29/10/2009 (Green Planet.net) - Switching to a 100 per cent certified sustainable supply of palm oil in all its own-brand products by 2014 is the goal of the British retailer Sainsbury's after starting using the first certified sustainable oil arrived on the market last year.

"A green turn that is born from the growing awareness that a solution is needed to create a sustainable growing system for palm oil - which is found in thousands of food products and is one of several oils that can be labelled "vegetable oil" on a list of ingredients - in order to decrease deforestation and ensure fairer gains to producers" explained Chief executive of Sainsbury's in a comment for The Independent.

For some years, an organisation called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which Sainsbury's helped found together with other major companies such as Unilever (see our related news) and international organizations such as WWF, has been working on a solution. Last year, the first certified sustainable palm oil arrived on the market. Sainsbury's immediately started using it in their own-brand fish fingers, before rolling it out to the rest of their frozen fish range. "Now we use sustainable palm oil in our own-brand soap while next month it will be introduced to digestive and rich tea biscuits lines" Justin King highlighted. 

Other UK retailers and manufacturers have not been as quick, Justin King says. Sustainable palm oil is expensive as it requires separate storage, infrastructure and growing practices. If more firms started buying it, it would stimulate the market and prompt more producers to make the necessary investment. This would lead to better prices, an increase in production and a decrease in deforestation, The Independent reports.

"Sainsbury's has been leading the way in this regard, from being the first retailer to buy RSPO oil, to becoming the first to label it as "palm oil", helping consumers to become more aware of its importance to the food industry" Justin King stressed.

Most of the world's supply comes from South-east Asia where countries including Indonesia and Malaysia, keen to provide economic opportunity for their growing populations, are clearing thousands of acres of forest to make way for plantations. But when grown and processed sustainably, palm is an excellent and environmentally beneficial crop because it so high-yielding, requiring less land than other vegetable oils. The problem lies in tracing the origins of the oil we put in our food.

As much as a third comes from smallholders working on micro-plantations who take their crop to a local mill for processing. This crude palm oil is then sent to refineries, often in Europe, where it is mixed with other shipments. This makes it difficult for manufacturers to pinpoint where their supply has originated, in order to determine whether it has caused any virgin rainforest to be destroyed.