While the 'unintended consequences' story is powerful, the article undermines its credibility by suggesting at first that palm oil's use in US biodiesel is a significant contributor to this clusterfuck, but only halfway through does it admit that US biodiesel is chiefly made with corn and soy, ostensibly leaving less of these oils for the US food industry -- forcing imports of other oils.<p>But the truth is even more complex: for the last two decades, US society has gone through a nutritional awakening about the risk of trans fats, and widespread phase-out of trans fats has occurred due to consumer demand and regulatory pressure. Trans fats are a hard-to-avoid byproduct of partial hydrogenation of unsaturated oils: a process you want in food manufacturing to convert a liquid oil to a solid shortening. Corn oil and soybean oil largely consist of unsaturated fats, so partial hydrogenation will turn a fair bit of product into trans fats. But palm oil and coconut oil are naturally high in saturated fats, which gives them desirable properties by natural means and without trans bonds.<p>This is the primary reason for US food manufacturing's increased palm oil imports into the US: if widespread partial hydrogenation were still on the table, plentiful cottonseed oil could have been used instead. Crisco and Wesson were both early pioneers of hydrogenated cottonseed oil, but even today's Crisco -- the archetypal hydrogenated shortening -- has been reformulated with palm oil and soybean oil.<p>Then there's the matter of occasional palm oil boycotts in the US and Europe, protesting about food companies' use of palm oil from plantations that haven't been certified sustainable. Other than the inherent fuzziness and conflict of interest about a trade group deciding what it means for clearcut-type agriculture to be 'sustainable', these protests unfortunately cause the average price of all palm oil to drop, leaving others whose priorities are different to buy them up on the cheap. For example, palm oil is widely used as a cooking oil in the Indian Subcontinent, because it's cheap, is produced nearby (as opposed to in the Americas or Europe), and those countries have populations whose demand for simple cooking oils well outstrips their domestic supply.<p>There are many factors to this story: the ones investigated in the article, and others that I hope to have shown were missing. This shows that reality is sometimes maddeningly complex, different actors are frequently at odds, and one group's good intentions rarely survive the realities and the intricacies the global economy and local situations on the ground where the rubber meets the road.
I thought bioengineered algae oil (e.g. <a href="http://algawise.com/" rel="nofollow">http://algawise.com/</a>) was supposed to help us save the planet, seeing as it's both healthier and more sustainable than palm oil.
This is powerful stuff - palm oil production is clearly an evil. But what really struck me from this was the rather cavalier mention of their guide killing dozens of people with a machete, during an ethnic cleansing. Isn't there a court for people like that? In The Netherlands?
After reading some of the informed comments, I take it that the cause-effect relationship is not as direct as what's described in the article. Specifically, most of palm oil being used for food in fast-growing Asian countries, along with how much more palm oil can be produced from the same land -compared to corn oil- suggest it may not be a naive political decision from a decade ago that's now reducing the Indonesian forest footprint.
I thought it was just supposed to prevent a health crisis ie prevent heart attacks and other health issues. I don't remember any marketing for palm oil related to saving the environment. Am I wrong?
Palm oil is a great example of the Jevons paradox:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox</a><p>Vegetable oil was expensive and took a lot of land to produce, then the oil palm made it cheaper and produced more in less land. But now we spend more money on vegetable oil and cultivate more land than before.
It is amazing that around 2007 the US had declining oil production, an oil price shock and peak oil scare which probably were the primary reasons for the invasion of Iraq and terrible ethanol and biofuel policies. Now, there is talk of the US not requiring any imported oil by 2025 (not sure if that counts imports from the biggest supplier Canada), how times change due to a technological advancement in drilling practices.<p>I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.
In UK rain forest anti deforestation TV ad "Rang-tan" was banned for being "too political" - <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/how-the-world-is-waking-up-to-palm-oil-in-the-wake-of-banned-iceland-orangutan-advert-a3992311.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/how-the-world-is-wakin...</a>
The more general pattern is that, because of the sheer volume of demand, solutions that merely substitute one material resource for another no longer work.
I believe we are already at point of no return and our grandchildren will live in mostly sterile world compared with what we have now. Probably only external expansion to the Solar system can save tiny bits of wild life they will have at that time.