07/03/2013 (Sky News) - The deaths of thousands of orangutans amid widespread environmental degradation have been laid at the door of the oil palm industry.

It's an emotive issue that's prompted an attempt in Australia's parliament to force manufacturers to list palm oil as an ingredient on food labels so consumers can avoid it or choose sustainably produced oil.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon's truth in labelling bill would make failure to label palm oil as an ingredient a breach of consumer law with hefty fines.

His bill, launched in 2009, passed the Senate but is stalled in the lower house due to a lack of support.

Senator Xenophon hasn't given up.

Not with in-principle support from the coalition and an election ahead.

'I am hopeful there will be changes sooner rather than later,' he says.

'Consumers are treated disgracefully.

'I want food labelling, and not just of palm oil, to be an election issue.'

His primary beef is about how some crops are produced.

Conservation websites claim palm oil costs the lives of up to 50 orangutans a week as the equivalent of 300 football fields are deforested every hour for palm oil production.

Xenophon says there'll always be a place for palm oil in food.

'The issue is to give an absolute priority to sustainable palm oil,' he says.

His bill would see certified sustainable palm oil listed as 'CS Palm Oil' to give consumers an ethical option.

'You can have a sustainable industry, it is not incompatible,' he says.

Curtin University's Professor of Geography, George Curry, says there's a sustainable palm oil industry right next door - in Papua New Guinea.

He's been working in PNG since 1988, with research funded by bodies including Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research.

The palm oil industry globally has a major image problem that's been well deserved in some parts of South-East Asia, he says.

'There are a lot of people against it. They did terrible things in some parts of South-East Asia,' Curry said.

'But in the PNG context, it is quite different.'

The problems are highlighted in a special edition on palm oil of the journal Asia Pacific Viewpoint, in which he and Rob Cramb, of University of Queensland, say palm oil is the most consumed vegetable oil globally with about 13 per cent used for biofuel.

It's very attractive to investors because it's the highest yielding of the oil-producing crops and it doesn't need as much pesticide.

To produce one tonne of vegetable oil from soybeans would take ten times more land than oil palms need per tonne.

But the rapid expansion of plantations in the Asia Pacific caused a raft of economic, social and environmental problems in parts of South-East Asia, Curry and Cramb write.

In Indonesia and Malaysia, customary claims to land were overridden in a land grab that saw public land and forest transformed into large scale plantations to benefit a few agribusinesses and their political patrons, they say.

Some people were pushed off their land or drafted into plantation workforces.

But that story is not universal, Curry says.

Oil palm provides a pathway out of poverty for rural people in some cases.

It's a reason why Australia funds research into how a sustainable industry might be developed across the region that enhances rural livelihoods while minimising the environmental impact.

Curry says PNG's small oil palm industry produces significant income and is driving the economies in the provinces where it's grown.

'They have got the whole country certified. It's a remarkable achievement and there are financial advantages in having it like that,' he says.

All PNG's smallholder farmers and large plantations have been recognised as sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

It's a vital tick of approval for ensuring there is respect for the rights of customary land owners, local communities, plantation workers, small farmers, that no new primary forests have been cleared for production since November 2005, and that mills minimise their environmental footprint.

But PNG's achievement appears under threat from a land grab, Curry says.

Claims for land have been made under special agricultural and business leases over about 5.5 million hectares, or about 10 per cent of the country.

While most purport to be for oil palm development they have nothing to do with the existing, sustainable industry, and appear to be a way for companies to get access to logging while circumventing restrictions on accessing timber.

Ian Orrell, executive director of the PNG Palm Oil Council, says they pose a massive reputational risk for the country and its palm oil exports.