Counting the cost of palm oil
International demand for palm oil is huge – and growing – but provokes great controversy. Sébastien Risso says the environmental damage caused by extracting palm oil is unsustainable, while Lim Keng Yaik argues that palm oil is one of the surest and most sustainable forms of development available.
Sébastien Risso is the EU forest policy director of Greenpeace:
Palm oil is everywhere – in chocolate, in soap and even in biodiesel. The industry is booming. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), demand will double by 2030 and triple by 2050. That is great news for business, but a disaster for some of the world’s richest forests and the people that depend on them. Images of blackened, moon-like landscapes where there were once pristine forests are a tragedy for all but the companies responsible and the politicians who support them.
The EU must shoulder some of the blame. Badly thought-through policies designed to lower Europe’s carbon emissions in the energy and transport sectors have sparked a gold rush into biofuel, with results that often go directly against the policies’ intentions. Studies show that some biofuel, including when made from palm oil from cleared rainforest and peatland, result in significantly more greenhouse-gas emissions than fossil fuel does.
Greenpeace is not anti-biofuel or anti-palm oil. But the conversion of forests and peatland for palm oil is a massive problem. It is in nobody’s interest to undo, in a few short years, what took thousands to create. Indonesia, for example, according to recent government estimates, is the world’s third-largest greenhouse-gas emitter, and 80% of Indonesia’s emissions come from forest loss and peatland degradation. The government says palm oil and pulp and paper are two of the major drivers of deforestation and rising greenhouse-gas emissions.
The climate is not the only casualty. Majestic animals such as orang-utans and Sumatran tigers are nearing extinction because of habitat destruction. Reports of human-rights violations and land-grabbing are also blackening the palm-oil sector. A Malaysian court recently convicted IOI, a Malaysian group, for illegally converting indigenous peoples’ lands. IOI supplies palm oil for biofuel to Europe.
Perhaps the biggest hole in Europe’s biofuel policy is the omission from its sustainability criteria of the impact of indirect land-use change (ILUC), where existing agricultural land is turned over to grow biofuel, with the effect that forests are cut down to grow food. If nothing is done, the EU policy-driven biofuel market threatens to make the energy and transport sectors major drivers of deforestation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Environment Programme and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre have recently warned that, when emissions from ILUC are taken into account, some types of biofuel could do more damage to the climate than conventional fuels. Steep food-price rises and social unrest are another effect. The OECD and the FAO also predict that food prices could rise by 40% by 2019, partly because of the increasing demand for biofuel.
What should the EU be doing? The Commission should be more transparent and avoid skewing the findings of scientific studies to fit its policies, as official emails uncovered by Reuters and European Voice (“Commission fails to blend biofuel with politics”, 8-14 July) suggest it may have. Biofuel policy must account for emissions from both direct and indirect land-use change, while avoiding social and environmental damage. A green-energy revolution in Europe has to be about making carbon cuts without trashing forests and exacerbating biodiversity loss and the food crisis. Most current types of biofuel do not pass this test. Member states should therefore encourage fuel efficiency and transport running on renewable electricity, while also financing the protection or restoration of forests and peatland. Second-generation forms of biofuel, made from agricultural, food or municipal waste, may also have a role to play.
What do we expect from the palm-oil industry? The industry must reform and companies must halt their expansion into carbon- and biodiversity-rich ecosystems. Instead, they should improve yields and processes in existing plantations. The Malaysian government should take action to support and accelerate this reform agenda, while the Indonesian government and industry should implement a moratorium on further deforestation and immediately protect all peatland.
Lim Keng Yaik was Malaysia’s minister of primary industries in 1986-2004 and is a founder of the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters:
Europe’s environmental activists are playing an anti-trade, anti-development tune and Europe’s policymakers are singing along. Radical green groups claim that imports of palm oil products should be blocked because palm oil is “unsustainable”. The claim would be laughable if it were not coming from Europeans; instead, it is arrogant, shameful and cruel.
Palm oil is a versatile product sourced in Indonesia, Malaysia (my home country) and elsewhere in the tropical regions that are home to hundreds of millions of the world’s poor people. It has dozens of commercial and industrial uses, and consumers around the globe, including in Europe, eagerly buy palm oil to meet their needs.
Radical green groups, such as Greenpeace and their allies WWF and Friends of the Earth, are angry, however. They claim palm oil is not sustainable. Why? They say it leads to the destruction of rainforests, wildlife habitat and indigenous homelands. And they say it contributes to the planet’s climate-change problem.
Here are the facts. In Indonesia, more than 25% of the nation’s forest cover is protected by law and kept free from development. In Malaysia, more than 50% of the country’s forest cover – over 18 million hectares – is protected. And we have successful programmes in place to protect the orang-utan and other regional wildlife. We have practised sustainable development since the Rio earth summit a generation ago. We care about our environment as much as anyone.
Indeed, if history is any guide, we care more than Europe. We have learned a thing or two from Europe’s wildly unsustainable development practices. Europe laid waste to its forests in its rush to develop in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Consider Belgium today. Only 10% of once-verdant Flanders is forested and its remaining forest cover is extremely fragmented. Continental Europe’s forest cover has not recovered to anything like its pre-industrial state and it never will. If European green groups and policymakers think protecting forests is so important, they can start at home.
Palm oil is an exceptionally environmentally friendly crop. It produces more oil per hectare of land, requires less fertiliser, and also sequesters more carbon than other major vegetable oil crops. When it is used as a biodiesel – as it is in some of Europe’s electricity-generation plants – it generates ten times more energy than it uses, something no other biodiesel comes close to doing, including biodiesel made from Europe’s rapeseed.
There is an economic dimension to the debate over sustainability. Europe is rich, so it has developed a habit of callously forgetting what it is like to be poor. But in my part of the world, the only thing that is considered truly unsustainable is poverty, as millions of people yearn for better lives and new opportunities for their families.
Palm oil helps provide that. In Malaysia, 570,000 people have jobs thanks to the palm oil trade. In Indonesia, palm oil is responsible for more than three million jobs. And the industry helps the family farmer – almost half the palm used for production in Indonesia is grown by small landholders.
Palm oil returns a higher income per hectare than almost any other crop, making it a wise investment for the developing world. Sustainable development is not possible without development, and palm oil provides one of the surest and best bets for development in impoverished areas.
As if the lies about palm oil perpetuated by the eco-activists were not insulting enough, Europe’s green groups are making common cause with Europe’s already rich – and heavily subsidised – agricultural producers, who want to block competition.
When Europe’s colonisers first came to the tropics, it was to fatten their wallets at the expense of the native population. The colonisers have gone, but the colonial mindset remains. Europe puts its own interests – for indulging in fashionable green propaganda and protecting domestic agri-business – over the basic needs of those in the poorer corners of the globe. This green neo-colonialism is as shameful this century as the original colonialism was last century. It is time to stop.