It’s an invisible ingredient, really, palm oil. You won’t find it listed on your margarine, your bread, your biscuits or your KitKat. It’s there though, under “vegetable oil”. And its impact, 7,000 miles away, is very visible indeed.
The wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are being chain-sawed to make way for palm-oil plantations. Thirty square miles are felled daily in a burst of habitat destruction that is taking place on a scale and speed almost unimaginable in the West.
When the rainforests disappear almost all of the wildlife – including the orangutans, tigers, sun bears, bearded pigs and other endangered species – and indigenous people go. In their place come palm-oil plantations stretching for mile after mile, producing cheap oil – the cheapest cooking oil in the world – for everyday food.
Until now, the best estimate of the number of leading supermarket products containing palm oil (Elaeis guineensis) has been one in 10, the figure quoted by Friends of the Earth in its 2005 report, “The Oil for Apes Scandal”. After a two-month investigation, The Independent has established that palm oil is used in far greater quantities. We can reveal for the first time that it is confirmed or suspected in 43 of Britain’s 100 bestselling grocery brands (see box, right), representing £6bn of the UK’s £16bn annual shopping basket for top brands. If you strip out drinks, pet food and household goods, the picture is starker still: 32 out of 62 of Britain’s top foods contain this tree-felling, wildlife-wrecking ingredient.
It’s in the top three loaves – Warburtons, Hovis, and Kingsmill – and the bestselling margarines Flora and Clover. It’s in Special K, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, Mr Kipling Cakes, McVitie’s Digestives and Goodfella’s pizza. It’s in KitKat, Galaxy, Dairy Milk and Wrigley’s chewing gum. It’s in Persil washing powder, Comfort fabric softener and Dove soap. It’s also in plenty of famous brands that aren’t in the top 100, such as Milkybar, Jordan’s Country Crisp and Utterly Butterly. And it’s almost certainly in thousands of supermarket own brands. Yet none of these manufacturers can prove their supply is “sustainable”.
What, then, is “unsustainable” palm oil? Step one: log a forest and remove the most valuable species for furniture. Step two: chainsaw or burn the remaining wood releasing huge quantities of greenhouse gas. Step three: plant a palm-oil plantation. Step four: make oil from the fruit and kernels. Step five: add it to biscuits, chocolate, margarine, soaps, moisturisers and washing powder. At breakfast, when millions of us are munching toast, we’re eating a small slice of the rainforest.
These rainforests are honeypots for flora and fauna, among the most biodiverse places on Earth. Consider the figures. Sumatra – the size of Spain, owned by Indonesia – has 465 species of bird, 194 species of mammal, 217 species of reptile, 272 species of freshwater fish, and an estimated 10,000 species of plant. Borneo – the size of Turkey and shared between Indonesia and Malaysia – is even richer: 420 birds, 210 mammals, 254 reptiles, 368 freshwater fish and around 15,000 plants.
All these species evolved to live in this unique forest environment. The Sumatran rhino is the smallest, hairiest and most endangered in the world; the Sumatran tiger is the smallest tiger. The black sun bear, with its U-shaped patch of white fur under its chin, is the smallest bear. Some of them are curious in the extreme: the bug-eyed western tarsier; the striped rabbit; the marled cat; and the tree-jumping clouded leopard, which feasts on pygmy squirrels and long-tailed porcupines.
Of all the animals, though, the most famous by far is the orangutan (or “man of the jungle”). With its orange hair and long arms, the orangutan is one of our planet’s most unusual creatures. And one of the smartest, too. The Dutch anthropologist Carel van Schaik found that orangutans could perform tasks which were well beyond chimpanzees, such as making rain hats and leakproof roofs for their nests.
The primatologist Dr Willie Smits estimates that orangutans can distinguish between 1,000 different plants, knowing which ones are edible, which are poisonous, and which cure headaches. In her book Thinkers of the Jungle, the psychology professor Anne Russon recalled that one orangutan keeper took three days to solve the mystery of who’d been stealing from the fridge. It turned out that an orangutan had been using a paperclip to pick the lock of its cage, then hiding the paperclip under its tongue.
Along with chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos, orangutans are great apes, sharing 97 per cent of their DNA with humans, having split from us a mere 13 million years ago. They exist only in these forests of Borneo and Sumatra, and it is their arboreal nature that leaves them so vulnerable to deforestation. Between 2004 and 2008, according to the US Great Ape Trust, the orangutan population fell by 10 per cent (to 49,600) on Borneo and by 14 per cent (to 6,600) on Sumatra. As the author Serge Wich warned: “Unless extraordinary efforts are made soon, it could become the first great-ape species to go extinct.”
Indonesia is trying to crack down on illegal foresting, but corruption is rife hundreds of miles from Jakarta. Satellite pictures show logging has encroached on 90 per cent of Borneo’s national parks – and according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): “New estimates suggest 98 per cent of [Indonesia’s] forest may be destroyed by 2022, the lowland forest much sooner.”
In its own way, palm oil is a wonder plant. Astonishingly productive, its annual yield is 3.6 tonnes a hectare compared with half a tonne for soy or rapeseed. Originally found in West Africa, palm oil is uniquely “fractionable” when cooked, meaning its properties can be easily separated for different products. Although high in artery-clogging saturated fat, it is healthier than hydrogenated fats. For manufacturers, there is another significant benefit. At £400 a tonne, it is cheaper than soy, rapeseed or sunflower.
Some 38m tonnes of palm oil are produced globally, about 75 per cent in Malaysia and Indonesia. Borneo’s 11,000 square miles of plantations produce 10m tonnes a year while Sumatra’s 14,000 square miles yield 13m tonnes.
Since 1990, the amount of land used for palm-oil production has increased by 43 per cent. Demand is rising at between six and 10 per cent a year. China’s billion-plus population is the biggest consumer, importing 18 per cent of global supply. About 16 per cent arrives in the EU.
In the UK, almost every major food manufacturer uses palm oil, among them Kellogg’s, Cadbury, Mars, Kraft, Unilever, Premier Foods, Northern Foods and Associated British Foods (ABF). Companies typically say they are working to source sustainable supplies – and insist their use is “small”, “very small” or “minute”.
The US household giant Procter & Gamble, which uses palm oil in detergents, shampoos and soaps, says: “P&G uses very little palm oil – about 1 per cent of a worldwide production of palm and its derivatives.” One per cent of global production is 380,000 tonnes a year. P&G says it hopes to source a sustainable supply by 2015 – six years’ time.
Right now no multinational can vouch that its supply is sustainable. The Anglo-Dutch household giant Unilever, the world’s biggest user of palm oil, is swallowing up 1.6m tonnes a year, 4 per cent of global supply. It admits the product causes huge damage, but believes it has a solution. Together with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Unilever set up the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2004. For its first four years – to the frustration of green groups – the RSPO talked, devising eight principles and 39 practical criteria designed to protect native peoples, plantation workers, small farmers and wildlife.
The best plantations can obtain RSPO certification for sustainability – but only 4 per cent of global supply (1.5m tonnes) is currently certified sustainable. The first shipment arrived in Rotterdam last November and costs about 35 per cent more than normal supplies. Another scheme, Green Palm, is already bringing prices for RSPO supplies down further, adding just 5 per cent to the cost.
Unilever has publicly committed to sourcing only certified palm oil by 2015. Premier Foods has a date of 2011, United Biscuits 2012. Most companies, however, including Cadbury, Kellogg’s, Nestlé, Mars and Heinz, have given no commitment to switch to an RSPO-certified supply. They merely say that their suppliers are members.
In its “Cooking the Climate” report, Greenpeace calculated that the burning of South-east Asia’s peat forests – largely for palm-oil plantations – spewed 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere: 4 per cent of global climate-change emissions from 0.1 per cent of Earth’s land. According to Greenpeace forest campaigner James Turner, “The destruction of these forests is a really serious cause of climate change, but some companies are still trying to look the other way. It’s time for them to cancel contracts with the worst suppliers, because purchasing power is a highly effective tool in changing this industry.”
Deforestation causes 18 per cent of Co2 emissions, according to British government figures – a key element in the rising temperatures that in coming decades will alter our world for ever. No one can be exactly sure what climate change will bring but, in Britain, we can expect more flooding and winter gales, drier summers, water shortages, and more food poisoning and skin cancer. The sea will not just sweep over Bangladesh and the Maldives, but possibly threaten low-lying parts of Britain, such as London, too. Meanwhile, millions of people in developing countries with failing agriculture could migrate to northern Europe.
The wealthy Western countries who have already felled their own forests (woods once covered Britain from Cornwall to Caithness) may have to pay more and more to protect those that remain in other parts of the world. At the Copenhagen summit in December, Britain and other countries will press for REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation) – essentially a scheme for funding jungles in developing countries.
In the meantime, forest campaigners hope that big companies will come under increasing scrutiny over palm oil. The Unilever-backed RSPO wants them to commit to a sustainable supply. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace say palm-oil use should be reduced or phased out altogether. A few have already done so – PepsiCo, for instance, is phasing out palm oil from its remaining two products. United Biscuits says it has reduced palm oil in Digestives by 65 per cent and in McCoys by 76 per cent since 2005.
Palm oil facts
90 per cent of Sumatra’s orangutan population has disappeared since 1900. They now face extinction
90 per cent of wildlife disappears when the forest is replaced by palm, creating a biological desert
98 per cent of Indonesia’s forests may be destroyed by 2022 according to the United Nations
43 of Britain’s 100 top grocery brands contain or are thought to contain palm oil
– from independent. 2 May 2009