Palm oil's bad rap among consumers could be reversed with news of an African tree that provides a vitamin-rich oil that feeds two to three billion people in 150 countries every day.
Recent media coverage of palm oil has typically included images of displaced orangutans and burning, degraded tropical forests. In Australia, the UK and France there have been attempts to boycott palm oil products ranging from bakery goods, chocolate and cosmetics.
However, news is emerging of an oil palm tree that's been cultivated as a source of food and fibre by people in western Africa for as much as 4000 years.
According to Denis Murphy, Professor of Biotechnology and Head of Genomics & Computational Biology Research at The University of South Wales, palm oil is a uniquely productive crop with oil palm trees six to 10 times more efficient at producing oil than temperate oilseed crops such as rapeseed, soybean, olive and sunflower.
“The trees also have a productive lifetime of around 30 years,” says Murphy, in an article published by The Conversation. “Soil in oil palm plantations is rich in organic content and is less disrupted compared to temperate, annual oil crops where highly destructive annual ploughing of the soil is required.”
Beware alternative oils
In 2014, the estimated global production of total palm oil was almost 70 million tonnes. Over 85 per cent is exported from Indonesia and Malaysia, mostly to India and China, where the fruit oil is used in food, including as a cooking or salad oil and in a range of processed food products.
If oilseed crops were to replace palm oil it would require at least 50 million additional hectares of prime farmland just to produce the same amount of edible oil.
The seed oil from palm is rich in lauric acid, a critical component in many cosmetics and cleaning products. Much of this type of palm oil is exported to Europe where it is used in toothpaste, washing up liquids, shower gels and laundry detergents.
The only viable alternative oil that is rich in lauric acid comes from coconut, but the oil yield of this plant is less than 10 per cent of palm oil. To completely substitute coconut for palm oil would require cultivating 10 times as much tropical land. This is rarely realised by consumers who choose to use products containing coconut instead of palm oil.
Another misconception is that palm oil is overwhelmingly a 'big business' crop. In fact, there are about three million smallholder growers, nearly all of whom farm individual family-owned plots. In Indonesia, which is the largest palm oil producing country, smallholder plots account for 40 per cent of the total crop area.
According to Murphy, one of the most encouraging developments has been the establishment of a robust and independent body to certify the environmental and social credentials of palm oil. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, or RSPO, has a vision to “transform the markets by making sustainable palm oil the norm". The RSPO has over 2000 members globally that represent 40 per cent of the palm oil industry, covering all sectors of the supply chain.
“There are undoubtedly many significant challenges facing oil palm, and further encroachment onto sensitive native forest areas should be minimised and eventually halted,” Murphy says.
“But palm oil is also a uniquely efficient edible crop that is essential for food security in Africa and Asia. By working together as an international community that includes scientists, farmers, processors and consumers we aim to develop solutions to many of the problems faced by oil palm. Hopefully this will soon enable palm oil to regain its rightful place as one of the stars in the pantheon of global crops.”
