Palm oil is just that: oil from the fruit of a palm tree. Sounds as vegan as anything,
right? Well, this most certainly plant-derived oil found in processed foods, makeup, household
cleaners, toiletries, biodiesel, and more, is far from a black and white ingredient.
It’s one of the world’s most hotly debated crops, with concerns over deforestation, habitat
destruction, loss of biodiversity, species extinction, and a slew of human rights violations
in its wake, thus begging the question: IS palm oil vegan?
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan and welcome to another vegan nugget. Today’s video is
one that’s been requested more times that I can count and one that I greatly hesitated
to produce. Not because I think the truth about palm oil is unimportant by any means,
but because when you are a brand new vegan or when you’re considering going vegan,
the intricacies of what is or is not vegan beyond meat, dairy, eggs, and honey, can easily
overwhelm, leading to the exasperated “well what CAN I eat?!” or even worse “being
vegan’s too hard, I might as well not try!”
While it’s always important for us to be informed about the products we are choosing,
and I believe education is absolutely key, I want to say to brand new or would-be vegans
to focus on eliminating animal products first, get your bearings, and you’ll start to find
a growing awareness of other elements. This is not to excuse the affects of palm oil we’ll
be discussing, but rather to assure you that in removing animal products from your diet,
you will be making a huge impact already in all the areas we will be covering.
I’m going to attempt to make this video as simple and concise as possible by touching
on the major elements. If you want to delve deeper, which I’m always a fan of, and for
detailed citations to every study and fact that I’m mentioning, please see the blog
post for this video, which has resources and close to 60 academic citations. This issue
is terrifically complex and while I’ll relay suggestions at the end, you’ll see it’s
difficult to produce a clear-cut yes or no to the videos establishing query.
There are three main areas of concern when it comes to palm oil: the impact on the environment,
animals, and people. I’ll briefly touch on each, though all three are inextricably
linked.
Let’s start with the social impact, or human side of palm oil. Once heralded, even by the
United Nations, as a high-yielding, environmentally-friendly, economically-viable and even healthy “magic
bullet” to help struggling farmers in undeveloped nations build economic stability and provide
a cheap yet nutritious source of calories, palm oil production has proven to be far from
the golden child of workers' rights.
Though some case studies and accounts continue to praise the positive socio-economic aspects
of palm oil and it very much has dramatically improved the economies of producing countries,
namely Indonesia and Malaysia, which account for up to 90% of palm oil exports, the palm
oil industry is rife with human rights abuses including the illegal seizure of indigenous
peoples’ lands, labor trafficking, child labor, unprotected work with hazardous chemicals,
and long-term abuse of temporary contracts.
Palm oil workers, in many cases, end up like indentured servants, struggling to pay back
debt. Of course there also exist case studies of villages finding great prosperity from
the introduction of plantations, though often new problems can arise from the cash influx
like gambling and alcohol consumption.
A concretely negative aspect of palm oil farming for humans, the environment and non-human
animals alike are toxic pesticides. Pesticide usage isn’t monitored or controlled on plantations
with around 25 different types being regularly employed. One of great concern is paraquat,
the most toxic herbicide marketed over the past 60 years, which has been banned in 13
countries. Agrochemicals have been shown to be more harmful to women than men, and women
on palm oil plantations, as with many crops, are responsible for the mixing, handling and
spraying of the pesticides.
This brings us into the environmental impact of palm oil production, which is irrevocably
enmeshed with the impact on native species. The main elements of concern are the loss
of forested land, leading to habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity, and the extreme
greenhouse gas emissions caused by burning peatland, which I’ll explain in a moment.
According to the World Watch Institute, Indonesia emits more greenhouse gases than any other
country besides China and the United States mainly due to palm oil production, with the
World Resources Institute ranking its output as 7th in the world. While clear-cutting forested
land in and of itself is environmentally destructive, the conversion of what’s called peatland
into plantations is nothing short of devastating.
Peat is a water-logged, organic soil layer made up of dead and decaying plant matter
that is rich with carbon. Peatlands are vital to the reduction of global warming as they
absorb carbon and other greenhouse gasses, and Southeast Asia, where palm oil plantations
are blossoming, contains three quarters of the world’s tropical peat-soil carbon. If
all of this peat-stored carbon were released into the atmosphere, it would be equivalent
to the carbon emissions from about nine years of global fossil fuel use.
These vital ecosystems are actually not ideal for palm oil plantations, and ample grasslands
and degraded areas exist whereupon plantations could be built, however, companies can subsidize
the cost of clearing peatland by selling the timber taken from the areas, and thus follow
the most profitable route.
To convert peatland into palm oil farms, it has to first be drained, which causes the
peat to decompose, leading to heat-trapping emissions that can continue for decades. The
peat eventually compacts, falling below the water table at which point it must again be
drained. In addition, peat soil is often too acidic for oil palms and must have chemicals
added for viability.
Possibly the most devastating practice for the environment and human and non-human animals
alike is the intentional burning of peatland as an easy way to clear land for agriculture.
These fires, which are some of the world’s largest fires on record, release hundreds
of years’ worth of carbon and pollutants into the atmosphere and burn for weeks to
months.
In dry years, the carbon emissions are astronomical. In 1997 fires in Indonesia released as much
CO2 into the atmosphere as the United States had for that entire year. And when it comes
to the environment, when you outdo the United Sates in your destruction, you know it’s
bad. These fires can even become a public health hazard with the smoke and smog from
fires in Indonesia in 2013 causing respiratory problems as far away as Malaysia and Singapore.
Of course these fires aren’t just destroying the forests, but also the living beings within
them. Animals are burned alive while trying to flee and are often massacred by farm workers
as they try to escape or purposefully driven back into the flames. In the 1997 fires alone,
Borneo’s orangutan population was reduced by one-third when close to 8,000 of these
already endangered primates were burned to death or directly killed. Poachers also take
advantage of these burns to kill fleeing animals like the Sumatran rhino, which as of 2008
had a population of fewer than 275 individuals.
The threat this destruction poses to our world’s biodiversity cannot be overstated. Southeast
Asia is one of the most biodiverse regions of the planet. While comprising only 3% of
the world’s surface, it contains around 20% of all plant, animal and marine species
on the planet! It has 4 of the world’s 25 biodiversity hotspots, which are defined as
“a biogeographical region rich in biodiversity but under anthropogenic threat [meaning from
human-caused pollution] ..and 70% of its original habitat must have been lost.”
The orangutan is certainly the face of palm oil’s devastation to non-human animals,
with the critically endangered Sumatran population hovering around 7,300 as of 2004. But hundreds
of other threatened species in Southeast Asia are also being horrifically impacted by palm
oil production. The Sumatran tigers population, for example, was reported in 2008 to be a
paltry 176-271 individuals left, with elephants and rhinos also at great risk.
With all of this destruction and violence, what’s being done about palm oil production’s
long shadow? In 2004, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil was established with the objective
of promoting the growth and use of sustainable oil palm products through credible global
standards and engagement of stakeholders. Composed of oil palm producers, processors
or traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, banks/investors, and environmental
and social NGOs, the Roundtable has been largely criticized for not implementing its own standards.
There are numerous loopholes in the RSPO’s certifications like plantations being “grandfathered”
in and extremely subjective language for judging high value conservation forest versus forest
green-lighted for clearing. Groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists have called
for objective parameters for sustainability, such as caps of greenhouse gas emissions,
to no avail.
Companies like Unilever, who are also RSPO members, are still sourcing their palm oil
by unsustainable and ethically questionable methods, with plantation workers crashing
the 2013 RSPO meeting with the call “don’t certify exploitation,” and three case studies
finding rampant human rights violations at RSPO certified plantations in Indonesia.
Novi Hardianto, the Center for Orangutan Protection habitat program coordinator says that despite
the RSPO, “Forests are still cleared and orangutans are continually killed…All criteria
on sustainable palm oil and certification process are merely public lies.”
So, is there hope? And what are we to do as vegans or potential vegans when we walk into
a store to make a purchase? Is there such a thing as sustainable palm oil? And, after
all of this, is palm oil even vegan?
Well, palm oil, in theory, can be made sustainably by using degraded lands and grasslands instead
of forests and on mineral soils instead of peatland. Increasing yield on existing plantations
through tree breeding and better management, can reduce the need for using more land. Governments
can call for mandatory labeling of palm oil on ingredient labels, as currently there are
over 200 palm oil derivative terms in use.
Groups like Palm Oil Investigations believe that mandatory labeling will place companies
in a position to source Certified Sustainable Palm Oil, which is different from the RSPO’s
stamp, because consumers will be aware of their use of palm oil and be able to demand
sustainable sources. They also argue that contacting brands and encouraging them to
shift to actual sustainable palm oil is even preferable to full boycotts. The logic being
that palm oil companies aren’t going out of business anytime soon and if no one demands
truly sustainable options, they’ll keep producing with their current cheap and destructive
methods.
Of course there’s also the argument that such consumer-driven tactics are vain attempts
to fix the underlying problem of capitalism with capitalistic efforts, and that an entire
overhauling of our economic systems and food distribution politics is needed.
Now I’d like to try and put this into the greater vegan framework, if I may. With any
agricultural production, there will be destruction. I have a whole video on whether vegans kill
more animals than non-vegans due to the field mice, rabbits and other animals who are unintentionally
killed during harvests, as well as a video on whether you can be 100 percent vegan and
whether you’re vegan “enough,” all of which address this issue and are linked below.
Should we be aware of and constantly striving to educate ourselves about where our food
and other products come from and whom they impact? Absolutely. The danger comes when
we are so overwhelmed that we throw up our hands and think it’s not worth it to even
try.
Animal agriculture, as I demonstrated in an extensive video linked there and below, accounts
for 51% of global Green House Gas emissions, a staggering 91% of Amazon rainforest destruction, and
is itself a leading cause of species extinction and loss of biodiversity, not to mention the
deaths of trillions of beings every year.
I’m not here to play the numbers game or place the impact of palm oil beneath that
of animal products. What I’m trying to say to those of you who are newly vegan or wanting
to be vegan is: the efforts you are making are not discounted by those you are learning
to make.
If we give up entirely because we aren’t perfect, what kind of impact are we having?
Yes, we can always improve, which to me is the definition of veganism- doing the best
with what we know and always working to educate ourselves and adjust our behavior accordingly.
So I would encourage you to look into this further for yourself. Check out the blog post
and the resources. I’ve included links to lists of products known to contain palm oil
and lists of palm-oil free products as well as a phone app you can use to scan products
and check for pam oil and more.
Luckily, palm oil is in processed foods, so if you eat a whole foods diet, chances are,
you’re largely avoiding it already. But do know that vegan food items, toiletries,
cleaning products and more, can contain palm oil.
I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you consider palm oil vegan? Whether
you’re vegan or non-vegan, do you avoid palm oil in your products and if so, why?
What do you think the solution is to this industry? Let me know in the comments.
I hope that this has been helpful. The time it to produce this video clocks in at around
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