Palm oil is both the most land-efficient oil crop and a driver of deforestation
Palm plantations cover about 5 percent of the world's vegetable oil farmland yet yield around 38 percent of its vegetable oil. Swapping palm for other crops would take far more land. The catch is where palms grow: in tropical forests whose clearing threatens orangutans, and replacing that forest does more damage to biodiversity.
The oil comes from the reddish pulp of the African oil palm's fruit, and people have used the tree for about 5,000 years. In the late 1800s archaeologists identified what they concluded was palm oil in a tomb at Abydos in Egypt, dated to 3,000 BCE. In West and Central Africa it has long been an everyday cooking fat, still central to dishes such as egusi and okra soup.
Industrial Britain turned it into a global commodity, prizing it as a machine lubricant and a base for soap; Lever Brothers' Sunlight and the American brand Palmolive both relied on it. By around 1870 it was the leading export of some West African countries, often produced under oppressive labour, until colonial cocoa plantations overtook it in the 1880s. Today it is everywhere: roughly 70 percent of personal care products contain palm-derived ingredients, hidden behind more than 200 different names, only a tenth of which mention palm.
Its efficiency is real. In 2016 palm farms produced around 4.17 tonnes of oil per hectare, against 0.56 for sunflower and 0.39 for soybean, because both fruit and kernel yield oil. A 2018 report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature agreed it uses land and water far better than rivals, while noting that clearing forest for it causes more biodiversity loss than switching oils would. Indonesia produced 60 percent of the world's supply in 2022, and slash-and-burn clearance there burned 857,000 hectares between January and September 2019.
Fuel adds pressure. As of 2018 half of Europe's palm oil imports went into biodiesel, which by one estimate generates three times the emissions of fossil diesel once land clearing is counted. Indonesia blends 30 percent palm oil into pump diesel and aims for pure palm biodiesel, which it reckons would require about 15 million hectares of plantations. Growers also face documented disputes with indigenous communities, with more than 650 land conflicts recorded in Indonesia in 2017.
Source: Palm oil
