Palm oil is one of the most contentious ingredients used in food, biodiesel and household product production – and for good reason. It can be found in literally anything, from your morning toast to your toothpaste. Because Irish consumers don’t run to the shop “for a bottle of palm oil”, it’s not necessarily on our radar as a product to avoid. But should it be avoided?

When I was younger and living in South Korea, I spent a month backpacking through western Indonesia. I made it as far as the island of Sumatra, and while there I went on a jungle trek to see wild and rehabilitated orangutans. I stayed in the tiny village of Bukit Lawang, where there is an orangutan rehabilitation centre.

Orangutans are brought in because their habitats have been destroyed, or because they have been orphaned.

The volunteers raise them on bland foods to encourage them to find their own, tastier meals, and eventually they are released into the protected pocket of rainforest surrounding the village. In the last 20 years, over 80% of their natural habitats have been destroyed due to deforestation.

Even though this was over a decade ago, I still remember my jungle trek guide, Sanur, laughing at me (I am not athletic, so he spent a lot of time laughing at me) when I mentioned I was worried a Sumatran tiger might attack our tent in the middle of the night.

“Tigers are a three-day journey into the deepest part of the jungle,” he said. He was laughing, but his eyes were sad.

[...] demand for palm oil is steadily increasing. And why wouldn’t it? Palm oil, as an ingredient, is unmatched in many ways

Deforestation in Sumatra (and nearby Malaysia) is mostly done to make room for palm plantations. When you replace a richly biodiverse jungle with a monoculture of palm, habitats are lost.

Orangutans are the most talked about, but in reality, many animals (like the aforementioned tigers) are endangered – even close to extinction – because of deforestation.

Still, demand for palm oil is steadily increasing. And why wouldn’t it? Palm oil, as an ingredient, is unmatched in many ways.

Yield

According to Dr Inke van der Sluijs, director of market transformation for the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), when farmed sustainably, palm oil can be considered the most efficient vegetable oil on the market.

“The success of the oil palm is due to the fact that it produces very high yields per unit area,” she explains.

“At a global average of 3.3t of oil per hectare, the oil palm produces a higher per-hectare yield than any other oilseed crop and is thus the most efficient in terms of its land footprint.

“Palm oil is also relatively cheap and has a range of unique characteristics,” she adds.

Properties

Palm oil helps increase the shelf life of food products. It also benefits texture, flavour and increases the yield of the food product itself. Because it is inexpensive, it enables processed foods in supermarkets to cost less, as well. Truthfully, there is no ingredient like it in terms of overall usefulness in mass food production.

The real cost of it all

The ingredient itself is fantastic and, in the countries where palm oil is produced, locals have been using it for centuries without causing a negative environmental impact.

The problem lies in demand. When demand for palm oil is as high as it is, one could be convinced to practise illegal deforestation – and that is what has been happening for decades.

The RSPO believes sustainably farmed palm oil is a safe way to protect vulnerable rainforest environments while still meeting demand. Through their certification process, they are able to provide consumers with some confidence, in this regard.

RSPO certification

Inke says, to ensure the credibility of palm oil sustainability claims, all RSPO members who take legal ownership and produce/handle RSPO-certified sustainable oil palm products need to be certified.

In practice, it means no deforestation, no new planting on peat, no use of fires and that workers are treated fairly

“RSPO certification ensures that all users and consumers are contributing to the production of Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO), and thereby reducing the negative social and environmental impact of conventional oil palm cultivation,” she says. “At the heart of this process is the RSPO principles and criteria (P&C), a set of stringent standards for sustainable palm oil production that RSPO members must comply with.

“In practice, it means no deforestation, no new planting on peat, no use of fires and that workers are treated fairly according to local and international labour rights standards and earn a decent living wage.”

Criticisms

It would be great to feel confident in sustainable palm oil certification, but this has not been the case for palm-wary consumers. Independent reports by Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency (among others) claim the RSPO is weak when it comes to enforcement and penalisation of those not adhering to certification guidelines.

According to Greenpeace’s latest “certification scorecard” (as published in their 2021 document Destruction: Certified), RSPO does well with respect to Indigenous land rights, addressing labour issues and providing Intact Forest Landscape protection, but they falter in areas of auditing and implementation. The report, which also looked at other sustainability certification bodies, summarises that certification on its own “has not helped companies meet their 2020 commitments to exclude deforestation from their supply chains”.

The RSPO offers four supply chain models with the aim to ensure traceability

When asked to comment on RSPO certification, Greenpeace’s European communications officer John Hyland says that, from the data gathered in their report, they cannot guarantee RSPO certified oil is free of deforestation or human rights abuses. He also confirmed claims that certified and non-certified palm oils are often processed together.

“The RSPO offers four supply chain models with the aim to ensure traceability, and [two of these models] have proven to be dysfunctional,” he says.

“Here’s what our report says:

There is no transparency regarding the identity of suppliers whose palm oil is mixed with certified palm oil in the mass balance system, where members are required to collect chain of custody information but not to make it publicly available... Additionally, the lack of transparency on ownership links to other companies means RSPO members may be linked to companies carrying out deforestation and human rights abuses.”

Response

When asked about this, Inke insists consumers can and should be confident in RSPO certified products.

“The RSPO P&C 2018 is one of the world’s strictest sets of criteria regarding deforestation of any commodity standards, as evidenced by a 2019 benchmarking report by IUCN [National Committee of the Netherlands] Netherlands and even highlighted in the Greenpeace report,” she says.

Chef and culinary director of FoodSpace Ireland, Conor Spacey, completed his own palm oil investigation in 2020 and has since decided to ban all palm oil products in the company’s kitchens, which are found throughout Ireland (mainly in corporate catering set-ups).

This was a natural progression for the company, which had previously banned single use plastics and even avocados from their kitchens and catering spaces. Conor says those previous decisions were much easier to make than their decision to ban palm oil.

You need a good discussion on this, because it’s not just black and white

“I started looking to palm oil during the first lockdown and I ended up going down a rabbit hole,” he says. “At FoodSpace, we don’t make decisions lightly – we do our research. I asked, what is sustainable palm oil; how does that work? After six months of research, I realised it wasn’t just a yes or no kind of thing. All of our previous decisions – single use plastics, cling film, avocados – they were all easy. Palm oil wasn’t that easy.

“You need a good discussion on this, because it’s not just black and white,” he continues. “I went down the sustainable palm oil side of things. I get that the land oil palm is grown on can be controlled sustainably, but [I learned] certified palm oil can still contain up to 10% unsustainable palm oil because it can all be processed together. I can’t stand over that and say that’s sustainable.”

Conor’s kitchens are fresh-food focused and most of their ingredients are locally sourced, so he admits it wasn’t as difficult for them to cut out palm oil completely, but there were some food products he had to stop purchasing.

In all of our FoodSpace cafés, we bake our own breads or use local bakers

“It was more along our bakery section,” he says. “Margarine and, in our retail section, chocolate – your big branded chocolate is full of palm oil and I always wanted to get rid of that anyway. Some of our clients would say, ‘We want to have Flora or LowLow as alternative butter’ – which we don’t sell now because they contain palm oil.

“In all of our FoodSpace cafés, we bake our own breads or use local bakers. For our large-volume breakfasts we would have used sliced pan, but they had to go – they all use palm oil. And I get it – from a baking point of view, it gives a bigger yield and allows them to sell their bread cheaply. They use sustainable certified palm oil but, having done the research, to me there’s no such thing.”

Lack of public response

In their previous sustainability initiatives, Conor says FoodSpace received lots of positive support from clients. Now that they’ve banned products with palm oil, he says the response hasn’t been negative or positive – in fact, he hasn’t gotten much of a response at all.

To me, yes, our food system is a global system; of course things have to travel, but can we at least know where they’re coming from?

“Years ago, when we banned avocados, the response was brilliant and people got why we were doing it,” he laughs. “[With palm oil], it’s been like tumbleweed! I actually think this might be the biggest part of our sustainability journey, and we’ve been getting no response.

“To me, yes, our food system is a global system; of course things have to travel, but can we at least know where they’re coming from? I’m delighted we’ve done the palm oil ban, but maybe consumers don’t realise everything it’s in. It adds to a product, but at what cost?”

Palm Kernel Expeller (PKE) is a byproduct of palm oil production and a common addition to livestock feed. Like palm oil itself, PKE has many beneficial properties for livestock consumption: it has a moderate protein level (16% crude protein) and is useful for livestock when used appropriately.

Particularly in dairy cows, PKE can increase milk fat content in milk at low inclusions (8-10%) in concentrates.

That said, industry experts have told ICL that PKE can also pose problems aside from the obvious environmental impact the palm oil industry has on deforestation. Aside from high levels of PKE making milk fat processing difficult, it is indicated that too much PKE in dairy feed will negate the health benefits of butter, which the industry uses as a marketing tool.

“Feeding high levels of palm kernel… challenges the specifications upon which the nutritional merits of dairy product has been built,” they say.

“When fed at >10% of dry matter intake, it has the effect of increasing the level of palmitic and stearic fatty acids in butterfat and reducing the level of CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) that is widely recognised as beneficial for our health and our hearts. CLA is the main argument for selling butterfat over margarine (vegetable fats).”

Feeding pure PKE at farm level is not recommended because the feed can go rancid more easily, thanks to the large distance it travels from where it is produced.

PKE feed also frequently contains foreign bodies, requiring screening and magnetic force to remove them.

Aside from this, butter produced from cows who are fed too much PKE can be affected.

A recent study from the University of Guelph in Canada has proven a strong correlation between butter firmness and palmitic acid content, which can be attributed to PKE animal feed. In an interview with Canadian publication The National Post, University of Guelph professor and Canada Research Chair Alejandro Marangoni said: “While butter hardness can be affected by a series of factors, the data suggests that 64% of that effect can be explained by the palmitic acid content.”

In other words, if your butter isn’t softening to room temperature like it used to, it could be because the cows are ingesting too much palmitic acid.

Palmitic acid is the most common SFA [saturated fatty acid] in nature and it is found in both animal and plant tissues

In an academic letter dated March, 2021, Alejandro and his colleague Saeed Ghazani also say that palmitic acid content can come from sources other than palm.

“Palmitic acid is the most common SFA [saturated fatty acid] in nature and it is found in both animal and plant tissues. For example, soybean oil contains ~16% palmitic acid, cottonseed oil contains ~25% palmitic acid, and palm oil contains ~45% palmitic acid.

“... if we are really concerned about palm oil and its negative sustainability footprint, we should stop eating most bakery, confectionery, and culinary products on the market, because those contain almost exclusively palm oil or its fractions,” it continues.

“This would have a much greater impact on palm oil utilisation than discontinuing the feeding of palmitic acid to dairy cows.”

Compared to other EU member states like the Netherlands, Italy and Spain, the amount of palm oil we directly import seems low (as from data received from the European Commission). That said, once a large importer (like the Netherlands) brings in palm oil or PKE, some – or much – of it will then move on to other EU member states, like Ireland.

Inke says, like palm oil, there are RSPO certified PKE feeds available on the European market, but the demand for these is low.

Collectively, the animal feed sector can have a positive impact on the ground

“Similarly to palm oil, if PKE is produced sustainably, its production is possible in coexistence with nature, and in a space where forests and wildlife are not harmed,” she explains. “Collectively, the animal feed sector can have a positive impact on the ground by purchasing sustainable palm ingredients for the production of animal feed.”

We reached out to the European Commission to see what was happening with palm oil at a European level. Being such a contentious ingredient, could we not demand strictly enforced certification standards or even – the unthinkable – ban palm oil imports altogether?

They responded, saying they are aware of the concerns associated with the production of palm oil but also acknowledge it is an important source of income and employment in producing countries, including for millions of smallholders.

The Commission continues to encourage efforts of the producing countries

“The Commission considers that palm oil production should be addressed in a comprehensive and balanced manner, taking into account both the challenges and the opportunities that it presents,” they say.

“The Commission continues to encourage efforts of the producing countries and of the different actors involved in the palm oil supply chain towards the sustainable production of palm oil, such as the enhancement of certification schemes for sustainable palm oil and the strengthening of relevant legal frameworks – and of their enforcement – in producing countries.

“More broadly, it supports partner countries in their efforts to address deforestation, such as through support of sustainable forest management and capacity building for well informed and transparent land use decisions.”

They also say the EU is “taking increased responsibility for the externalities of imports” and, this year, they are planning to present measures to curtail products associated with deforestation being placed on the EU market.

Palm oil is a multi-functional ingredient. It’s difficult to find a replacement for the many things it can do for the production of household goods and food. There are researchers who have found promising in-lab alternatives, but realistically? They aren’t alternatives we’ll be seeing any time soon.

Like so many environmental problems in the world today, it seems there is little the average consumer can do.

If you want to stop supporting the palm oil industry (to the best of your ability, because – let’s face it – it is very difficult to avoid entirely), here are a few tips.

The UN says palm oil is found in roughly half the products on supermarket shelves. These products include:

According to UK publication Ethical Consumer, the supermarkets with the best palm oil rating are:

Iceland – the retailer has banned the use of palm oil in its own-brand products.

Marks & Spencers – all of the palm oil used in their products is RSPO certified.

*Lidl and Spar rated among the lowest in palm oil policy.

Before you start feeling guilty about your supermarket purchases, you should know that more than half of the palm oil imported into Europe ends up as biodiesel for vehicles. According to the European Federation of Transport and Environment’s most recent annual report, biofuels from palm oil continue to present major challenges to the environment.

It reads: “European drivers burn 100 times more palm oil in their tanks than is in the 40bn Oreo cookies consumed worldwide every year. It found that the amount of forest-ravaging palm oil used to make EU ‘bio’-diesel increased 7% the year before, reaching an all-time high of 4.5m tonnes.”

It also says a study done for the European Commission has found that palm oil biodiesel is three times worse for the climate than regular diesel, while soy biodiesel is two times worse.