Hello!
Today there is no such person who has not heard about palm oil.
It is considered the cheapest in the world.
But what is the cost of this cheapness?
We'll talk about it in our video.
Today, cheap palm oil is found in many everyday products.
It is the most consumed oil on the planet.
It accounts for 35% of total consumption.
The main suppliers of palm oil, Malaysia and Indonesia, account for approximately 84% of
the global market.
In some years, the cost of a kilogram of palm oil was as low as $2.
However, the cultivation of oil palm causes a lot of controversy around the world.
And this is not surprising, because in order to make room for palm plantations, huge areas
of tropical forests are cut down in the world.
So why is this oil so readily available and so low in price?
Palm oil is in almost everything today, from chocolate to bread, and from instant noodles
to shampoos.
And without much thought, all over the world, each of us consumes an average of about 8
kg of palm oil per year.
Because the written ingredients on the product label can simply be overlooked.
Oil palm cultivation originated in the coastal regions of equatorial West Africa.
Palm trees were first introduced to Malaysia in 1875.
In 2017, the Malaysian palm oil industry celebrated 100 years of commercial production.
Malaysia provides 29% of global palm oil production and 37% of global exports and is the second
largest palm oil producer in the world after Indonesia.
The history of commercial oil palm cultivation began in 1917, when the enterprising Frenchman
Henri Falconier established the first commercial oil palm plantation on the Batang Berjuntai
estate near the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur in 1917.
Prior to this, Falconir was first fascinated by the appearance of the plant after visiting
a friend's oil palm plantation in the Delhi Sultanate in eastern Sumatra.
When he learned about the beneficial properties of the palm tree, he decided to purchase some
seedlings to plant on his estate.
Over time, the plantation grew and the business became the leading palm oil exporter in Malaysia.
This has become possible thanks to intensive research and development of methods to improve
the quality of the product produced.
In the 1920s, all efforts were focused on breeding palms, improving their genetics and
physiology.
The scientists were also able to shorten the trees to make it easier to harvest the fruit.
All this made it possible to give palm oil an advantage over other types of edible oils.
Palm oil can withstand high temperatures, making it ideal for deep frying and cholesterol-free.
But for a hundred years it was not clear how to pollinate plants.
So hundreds of workers have pollinated the flowers by hand over the years.
Which, of course, was ineffective.
That was until the introduction of African palm weevils into the country in 1981.
These small beetles began to pollinate plants without human intervention.
They move, and in a humid tropical climate, pollen from male flowers sticks to the body
of insects.
Tiny beetles then deposit pollen grains on the stigmas of the female flowers.
In this way, small, nondescript weevils have saved the palm oil industry more than US$10
billion over several decades by pollinating countless oil palms.
In this way, the beetles increased the yield of palm oil plantations by as much as 43%
to 20 tons of fresh fruit bunches per hectare.
Since then, palm oil production has skyrocketed and its popularity has grown steadily.
Demand especially jumped in the 1990s, when the negative health effects of the use of
trans fats found in many processed products became clear.
Palm oil has been used to replace them.
And as the number of highly processed products increased, so did the amount of oil used.
But there was a price to be paid for this incredible growth.
The rapid expansion of palm oil plantations has led to the destruction of vast areas of
tropical forests and the creation of hazardous carbon dioxide emissions.
This contributed to the destruction of the remaining habitats of animals that are already
endangered.
The activities of various companies continue to cause serious damage to the environment,
further reducing habitat and fragmenting forests.
As a result, iconic species such as orangutans are increasingly being deprived of suitable
habitat in the forests where they once thrived.
According to the Indonesian Ministry of Environment and Forestry, the number of orangutans in
the Indonesian part of Borneo has dropped significantly in just over a decade.
Many of the forests that great apes still inhabit in Borneo have thinned out considerably,
forcing the animals to continue to retreat to denser forest areas.
Of the 57,350 Bornean orangutans in the wild in Kalimantan, a fifth currently live outside
protected areas, according to the Indonesian government, putting them at greater risk of
poaching.
In just two decades, from 1990 to 2010, 3.5 million hectares of forest were cleared for
palm oil plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
This is comparable to the area of Germany.
According to a 2007 United Nations Environment Report released at the time, at this rate
of deforestation, by 2022, 98 percent of Indonesian forests will be destroyed due to legal and
illegal logging, wildfires, and palm oil plantation development.
Seeing the devastation caused, your first wish may be to give up palm oil entirely.
But looking for alternatives can actually make things worse.
Palm oil is so efficient that it would take 10 times more land to use the alternative
oil to grow oilseeds.
It is the highest yielding oilseed, requiring less than half the land required by other
oilseeds to produce the same amount of oil.
One hectare of palm plantation produces an average of up to six tons of oil per year,
making palm oil the cheapest cooking oil in the world.
Oil palms are evergreen, perennial plants.
They provide oil throughout the year.
Palm trees can grow well in soils that are not accessible to many other plants.
In 2004, to promote the growth and use of sustainable palm oil products through global
standards and multi-stakeholder governance, non-governmental organizations and companies
around the world established the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
This organization has defined criteria for the sustainable cultivation of this crop.
But it wasn't until 2018 that the Roundtable developed a set of environmental and social
criteria that companies must meet in order for the oil they produce to be considered
certified palm oil (CSPO).
When properly applied, these criteria can minimize the negative impacts of deforestation.
Palm oil production is highly profitable and employs millions of small farmers in producing
countries.
In Indonesia and Malaysia alone, 4.5 million people depend on palm oil production for their
livelihood.
Over the past decades, palm oil production has grown into a major global industry.
Today, farmers produce more than 70 million tons of palm oil per year, more than double
what they produced just 20 years ago.
Palm oil plantations currently cover about 27 million hectares, an area larger than New
Zealand.
And while coconuts, corn, and many fruit trees require intensive and costly post-harvest
treatment at every harvest, in oil palm cultivation, all the oil farmer has to do is harvest and
deliver the fruits to the processing plant within 2-3 days of harvest.
harvest.
The earlier the delivery, the better, because the quality of the oil depends on the condition
of the fruit.
Many farmers produce palm oil in an artisanal way.
The ancient manual technology for making palm oil has not changed today, because the principle
of obtaining oil is the same.
First, the fruits are separated from the cuttings and debris, sterilized and placed in a container
with hot steam under pressure.
There, the fruits soften, if they are broken by hand, an orange oily liquid will run down
the fingers.
When heated, the palm oil will melt and separate from the pulp.
Now they are ready for pressing.
The press presses both the pulp itself and the hard bone inside.
These are different oils, but they are broken down into fractions already in the process
of further processing.
Well, then complex chemical processes begin, where the oil is hydronized, separated, and
so on.
The output is not only raw palm oil, but also many by-products.
Raw palm oil initially has a red-red color due to the high content of carotenoids, it
is separated into red and yellow after processing, fractionation and refining.
A similar process takes place in the industrial production of palm oil at biochemical enterprises.
After the oil palm fruits are extracted from the plantation, they are transported to a
nearby primary processing plant, where the raw palm oil is actually extracted by pressing.
The second stage is a complete processing at the plant, where, after complete purification
of the oil and removal of free fatty acids, the finished product is obtained.
In the early stages of oil palm fruit formation, its oil content is very
low - as the fruit approaches maturity, oil can take up to 50% of the mass of the intercarp.
After the fruit breaks away from the bunch, due to
the action of enzymes on it, the content of fatty acids increases rapidly.
Therefore, they try to process the fruits as early as possible.
To preserve the properties of the oil, factories for its production are located directly next
to the plantations.
Fruits are recommended to be processed within 48 hours from the moment of harvesting.
To begin with, the fruits must be separated from
each other, a rotating mechanical drum is considered the classic way to separate the
fruits from the bunches.
After that, the fruits are subjected to high-temperature processing, during which the enzymes that
break down the oil are destroyed, and the hydrolysis and autoxidation of the fruit are
stopped.
The pulp of the fruit softens, which makes it easier to separate the fibrous material
from the rest of the contents of the fruit, which
in
turn makes it easier
to extract the oil.
The result of such processing is raw palm oil, from
which
the final consumer product is further produced.
That's all.
If you liked this video please like and subscribe to the channel.
See you again.