Palm Oil - Story of the other side

Shivam! You are an Environment activist. Isn’t it? This is one of the reasons why you opted to Intern with us, asked one of my colleagues at an NGO where I worked as a Circular Economy and Sustainability Strategist for agroecology and regenerative agriculture in Milan, Italy for a period of three months as part of my MBA Internship Program. Yes, I responded. Then how come you worked in Palm oil mill, which is considered as one of the major causes of environmental destruction? She asked. I smiled and responded; well you are not the only one who asked me this question, I came across this in major portion of the world wherever I traveled for academic and professional reasons, and sorry but my answer is simply a question to you, how much do you know about palm oil?

Well, Yes! How much do you as readers know about Palm oil? The world has seen one side of it, and it is the duty of people like us who have worked in this sector to show the same world a different side of it. Environmentalists and Intellectuals have always a problem associated with Palm oil and even speaking about it is starting a whole new discussion. To understand something better we should investigate the deep roots of it and do that a dive into history is what needed.

Typing palm oil on google yields 34,70,00,000 results and I can bet 50% or even more will showcase it as one of the worst things ever happened to the biosphere and mankind in general. I won’t advocate that palm oil is exactly opposite of what media, environmentalist or so-called Intellectuals portrayed but I would definitely give some valid figures and data that will probably change your mind of what you must have heard so far, and the reason why I am doing this is not because I worked in this sector but because human being, in general, make perceptions out of things which they usually know little about. 

So, what exactly is palm oil and how it originated? “The oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) originated from West Africa, where evidence of its use as a staple food crop dates as far back as 5,000 years. There is even evidence in Egyptian tombs of people being buried with casks of palm oil, reflecting the high societal value attributed to the product. Later, it was introduced to Malaysia, then Malaya, by the British in the early 1870s as an ornamental plant.

Currently, Malaysia and Indonesia are the world's biggest palm oil producers where the production of both countries is 85% of world palm oil production whereas India is the biggest importer followed by China, Pakistan, Netherlands, and Spain.

Let’s now dive into the Economics of Palm oil before starting the business of blame game. So, what basically drives the market, it’s demand and supply, isn’t it? If for a reason palm oil consumption rose to 230% or even more in the last two decades, don’t you think its demand is relatively high and once the demand is high so definitely supply must be high in order to facilitate the market. For the supply to be high either the planting area or the yield of the crop should be high, and when I say yield, let me tell you one thing that it is the highest yield producing crop when it comes to edible oil and that’s one of the reasons of it being relatively cheap compared to the other crop and its oil. 

“A new IUCN report shows that while palm oil leads to deforestation and biodiversity losses, replacing it with other types of vegetable oils might be even worse for the environment. The key factor is the high yield of oil palms, with other oil crops requiring up to nine times as much land to produce the same volume of vegetable oil. Transitioning to the latter would shift the deforestation associated with palm oil production to other regions such as South America, a major producer of soy. The report found that by far the biggest gains for biodiversity in an oil palm context are through avoiding further deforestation, which can be achieved through improved planning of new plantations and better management of forest patches left untouched in plantations”.

I do care of the environment as everyone else does, but do you think these numbers can be reversed? Today, 3 billion people in 150 countries use products containing palm oil. Globally, we each consume an average of 8 kg of palm oil a year. You will find it in many brands of ice-cream, pizza, dough, bread, frozen foods, packaged soups, sauces, desserts, and snack foods, like cookies and chips. In addition, palm oil is in some skincare and beauty products, like lipstick, detergent, and soap.

Are you willing to give up on these products? If Yes, Astonishing! If No, what’s the alternative? Soy, Sunflower, Olive, what? Remember the yield, remember the nutritional values when you talk about health, similarly, remember the carbon-footprint it generates based upon the area of cultivation not by the total production, because then it’ isn’t a justification with Palm oil. Yes, Orangutans have been wiped-off and I feel sorry for it but just imagine the amount of destruction to any other biodiversity be it chimpanzees, or elephants or anyone will be when we will need much higher land for any other type of oil.

Instead what we can do is to avoid further deforestation, having more and more conservation areas, sustainable re-planting and clearing activities etc. and that’s what Round-table of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), Malaysia and other EU regulating bodies are doing. All the member countries of the European Union for instance import only sustainable palm oil being produced either in Malaysia, Indonesia, West Africa or any other part of the world. In a similar context country such as India, China and other major importers should do in the near future.

I worked in a Palm oil mill in Western Africa for a period of 3.5 years in operations, wherein I got trained in Malaysia to handle the same. Where do you think we got the electricity to run the plant from? How much water do you think the production activities consume? What all the chemicals we use to produce crude palm oil? What happens to the waste? Is there mass balance, traceability across the value chain? Is it a smart factory with IoT, Blockchain etc. enabled digital and innovative platforms?

These questions might come to your mind? Let me answer all before you get confused, Palm oil production requires zero energy from the national grid or from diesel generators (just for the initiation), wow! Isn’t it? It runs from the energy produced both by its solid (fiber and shells) and semi-solid or liquid waste (mill effluent) which generates methane gas and produces biogas to generate electricity. And let me remind you to process 1 MT of fresh fruit bunches (palm) we need 22 kW h of energy. So yes, in terms of energy it is self-sustainable.

Water! 1 MT of fresh fruit bunches (palm) requires equivalent or more water, from where does water comes from. It’s the rainwater harvesting that is happening in most of the palm oil mills, if not it fetches water from the river but believe me not even a single mill in the world disposes waste back into the river, there’s no facility as such in this sector, as it’s a zero-waste plant which utilizes every single thing to provide value in terms of energy, fertilizers, compost etc.

It is also an industry that is digitally transformed and is part of Industrial Revolution 4.0, wherein machines do communicate with each other and data analysis is quite easy to avoid malfunctions, breakdowns etc. Predictive analytics and Maintenance are what this industry is doing today. It has a minimum (less under the range of allowable limit) carbon footprints if we specifically talk about the mill where oil is processed. Yes! Plantations do have flaws like every other thing in this world but they’re working on it, we worked on improvising this sector, extensively.

References

https://news.mongabay.com/2018/07/whats-worse-than-palm-oil-for-the-environment-other-vegetable-oils-iucn-study-finds/

https://www.sciencealert.com/why-palm-oil-does-not-deserve-its-bad-press

SHIVAM BATRA