22/09/2009 (Deforestration Watch) - Writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Sandy Bauers bemoans the fact that palm oil appears to be in everything.  She writes: “The world of suds is quite the soap opera. Trying to sort it out took me into global commerce, biodiesel, and vegetarianism.”

She announces quite empathetically: “One thing I learned: Industry loves palm oil!”

Foodwise, it's a cheap substitute for fats. According to the American Palm Oil Council, 90 percent of palm oil is used in foods. The other 10 percent is used in soaps, plastics, candles, and skin-care products. And in biodiesel, to replace vanishing petroleum.

In an inadvertent admission and a dead giveaway of the real reason behind her anti-palm oil strop (and the real reason behind the anti-palm oil campaigns) she concludes: “Palm oil is an often-used replacement for animal fats because it has many of the same properties, and it's cheap as heck.!”

Therein lies the confession. Palm oil is not only a replacement for animal fats, but for other vegetable fats such as soy, rapeseed (Canola) and sunflower.

If Ms Bauers had cared to delve a little deeper into the reasons as to why industry is so enamored of palm oil, she’d find that cost competitiveness is not the only reason.

Industry can spot a phony cause a mile away, even if the cause is “supported” by a whole assortment of “environmental types” and perhaps because it is supported by a whole cabal of environmental types like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE), Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Palm Oil Action Group (POA). 

The real reason why industry does not give much credence to the white noise coming from this disparate grouping of  “environmental” agitators is the sheer incongruity of the agitators’ claims against palm oil, especially the palm oil produced in Malaysia.

It is well known that Malaysia is a small country.  With a total land mass roughly that of New Mexico, this small South East Asian nation had been planting palm oil for a long time, in fact, for over a century. Yet, it was the world’s largest producer of the commodity.

Small country.? World’s largest producer of palm oil? Deforestation? How can it ever be reconciled?

What does that tell you? Palm oil does not require quite as much land as the agitators would want you to believe.

Palm oil is in fact, the most productive of all the oilseeds, so productive that it has a yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is close to 10 times that of its nearest competitor, soy.

That explains why industry gives short shrift to the white noise coming from the anti-palm oil cacophony drummed up by the alphabet soup “environmental” outfits like FOE, RAN, POA etc.

Deforestation Watch is inclined to think that this trend will continue as little by little, consumers wake up to the incongruity of the agitators claims against palm oil and realize that the anti-palm oil campaigns are really clever proxy trade wars fought on behalf of palm oil’s competitors by “environmental” organizations such as the afore-named cabal of alphabet soup organizations.