The Palm Oil Crisis

Background: The Palm Oil Crisis. Reasons to stop purchasing and consuming products with Palm Oil 

• Environmental Degradation and Destruction 

  1.  Slash and burn of tropical forests

  2. Causes habitat loss for critically rare and endangered species

  3. Rainforest habitat loss is the greatest driver of global climate change 

• Human Rights Abuses

  1. Murder and rape of protesters and villagers by government and company-funded armed forces

  2. Destruction of villages; pollution water sources

  3. Illegal arrests and imprisonment 

  4. Subjugate negative impacts on Indigenous Peoples

• Health Issues

  1. Highly saturated fats - detrimental to cardiovascular health (Ex: Heart attack and stroke)

  2. Shelf life of products increased with palm oil for months to years resulting in a loss of nutritional value

The Unsustainability of ‘Red Gold’:

Palm oil has become symbolic of forest destruction, similar to other products like rubber, cattle, and soy. While progress has been made in highlighting the need for sustainable palm oil (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil Impact Report - 2023), existing corporate sustainability initiatives have largely fallen short, oftentimes committing greenwashing (Dauvergne, 2018). Greenwashing efforts fail to recognize and rectify the ecological and social realities on the ground in tropical regions. Corporations are purchasing the “red gold” (palm oil) at an increasingly higher rate (Berenschot et al., 2024), further perpetuating forest destruction at a grand scale in tropical regions around the world. Existing certification systems, like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), represent conflicts of interest in that these systems are governed by corporate palm oil operations. And, despite the existence of the RSPO, there has not been a significant reduction in increased forest clearing for oil palm plantations (VanderWilde et al., 2023). The RSPO's standards for sustainable palm oil have shown a lack of accountability, as the corporation's increasing land use raises concerns about shifting the sustainability goalposts from the RSPO's perspective. 

Berenschot, Ward, Ahmad Dhiaulhaq, Otto Hospes, Afrizal, and Daniel Pranajaya. 2024. "Corporate Contentious Politics: Palm Oil Companies and Land Conflicts in Indonesia." Political Geography 114: 103166. doi: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103166.

Dauvergne, Peter. 2018. "The Global Politics of the Business of “Sustainable” Palm Oil." Global Environmental Politics 18(2): 34-52. doi: 10.1162/glep_a_00455.

Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil Impact Report - 2023. https://rspo.org/wp-content/uploads/Impact-Update-2023_.pdf

VanderWilde, Calli P., Joshua P. Newell, Dimitrios Gounaridis, and Benjamin P. Goldstein. 2023. "Deforestation, Certification, and Transnational Palm Oil Supply Chains: Linking Guatemala to Global Consumer Markets." Journal of Environmental Management 344: 118505-118505. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.118505.