Is palm oil environmentally friendly?
22/06/2009 (The Times) - Q I recently bought a bottle of cooking oil sourced from palm oil. It tastes fine and the label says it’s healthy and comes from environmentally sustainable plantations. But there has been a lot of adverse publicity about such oils — what should I believe?

A Last year palm oil producers were taken to task by the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for a television commercial that claimed the oil was a sustainable product. The trees on plantations, said the advert, “help the planet to breathe”. The ASA said the ad was misleading.

Yet palm oil is something of a miracle product. The palm oil tree is amazingly productive, capable of yielding far more oil per hectare than other crops such as rapeseed. Palm oil is widely used in our bread, margarine, cereals, sweets, biscuits as well as soaps and washing powders. It’s also an important component of biofuels.

Palm oil production has exploded in recent years — from 10 million tonnes in 1980 to about 40 million tonnes last year, with Malaysia and Indonesia accounting for 85 per cent of the total global output.

Undoubtedly vast swaths of rainforest — home to an immense array of flora and fauna as well as serving as a vital “carbon sink” for greenhouse gases — have been chopped down to accommodate palm oil plantations.

If present trends continue, it is forecast that there will be little virgin tropical forest left in Indonesia in 15 years’ time. Furthermore, the clearing of large areas of peat bog for plantations threatens to release substantial additional amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Under pressure from the EU and others, producers have pledged not to chop down more virgin forest while many of the big conglomerates buying palm oil from South-East Asia say that in future years they will purchase only from sustainable sources. The difficulty is actually defining what is and what is not sustainable — and monitoring whether producers in remote places are obeying environmental guidelines.

It is calculated that at present, less than 5 per cent of palm oil produced is from what are judged to be sustainable plantations. A first shipment of such oil arrived in the EU late last year, but producers complain that buyers are reluctant to pay a premium of between 15 and 50 per cent above the market price.

Finding out if your particular palm oil sourced product is from a sustainable plantation would involve a Poirot-like search along a very complex supply chain — and a journey to Malaysia or Indonesia. Don’t be afraid to ask the shop or supermarket if they can guarantee the claims on the products they sell. Enjoy the oil — but remain sceptical.