requires even more hectares to produce (palm oil yield is 5 times higher than the next highest oil yield), and could lead to even more deforestation.
dkdbejwi383 6y ago
Why is palm oil in everything these days? What did we do 10/20/30 years ago before it was ubiquitous? Has the need to bulk up products with palm oil arisen because of population growth, needing to stretch out yields more?
- joecool1029 6y ago
  >What did we do 10/20/30 years ago before it was ubiquitous? We used partially hydrogenated vegetable oils: aka trans fat. It's a texture/spreadability thing for junk food and baking. Use of trans fats accelerated after the 1980's declared saturated fats harmful and they took its place. It didn't work out so well and now palm oil is phased in to replace it.
- JeromeLon 6y ago
  The yield per hectare of palm oil is 5 times higher than the next most productive edible oil crop (rapeseed). Note that there is nothing wrong with palm oil itself, it's just that the cheapest way to produce edible oil on Earth, is to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. Replace palm oil with another vegetable oil, and the effect on deforestation will be even worse, as we would need even more land to grow the replacement. Even Greenpeace is not calling for a boycott or palm oil.
  - paganel 6y ago
    Presumably 1 ha of tropical forrest > 1 ha of temperate-climate forrest, that is if the replacing crop would be a temperate-climate one.
- scythe 6y ago
  Population growth is probably somewhat of a factor. Oil palms produce so much oil that they are one of the most productive food crops as well as leading the pack in oil production -- competing with rice or potatoes in calories per acre. As another poster noted, the largest consumer is India where it's used for cooking.
DarthGhandi 6y ago
Something I think many miss in the comments here is that even if you completely wiped out natural palm oil usage today that rainforest is still going to get cut down tomorrow. It will simply just be a different crop, hey they might even raise cattle or buffalo or grow canola instead just to spite the West. It's painful to watch people think that palm oil is the environmental problem when it's merely the symptom of far deeper issues that are much harder to solve. Lecturing some family living in poverty to not cut down trees on their land is a bit rich if you look at the history of deforestation in the states and Europe in the last century, to that farmer you're trying to put out of business all he sees is hypocrisy and gatekeeping, not moral duty.
- mjevans 6y ago
  It's a political problem, which needs a political answer. Some things should be heritage sites for everyone on the planet. How such a status is achieved and maintained, that's the political part.
weddpros 6y ago
An important part of palm oil is burnt in western cars to provide a "green alternative" to oil. How ironic? Plantations have grown as a consequence... Also palm oil feeds many families in SE Asia. Boycott is not a solution.
- perfunctory 6y ago
  > Also palm oil feeds many families in SE Asia. Boycott is not a solution. Does it really? Palm trees are not exactly grown by small scale artisan farmers.
  - s5300 6y ago
    No, but many workers get paid meager (but slightly livable for their area) wages we would likely see as/refer to as modern "slave labor" Is it a pretty thing? Not even slightly. However, this lets them/their family survive. Take it away, native workers will die/turn to even shittier methods of survival.
  - weddpros 6y ago
    According to [1], small farmers represent 40% of Indonesia's palm oil industry. [1] - https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm-sustainably-external-support-necessary https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...
- mrpopo 6y ago
  I think the EU was set to ban the use of palm oil for use in biofuels this year. Also, biofuel is/was "only" 50% of the EU's total palm oil consumption. And for other coutries, it's a lot less.
ninetax 6y ago
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EGreg 6y ago
Excuse me, what would save rainforests is to stop this expansion of soy and cows by Bolsonaro in Brazil, and so on. People throughout those latitudes are burning down rainforests for bullshit reasons!
- postingpals 6y ago
  The amazon rainforest is not the only forest on earth. Watch the latest David Attenborough documentary if you'd like a bit more understanding of how forests are destroyed and replaced with oil palm trees, in a way it is worse than the amazon because this is justified by profit motives whereas the amazon was a poor leadership decision.
  - da39a3ee 6y ago
    It is however the most important remaining area of tropical forest on Earth, because of its size and the fact that large pristine areas still exist. That's not to say that conservation issues in the Congo basin, tropical SE Asia, Borneo, Papua New Guinea etc are not as important. But I think you should be cautious about making a statement like that about Amazonia.
- baq 6y ago
  Money is no bullshit. It must stop make economic sense.
pmlnr 6y ago
> A palm oil alternative You mean... any other vegetable oil, like it used to be?
baq 6y ago
I would love to buy food without palm oil, but right now it just seems impossible. A workable alternative is desperately needed. Regulators have very little incentive to tax palm oil (not the importers’ problem, exporters happily take money and don’t care about the environment). Hopefully a replacement could make taxing the original work.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  At least here it's certainly very possible to avoid palm oil. Read the list of ingredients and don't buy anything with palm oil as a listed ingredient. Always read the ingredients and the nutritional information. Yes, that means going without pre-baked pastries, frozen dinners and similar products. I think that sacrifice is worth it.
yholio 6y ago
People don't cut the rainforest to produce palm oil. They cut it to make money and improve their livelihood in a political environment that places no value on rainforest. If palm oil prices drop tomorrow to zero, those people will become even poorer, the value of the rainforest will remain zero, so they will cut it even further to plant the next best profitable cash crop not yet made obsolete by technology. This is a common pattern among green initiatives, trying to solve things by creating poverty and scarcity, expecting people far away to happily plow in manure so that they can buy a pair of jeans made from organic cotton at the latest pop-up fashion store. Survival is the most powerful force driving the human race forward. If you want to save the rain forest, there is a very simple trick to it: make sure the economy in the area is able to create 1000$/month environmentally sustainable jobs. At that labor price, survival farming and destroying the habitat does not pay, the palm oil farms will not find labor and will close down. Since in economic reality that's not at all a simple trick, we can suplement it with political measures, things that give value to the rainforest or strongly penalize its destruction: international agreements, subsidies and tariffs, sustainable tourism etc. But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival.
- mangecoeur 6y ago
  This point was also made in David Attenborough’s recent climate documentary: the point is not about palm oil but about rainforest protection. If there is no protection, and if people can’t make a living another way, the forest will be cut for whatever makes money. The most tragic example i’ve seen is rainforest turned into those wood chips they put around potted plants. Is that a high value commodity? No. But it makes >0 money and if the value given to the wild forest is zero, then it will happen.
  - worldsayshi 6y ago
    The solution should be fairly simple. Give wild forest a >0 value by paying people for keeping it wild. I mean of course it's not a new idea and apparently it's very difficult in practice but it seems like the obvious response to that logic.
Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
The largest buyer of palm oil is India [1], and the largest use case for palm oil is as cooking oil. If we want to pursue a replacement for palm oil, we need to solve for that specific use case on a technical level. Cooking oil (simplifying greatly) is just a heat transfer medium from the stove to all surfaces of the food being fried. Like a catalyst, ideally it should not be consumed in the process. If we can develop a benign heat transfer medium that is infinitely recyclable in cooking, that should be a real replacement for palm oil. [1] https://scroll.in/article/967186/as-worlds-largest-importer-of-palm-oil-india-has-a-duty-to-push-for-ethical-production-practices https://scroll.in/article/967186/as-worlds-largest-importer-...
- elric 6y ago
  Somewhat tengential, but one of the driving forces behind India's cooking style (simmering stuff for a long time over a relatively low heat) is due to their lack of combustible fuel. A lot of cooking was (is?) done using cow dung for fuel. This results in a slow, long burn but doesn't reach very high temperatures.
  - CommieDetector 6y ago
    So the solution is again MASSIVE investment in NUCLEAR power to give access to cheap and reliable energy.
- diydsp 6y ago
  In frying, the oil is purposefully consumed. In "heat transfer" cases, water-frying can be done. I do it all the time. Keeps calories low though it's less tasty and satisfying. Also easier to clean!
  - Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
    The problem with water-frying (boiling?) is you can't get to the critical temperature (140C+) for Maillard reactions needed to brown the batter. I am by no means an expert in food science, but it's something I've wondered for a long time. It'll be great if we never have to throw away used cooking oil (when it isn't consumed of course, like when making fried chickens).
bttrfl 6y ago
We are bothered by deforestation and diminishing biodiversity yet we fail to put monetary value on rainforests. Let's make Brazil one of the richest countries in the world for what they have and they will make sure not a single tree is ever cut down. Ecuador was asking for $3.6B so they could afford not to dig out their oil and save one of the richest ecosystems in the World. The World pledged just $200M. It's a sad lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasun%C3%AD-ITT_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasun%C3%AD-ITT_Initiative
AntiImperialist 6y ago
So, they'll ferment "food waste"? Sure! If this catches up, I can see them mostly fermenting grains or sugar because collecting and fermenting food waste is more expensive. So, instead of cutting down forests for planting palm trees, you cut it down for planting corn.
da39a3ee 6y ago
> Added to that is the aversion of consumers in many markets to eating anything that might contain an ingredient derived from genetically modified microbes. Which is exactly why those of us who care deeply about natural habitat conservation from a scientific point of view wish that the public were more influenced by scientifically-minded conservationists and less influenced by organizations like Greenpeace, who oppose GM on a basis that can only be called flimsy hippy ideology.
ChrisRR 6y ago
I thought palm oil was already one of the most efficient oils in terms of land and water usage? And can be grown in sustainable areas. Surely the issue isn't the oil itself, but that poor farmers are seeing the rainforest as free farm land and will cut it down to make a profit. If you replace one oil with another, won't poor farmers still do the same?
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  Most of palm oil plantations here in Indonesia are owned by large corporations. The "poor farmers" who till their own land usually plant rice, fruits, veggies, coffee, cacao or spices instead, and their farmland is actually close to their villages instead of deep within the cut-down rainforest.
hikerclimb 6y ago
I hope this doesn’t work

Palm oil plantations are common because of the massive yield of the oil palm in the tropics. The only thing that comes near it is sugarcane. So it seems unlikely that you will economically put the palm plantations out of business with the process described.

Ma8ee 6y ago
Those issues were discussed at length in the article. Not that it contradicts anything you say though.

mrpopo 6y ago

You cannot just use alchemy to create matter. Here they use sugar to synthesize palm oil. Then where does the sugar come from? How would it be sustainable to have massive sugarcane plantations instead of massive palm tree plantations?

captainredbeard 6y ago
The palm oil land is being cleared from rainforest and has a limited growing range. Sugarcane, not so much.
- zakki 6y ago
  So where the sugarcane for oil's land comes from? Current land for sugarcane is to produce sugar.
  - mrob 6y ago
    A substantial part of the global sugarcane crop is used to make ethanol for fuel. The world's biggest producer, Brazil, uses the majority of its crop for ethanol. (65% as of 2019, the most recent number I could find [0]). Wikipedia's "Sugarcane" article quotes a 2005 source to claim "solar energy-to-ethanol conversion efficiency is 0.13%". It might be slightly better now, but it's not going to match the 20% or more of a modern photovoltaic system, which could be used to power electric vehicles instead (an ideal use of solar energy, because electric vehicles need batteries anyway so there's no base load problem). [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/cofco-sugar-ethanol/cofco-expands-ethanol-capacity-in-brazil-sees-sugar-prices-flattened-idUSL2N27D0PK https://www.reuters.com/article/cofco-sugar-ethanol/cofco-ex...
- krzat 6y ago
  Perhaps it would be efficient to to GMO palm tree that grows in wider range. Or make a yeast that can produce oil from garbage, that would be pretty useful.
- scythe 6y ago
  >The palm oil land is being cleared from rainforest and has a limited growing range. I don't know where people got the idea that oil palms are limited to a tropical rainforest climate, but it's not true. Palms are dry-weather crops; that's why they're all over California. Historically, the largest oil palm producer was Nigeria; only a small fraction is a rainforest climate and those areas are urbanized anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#/media/File:Koppen-Geiger_Map_NGA_present.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#/media/File:Koppen-Gei... It simply happens that Indonesia and Malaysia hold a significant fraction of the world's rainforests and are developing high-productivity food crops in response to rapid population growth on the shores of the Indian Ocean and of course a popular will that demands economic growth.
  - sharaticku 6y ago
    There are thousands of different palm species, not all of which produce the oil palm fruit, which is the starting point for palm oil. The main palm tree species that produces oil palm fruit is Elaeis Guineensis. This species can only grow within 5-10 degrees of the equator. There are many palm species in California, but they do not produce oil palm fruit.

estaseuropano 6y ago

Palm oil is a nightmare in our food chain. It is horrible for the environment and horrible for the body (an aspect totally ignored in this article). And yet it has become near ubiquitous. Living in a big European city I can for instance buy 30+ types of margarine at my regular supermarket. But every single one is full of palm oil. Even supposedly healthy ones based on olive oil (looking at you Bertoli) are to a large degree palm. Even the bio/organic shop has nothing. It's nearly as bad for chocolate, spreads, cakes, veggie or non veggie charcuterie, ... Anything that's not a standardised/pure product is just palm. 2 years ago it was perfectly possible to avoid palm. Today I basically don't see any chance. Even organic and supposedly ethical products are full of palm, just under the pretense of some certification that sums up to 'the forest was killed 10 years ago so we are now able to call ourselves sustainable while the problem is shifted somewhere else'. Our food systems seem fundamentally broken. Unless I buy basics at the local market and cook everything from scratch I basically have to eat palm, glutamate, bamboo fibre, gelatine and whatnot other waste every day.

qwerty456127 6y ago
Aren't some kinds of palm oil actually good for health?
- JeromeLon 6y ago
  Palm oil is not unhealthy. Th reason it's bad is because the cheapest way to produce it is to destroy rainforest to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. UK consumers managed through campaigning to force the industry to source 50% of palm oil from non-tropical origins. When the worlwide demand for tropical palm oil drop enough, tropical deforestation will drop.
- LoSboccacc 6y ago
  the health angle comes from the proportions of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and saturated fats presented in the mix, but so does the mechanical angle that makes one mix more useful than another in recipes, i.e. spreads and biscuits; the saturated fats that are responsible for soft spreads and buttery biscuits are also the one that are bad for health. on the other hand palm oil is just a collection of acids, primarily the saturated palmitic acid, but while the naming stuck because it was firstly isolated there, most oil and fats contains a similar set of the same fatty acids in different proportions; pure butter contains like 15% of naturally occurring palmitic acid, and olive oil contains likewise 5-10% of the stuff. so well you can take any kind of oil, dilute or reinforce it with saturated / monounsaturated fats, and change it's healthiness in proportion of the rest of the recipe, but in doing so you also change their mechanical properties.

crispyporkbites 6y ago

I don’t know what the solution is or whether the article’s alternative is viable. But please do try and avoid buying products palm oil. It’s absolutely devastating and we will not get the land or the millions of species that we’re losing back. I once flew into a tiny airport in Borneo, from above it looked like a neat lush jungle, but as we descended the horror of millions upon millions of neatly lined up palm trees stretching for hundreds of miles became clear. The tiny scrap of jungle left was condensed around the river and all the large fauna had gathered there to escape. It’s tragic and the scale is unprecedented. I don’t know if not buying palm oil will stop them, but at least it sends a message that we need alternatives and raises awareness about one of the most visceral impacts we humans have on the earth.

perfunctory 6y ago
While you are busy boycotting palm oil, I would suggest you also stop flying if you are concerned about species extinction (unless your flight to Borneo was absolutely essential). Sorry if this sounds sarcastic. I don't mean it that way. Just couldn't help but notice the irony in your post.
- crispyporkbites 6y ago
  I'm glad you wrote this - flying at scale is terrible for the environment. However it doesn't mean eating palm oil is ok. Whataboutism is even worse for the environment, there is always something you can do better and life has many facets. The danger of your comment is that people use this to justify not doing anything while continuing to fly and act irresponsibly, and pretend that they have some kind of moral high ground. Even a small change like one individual not eating palm oil can be the first step towards a sustainable planet.
JeromeLon 6y ago
Encouraging the use of products that don't contain any oil is indeed good for the rainforest. But be careful, the way you phrased it could encourage people to use products that use another vegetable oil, which requires even more hectares to produce (palm oil yield is 5 times higher than the next highest oil yield), and could lead to even more deforestation.

dkdbejwi383 6y ago

Why is palm oil in everything these days? What did we do 10/20/30 years ago before it was ubiquitous? Has the need to bulk up products with palm oil arisen because of population growth, needing to stretch out yields more?

joecool1029 6y ago
>What did we do 10/20/30 years ago before it was ubiquitous? We used partially hydrogenated vegetable oils: aka trans fat. It's a texture/spreadability thing for junk food and baking. Use of trans fats accelerated after the 1980's declared saturated fats harmful and they took its place. It didn't work out so well and now palm oil is phased in to replace it.
JeromeLon 6y ago
The yield per hectare of palm oil is 5 times higher than the next most productive edible oil crop (rapeseed). Note that there is nothing wrong with palm oil itself, it's just that the cheapest way to produce edible oil on Earth, is to grow palm oil trees in a tropical climate. Replace palm oil with another vegetable oil, and the effect on deforestation will be even worse, as we would need even more land to grow the replacement. Even Greenpeace is not calling for a boycott or palm oil.
- paganel 6y ago
  Presumably 1 ha of tropical forrest > 1 ha of temperate-climate forrest, that is if the replacing crop would be a temperate-climate one.
scythe 6y ago
Population growth is probably somewhat of a factor. Oil palms produce so much oil that they are one of the most productive food crops as well as leading the pack in oil production -- competing with rice or potatoes in calories per acre. As another poster noted, the largest consumer is India where it's used for cooking.

DarthGhandi 6y ago

Something I think many miss in the comments here is that even if you completely wiped out natural palm oil usage today that rainforest is still going to get cut down tomorrow. It will simply just be a different crop, hey they might even raise cattle or buffalo or grow canola instead just to spite the West. It's painful to watch people think that palm oil is the environmental problem when it's merely the symptom of far deeper issues that are much harder to solve. Lecturing some family living in poverty to not cut down trees on their land is a bit rich if you look at the history of deforestation in the states and Europe in the last century, to that farmer you're trying to put out of business all he sees is hypocrisy and gatekeeping, not moral duty.

mjevans 6y ago
It's a political problem, which needs a political answer. Some things should be heritage sites for everyone on the planet. How such a status is achieved and maintained, that's the political part.

weddpros 6y ago

An important part of palm oil is burnt in western cars to provide a "green alternative" to oil. How ironic? Plantations have grown as a consequence... Also palm oil feeds many families in SE Asia. Boycott is not a solution.

perfunctory 6y ago
> Also palm oil feeds many families in SE Asia. Boycott is not a solution. Does it really? Palm trees are not exactly grown by small scale artisan farmers.
- s5300 6y ago
  No, but many workers get paid meager (but slightly livable for their area) wages we would likely see as/refer to as modern "slave labor" Is it a pretty thing? Not even slightly. However, this lets them/their family survive. Take it away, native workers will die/turn to even shittier methods of survival.
- weddpros 6y ago
  According to [1], small farmers represent 40% of Indonesia's palm oil industry. [1] - https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm-sustainably-external-support-necessary https://snv.org/update/smallholder-palm-oil-farmers-can-farm...
mrpopo 6y ago
I think the EU was set to ban the use of palm oil for use in biofuels this year. Also, biofuel is/was "only" 50% of the EU's total palm oil consumption. And for other coutries, it's a lot less.

ninetax 6y ago

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EGreg 6y ago

Excuse me, what would save rainforests is to stop this expansion of soy and cows by Bolsonaro in Brazil, and so on. People throughout those latitudes are burning down rainforests for bullshit reasons!

postingpals 6y ago
The amazon rainforest is not the only forest on earth. Watch the latest David Attenborough documentary if you'd like a bit more understanding of how forests are destroyed and replaced with oil palm trees, in a way it is worse than the amazon because this is justified by profit motives whereas the amazon was a poor leadership decision.
- da39a3ee 6y ago
  It is however the most important remaining area of tropical forest on Earth, because of its size and the fact that large pristine areas still exist. That's not to say that conservation issues in the Congo basin, tropical SE Asia, Borneo, Papua New Guinea etc are not as important. But I think you should be cautious about making a statement like that about Amazonia.
baq 6y ago
Money is no bullshit. It must stop make economic sense.

pmlnr 6y ago

> A palm oil alternative You mean... any other vegetable oil, like it used to be?

baq 6y ago

I would love to buy food without palm oil, but right now it just seems impossible. A workable alternative is desperately needed. Regulators have very little incentive to tax palm oil (not the importers’ problem, exporters happily take money and don’t care about the environment). Hopefully a replacement could make taxing the original work.

KozmoNau7 6y ago
At least here it's certainly very possible to avoid palm oil. Read the list of ingredients and don't buy anything with palm oil as a listed ingredient. Always read the ingredients and the nutritional information. Yes, that means going without pre-baked pastries, frozen dinners and similar products. I think that sacrifice is worth it.

yholio 6y ago

People don't cut the rainforest to produce palm oil. They cut it to make money and improve their livelihood in a political environment that places no value on rainforest. If palm oil prices drop tomorrow to zero, those people will become even poorer, the value of the rainforest will remain zero, so they will cut it even further to plant the next best profitable cash crop not yet made obsolete by technology. This is a common pattern among green initiatives, trying to solve things by creating poverty and scarcity, expecting people far away to happily plow in manure so that they can buy a pair of jeans made from organic cotton at the latest pop-up fashion store. Survival is the most powerful force driving the human race forward. If you want to save the rain forest, there is a very simple trick to it: make sure the economy in the area is able to create 1000$/month environmentally sustainable jobs. At that labor price, survival farming and destroying the habitat does not pay, the palm oil farms will not find labor and will close down. Since in economic reality that's not at all a simple trick, we can suplement it with political measures, things that give value to the rainforest or strongly penalize its destruction: international agreements, subsidies and tariffs, sustainable tourism etc. But whatever method we chose, it should not ignore the actual people living there, their intelligence comparable to our own and their fight for survival.

mangecoeur 6y ago
This point was also made in David Attenborough’s recent climate documentary: the point is not about palm oil but about rainforest protection. If there is no protection, and if people can’t make a living another way, the forest will be cut for whatever makes money. The most tragic example i’ve seen is rainforest turned into those wood chips they put around potted plants. Is that a high value commodity? No. But it makes >0 money and if the value given to the wild forest is zero, then it will happen.
- worldsayshi 6y ago
  The solution should be fairly simple. Give wild forest a >0 value by paying people for keeping it wild. I mean of course it's not a new idea and apparently it's very difficult in practice but it seems like the obvious response to that logic.

Mengkudulangsat 6y ago

The largest buyer of palm oil is India [1], and the largest use case for palm oil is as cooking oil. If we want to pursue a replacement for palm oil, we need to solve for that specific use case on a technical level. Cooking oil (simplifying greatly) is just a heat transfer medium from the stove to all surfaces of the food being fried. Like a catalyst, ideally it should not be consumed in the process. If we can develop a benign heat transfer medium that is infinitely recyclable in cooking, that should be a real replacement for palm oil. [1] https://scroll.in/article/967186/as-worlds-largest-importer-of-palm-oil-india-has-a-duty-to-push-for-ethical-production-practices https://scroll.in/article/967186/as-worlds-largest-importer-...

elric 6y ago
Somewhat tengential, but one of the driving forces behind India's cooking style (simmering stuff for a long time over a relatively low heat) is due to their lack of combustible fuel. A lot of cooking was (is?) done using cow dung for fuel. This results in a slow, long burn but doesn't reach very high temperatures.
- CommieDetector 6y ago
  So the solution is again MASSIVE investment in NUCLEAR power to give access to cheap and reliable energy.
diydsp 6y ago
In frying, the oil is purposefully consumed. In "heat transfer" cases, water-frying can be done. I do it all the time. Keeps calories low though it's less tasty and satisfying. Also easier to clean!
- Mengkudulangsat 6y ago
  The problem with water-frying (boiling?) is you can't get to the critical temperature (140C+) for Maillard reactions needed to brown the batter. I am by no means an expert in food science, but it's something I've wondered for a long time. It'll be great if we never have to throw away used cooking oil (when it isn't consumed of course, like when making fried chickens).

bttrfl 6y ago

We are bothered by deforestation and diminishing biodiversity yet we fail to put monetary value on rainforests. Let's make Brazil one of the richest countries in the world for what they have and they will make sure not a single tree is ever cut down. Ecuador was asking for $3.6B so they could afford not to dig out their oil and save one of the richest ecosystems in the World. The World pledged just $200M. It's a sad lesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasun%C3%AD-ITT_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasun%C3%AD-ITT_Initiative

AntiImperialist 6y ago

So, they'll ferment "food waste"? Sure! If this catches up, I can see them mostly fermenting grains or sugar because collecting and fermenting food waste is more expensive. So, instead of cutting down forests for planting palm trees, you cut it down for planting corn.

da39a3ee 6y ago

> Added to that is the aversion of consumers in many markets to eating anything that might contain an ingredient derived from genetically modified microbes. Which is exactly why those of us who care deeply about natural habitat conservation from a scientific point of view wish that the public were more influenced by scientifically-minded conservationists and less influenced by organizations like Greenpeace, who oppose GM on a basis that can only be called flimsy hippy ideology.

ChrisRR 6y ago

I thought palm oil was already one of the most efficient oils in terms of land and water usage? And can be grown in sustainable areas. Surely the issue isn't the oil itself, but that poor farmers are seeing the rainforest as free farm land and will cut it down to make a profit. If you replace one oil with another, won't poor farmers still do the same?

neurostimulant 6y ago
Most of palm oil plantations here in Indonesia are owned by large corporations. The "poor farmers" who till their own land usually plant rice, fruits, veggies, coffee, cacao or spices instead, and their farmland is actually close to their villages instead of deep within the cut-down rainforest.

hikerclimb 6y ago

I hope this doesn’t work