🌴 The Palm Oil Predicament

Unmasking the sizzling truth about our insatiable demand for vegetable oil.

Hey there 👋

There was a tree that grew in a land far away. A tree that produced a fruit so good that morals went out of the window. A magical fruit that when squeezed produces an oil that is healthier, more durable, and cheaper than any other oil. An oil that is in everything from lipstick and chips, to biofuels. A fruit so lucrative that farmers burned down forests, displacing animals, turning biodiversity into ash and releasing carbon into our atmosphere. A tree of good and evil.

The forbidden fruit that we discovered is that of the oil palm tree, Elaeis guineensis. The story of palm oil though, is not a story only about palm oil. It’s a story about our insatiable desire for vegetable oil.

Palm oil is the centre of attention because it’s cursed by how good it is. So good that about half of packaged products in grocery stores contain its oil. It grows all year round, is cheap to grow and is much more productive than other oil crops. It produces 36% of the world’s vegetable oil while only taking up 9% of oil cropland.

Globally we use 322 million hectares for vegetable oil crops. Roughly the size of India. If all vegetable oil was made from palm, that area would shrink to 77 million hectares. It’s not as simple as replacing all oil with palm. Cutting down biodiverse and carbon rich tropical rainforests is much more harmful than converting land in Europe. 45% of oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia are on lands that were forests in 1989. This mass clearing, often by burning, not only released greenhouse gases into our atmosphere but also destroyed the habitats of many endangered species like elephants and tigers. Palm oil has already been a major driver of deforestation and we shouldn’t add to this.

How can we solve this? How can we stop more tropical rainforests being turned into plantations?

These are difficult questions. With many things to be done. But one of the ‘tings that we can do is use the power of technology. There are a whole batch of startups reducing the need for farmland by using the age old technique of brewing beer. Well not exactly. A little more high-tech. They use custom engineered yeast cells to transform feedstocks into fats instead of alcohol.

One of those startups is Estonian ÄIO. They transform byproducts like sawdust into high-tech fats ranging from palm oil substitutes to vegetable oil and animal fat alternatives. By making use of side streams from the food, agricultural, and wood industry they not only produce oil without the need for new farmland they also up cycle low-value products and tackle food waste.

Other startups include 🇬🇧 Sun Bear Biofuture, 🇳🇱 NoPalm Ingredients, and 🇺🇸 Xylome. But only one seems to have moved past the lab stage. Bill Gates backed 🇺🇸 C16 Biosciences has scaled to a point where they are able to produce tonnes of oil per week while using land 250 times more efficiently than palm oil.

There is a long way to go to rival the 75 million tonnes of conventional palm oil production. Production will need to increase drastically, prices need to drop, and regulators will need to approve it for consumption. But if this can stop more forests from being cut down we should, or must, push for it to become a reality.

Until next time, much love,

Pascal Vilhelmsson 🖤

Photo by Nazarizal Mohammad on Unsplash. Drawings by me.