This one ingredient exploits people, endangers animals, and accelerates the climate crisis
Sorry to be a downer, but palm oil really is that bad.
Jocelyn Zuckerman’s new book, Planet Palm, is about how a single ingredient—palm oil—has saturated food and beauty products globally, with devastating consequences. It’s filled with big, alarming numbers, and it can be difficult to wrap your head around what they really mean.
Here’s one that really tripped me up: 15 million acres.
While so much attention has been on the slashing and burning of the Amazon in recent years, Zuckerman writes that the deforestation rate in Indonesia quietly outpaced the rate in Brazil. 15 million acres of Indonesia’s forests were cleared between 2000 and 2012, and much of it was to keep planting oil palm trees as far as the eye could see. (FYI, palm oil is the ingredient; the tree it comes from is called the oil palm.)
I wanted to understand what 15 million acres looks like, so I figured out that it’s about the same amount of land as the entire state of West Virginia. West Virginia is a small state compared to many others, sure. But while visiting earlier this year, I was struck by the landscape. I drove on winding roads framed by thick forest and steep rock faces. I snowshoed to the top of a mountain and looked out over the vast forested expanse of the Dolly Sods Wilderness. To imagine an area the size of that entire state completely cleared of its natural resources is mind-boggling.
But Zuckerman went and saw the endless acres of oil palm plantations planted where forests once supported a diverse ecosystem of plants, animals, and people herself. In the book, she starts with palm oil’s long history as a culturally important food in West Africa and shows how colonialists turned it into the cheapest fat in the world, to make soap and every kind of unhealthy packaged food you could imagine. Today, two thirds of the palm oil produced globally is used in food products, by global companies like Kellog’s, Mars, Nestle, Cargill, and PepsiCo.
Nutella, Twix, Pop-Tarts, Oreos, Hot Pockets...all made with palm oil.
“How did a crop most Americans have barely heard of—let alone ever seen—come to permeate our lives so completely?” Zuckerman asks in the book. The short answer is that corporations cut every corner to produce more and more of it as cheaply as possible, in the process displacing indigenous people and endangered animals and putting people around the world at risk by accelerating the climate crisis via extensive deforestation.
I talked to Zuckerman about some of the moments that stood out from her reporting and whether companies that say they’re sourcing palm oil “sustainably” have a leg to stand on.
Unwrapped
One aspect of the book that struck me was the history. I’ve been following issues with palm oil for years, but I had no idea it was tied up with colonialism as far back as the 1800s. Given how much you had to cover in the present day, why did you decide to spend time digging into that? Part of it was that I found it so fascinating. Like you, I had no idea whatsoever that it was this important commodity way back when. And then I found out about Goldie and William Lever...and I felt like, ‘Wow, this has so many parallels with today in terms of forced labor and racism, frankly.”
During your reporting, you saw a lot of things most people will never see in Indonesia, Liberia, Brazil. You were talking to workers who were poisoned by pesticides, poachers, activists rescuing orangutans. Is there a moment that stood out and left a lasting impact on how you understand the impacts of palm oil? There were a couple of them. I would say one was when I visited some of the indigenous people in Sumatra. They were just marooned amid oil palm [plantations] all around them, literally under these royal blue tarps that they got from an aid agency. They were really skinny and so down and out and pissed off. And they said this—people in Liberia and elsewhere said this too—like, “The forest was our supermarket. We got everything there. This is all we ever needed. For generations we had clean water, we went and hunted for small animals, and we got fish and we got our building materials and our medicines.” And now they're just left there with nothing, and they're not used to living in cities. Their whole culture is built around the forest, and so they've lost all of their cultural traditions as well.
Another thing was when I spent some time with the guy in Honduras who had been electrocuted when his pole [used for harvesting the fruit] hit a wire. And then also when I was in Guatemala and I was in this community where the palm oil industry had come in. A company down there, its effluent ponds [of untreated waste] had overflowed after a heavy rain, and there was this huge fish kill for miles and miles, just hundreds of thousands of dead fish floating. And they said that after that there was only one kind of fish that survived, and they told the teenager, “Go get that fish and show her.” And he came back with this really ugly looking thing. I took a picture of it; it’s in the book. It was hard to the touch, and they said, “This is the only fish that survives.” You can't eat it, it's all bones. And when the women go to wash in the river it bites around their ankles.
After a few exposes on the immense deforestation happening for palm oil production and endangered orangutans, the industry created the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil or RSPO, and now a lot of products have an RSPO certification. Based on your reporting, is there any legitimacy to the certification, or is it total bullshit?
I think it's like 80 percent bullshit. Things have gotten better in part because of organizations like Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network. I went to a couple of these big RSPO annual meetings—in Bangkok and one in Kuala Lumpur—and those guys [from environmental organizations] are always there. And they're very forceful about calling the industry to task for saying that they've got these strong criteria but not enforcing them. So, it's gotten better. But It was formed in 2004, 17 years ago. Today, only 19 percent of the global palm oil supply is certified RSPO, and most Americans wouldn't know the little label if they saw it. So it seems to me that they haven't haven't gotten very far.
And I heard repeatedly and there have been different reports over the years...about the auditing system. These third party auditors come in to see how the plantations are running, but they're paid by the companies that they are auditing. So you know, it’s to be taken with a grain of salt from the get-go. And then as I explained in the book, in Honduras, I was talking to workers and I've read this elsewhere about other places. They said, “Oh, the RSPO auditor was here last week, and we were coached by management before they came. We were given a script...and my manager was standing next to me when I was being interviewed. And then afterward if people were too honest, they would be punished or even fired, and the ones who went by the script would be rewarded. There have also been reports that in Indonesia, they use “casual laborers,” mostly men who get a contract to bring in fruit, and there's a quota system. They have to bring in this much fruit at the end of the day in order to get their pay. So often they'll bring their wife and child or children to help them pick up the loose fruit so they can meet that quota. Those children and spouses don't get paid at all. And it's been reported that in some instances before the RSPO auditors came, these casual laborers were told to go...way over there so that the auditors wouldn't see them.
Aside from RSPO, individual companies have been making their own commitments to source palm oil “sustainably.” You actually end the book before the epilogue on this positive note about PepsiCo embracing a new policy. Based on your reporting, do you believe that there's a way for these companies to create policies that are actually effective on the ground?
I think there is, but I think they'd really have to try. I mean, I don't think it's sustainable to have miles and miles of monocultures all over the world. So I think it's a much bigger problem in terms of land use. But I think in terms of labor abuses and not planting right up to rivers, they could certainly do a way better job if they were made to. I think up until now they haven't been made to because most people don't know about it. Or there's some oversight, but these operations are so massive and so much of it is in such remote areas that they can still just get away with a lot.
I know it’s not going to be a simple answer, but my readers are going to want to know: Do you tell people to avoid palm oil?
It's a hard one. My main thing is to avoid processed foods, because 75 percent of the production of crude palm oil goes to those foods. In some places it’s cooking oil, margarine, but in this country, it's mostly mass-produced baked goods, chocolate, ice cream, Nutella. I think it's much harder to avoid in personal-care products..but my idea is to get more people educated about it. And then you can go onto the websites of these different organizations that I mentioned, like the Rainforest Action Network, Friends of the Earth. They all have palm oil campaigns. And then you can find out which companies have palm oil policies. They tend to be greenwashing, but you could get on there and read them and then call them on it. Demand more transparency.
There's so much pushback from Indonesia and Malaysia because these are such important parts of their economy. But at this point in history, where we're in a climate emergency, this needs to be an all-hands-on-deck thing. We need to help them to transition to other crops and industries. It's similar to coal miners in Appalachia. This is what they've always known, these are the jobs they’ve had, with the now entrenched industries.
But we've got to save the planet, and there are some industries that just can’t be business as usual, and I would argue that palm oil is one of them.
I was actually going to ask you about the issue of: If we stop using palm oil now, to stop further deforestation, what happens to the people on the ground in these countries, like those you described earlier?
Well they aren’t doing that well to begin with. There was an amazing report that just came out last week from Chain Reaction Research. It breaks down where all the profits are, and they're all at the top. So the palm oil lobby will say, “When you're criticizing this industry, you're oppressing the smallholder farmers.” In fact, in Indonesia, smallholders do represent about 40 percent of production. In Malaysia, it's only about 10 percent. But smallholders generate $17 billion in the value chain and their profits are close to zero. They are living on the poverty line. Last year, the Indonesian government announced that it was going to give subsidies to palm oil companies and there was a big outcry from the smallholders because they said it all went to the big corporations and it didn't trickle down to them. So I think that land can be used for agroforestry, for intercropping foods that people can eat. They should not have to buy cooking oil and instant noodles because they can't farm on their land anymore. We need to think about how we use the land that is around the Equator in the best way to preserve biodiversity and sequester carbon.
And I do think given the climate crisis that there's a much bigger role for governments around the world to play. That’s starting to happen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) announced recently that he was going to introduce legislation that would put in place import requirements for agricultural commodities associated with illegal deforestation. And when he announced it, he actually said something like, “I don't think most Americans know that basically half the items in their grocery store have palm oil in them, and they don't know that a lot of it is grown illegally.”
There is similar legislation making its way through the government in the UK. It was just introduced a couple of weeks ago. Some people are saying it's not strong enough...and then the other objection is that it doesn't include labor or human rights criteria. It's just strictly about deforestation. Anyway, I think that if companies know that they're facing actual fines and reputational damage, that could go a long way. And then I think if consumers and investors and shareholders start telling their banks they don't want them funding these companies that are involved in deforestation and human rights abuses, I think like all of those things could definitely bring about change.
Wrapped up, to go
*Palm oil is ubiquitous in packaged foods.
*As a global commodity, it is now primarily grown in Indonesia and Malaysia, where extensive deforestation to plant oil palms releases incredible amounts of carbon and destroys ecosystems that animals and people depend on.
*Things are getting better, but sustainability certifications still have loopholes and have not been adopted by the majority of suppliers.
Still hungry?
Feeding America’s kids. For Civil Eats, I wrote about changes to federal policy that will affect how the federal government confronts child hunger and nutrition for years to come. “Lawmakers and advocates say the COVID-19 pandemic and a racial justice reckoning have created the political will to not only ensure that the country’s young people are fed, but that the programs also address systemic inequalities.” Read it, here.
Actually eating
I went to Savannah, Georgia for the first time, and the food (and atmosphere) I enjoyed the most was at The Wyld Dock Bar, which served a lot of local seafood. Here’s a shot of some of the stuff we tried—fish tacos, okra, fried shrimp, an arugula-peach salad, and succotash. It’s a little out of the way from the downtown area, but if you’re visiting the city, it’s worth the trip.
Let’s be friends
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