Oil palm, Elaeis guineensis

Palm oil is the cheapest and most widely produced vegetable oil on the world market and is available in huge quantities all year round. Due to its high melting point, it is particularly easy to process. In its refined form, palm oil is odorless, tasteless, colorless and has a long shelf life. All these properties make it the ideal raw material for the industry to produce cheap mass-produced goods. Palm oil is found in numerous everyday products – for example in margarine, frozen pizza, chocolate and cooking oil. It is also used in cleaning agents, detergents, candles, cosmetics and to generate electricity and heat.

The plant behind the oil

The oil palm can grow up to 30 meters into the sky and reach an impressive age of around 80 years. It is a monoecious plant, which means that it bears both male and female flowers. The alternating male and female inflorescences (flower clusters) produce fruit from the 5th year onwards, and not in short supply: several thousand plum-sized stone fruits ripen in a single fruiting body, which together can weigh up to 50 kg. The lower third of its trunk is covered with old leaf bases and crowned with pinnate leaves. As a distinctly tropical plant, the oil palm, like the coconut palm, requires temperatures of around 25 °C and regular rainfall of around 100 mm per month and therefore grows mainly around the equator. Unlike the coconut palm, it only thrives in deep, nutrient-rich soil.

Dark success story

Oil palm fruits were harvested and palm oil was used for culinary and medicinal purposes as early as around 5000 years ago when the population of West Africa settled down. In Egypt, palm wine made from imported fruits was used for mummification during the same period. It is not yet clear when, alongside the care and harvest of wild oil palms, the cultivation and domestication of the plant began. The oil palm came to Europe (Portugal) through colonisation in the 15th century, but initially only as an ornamental plant. This changed in the 16th century when the Portuguese took palm oil on their slave ships as provisions. It was used to enrich thin soups made from rice, corn or yam, which were given to the Africans who were deported to the Americas as a staple food. This is how palm oil found its way into the kitchens of Brazil’s black population and became a food that was meaningful to the culture. ‘Dendê oil’, as it is known locally, became an essential ingredient in many Afro-Brazilian dishes. The street food ‘acarajé’ and the fish stew ‘moqueca’ are the two best-known representatives.

European industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries increased the demand for oils and fats for machines, candles and lamps, among other things. The European colonial powers forced West African smallholders to grow oil palms outside the original cultivation area in the Niger Delta. The Briton William Lever founded the first colonial oil palm plantation in the Belgian-occupied Congo in 1908 and merged with a Dutch margarine manufacturer to form Unilever in 1929. Belgian agricultural engineers also established the first plantations on the Dutch-occupied island of Sumatra at the beginning of the 20th century, thus paving the way for the rapid spread of the oil palm in Southeast Asia, where the soil and sunshine conditions are even more favorable than in equatorial Africa.

Palm oil production is still rising steadily today – according to the FAO, almost 410 million tonnes of palm oil fruits were harvested worldwide in 2023, with over half being used as biofuel. Over 60 percent of palm oil is produced in Indonesia, followed by Malaysia with over 20 percent and Thailand, Nigeria and Colombia with much smaller quantities. The world’s largest palm oil consumer to date is the Unilever Group (Rama, Langnese, Dove) with 1.4 million tons of palm oil per year. Its size and market power are the result of colonial exploitation and land expropriation around a hundred years ago.

From ‘vegetable’ to industrial product

Originally, palm oil fruits were eaten as vegetables and their oil was used for soups, for frying or as an ingredient for porridges (together with cassava, rice, bananas, yams and beans) and stews. Fibers, palm wine, wood and palm kernel oil were used to make soaps and the roots of the oil palm were used for medicinal purposes.

Today, palm oil, half of which consists of saturated fatty acids, is notorious as a fattening agent that can cause high cholesterol levels and heart disease. Palm kernel oil, which is used for cocoa glazes or ice cream confectionery, consists of 80 percent saturated fatty acids. In addition, refined palm oil usually contains high levels of fatty acid esters, which are considered carcinogenic. Their presence in infant formula is particularly worrying. Nut and chocolate spreads also often contain high levels of harmful palm oil.

During harvesting, the whole fruiting bodies of the palm are chopped off and then steam heated. The individual fruits are then detached and crushed to separate the seeds. The oil can be pressed directly from the fruit pulp, which consists of over 50 percent fat. This is solid at room temperature and is mainly used to make margarine. The seeds are cracked using special machines and, depending on their quality, are used as a food additive or for soap and cosmetics production. The residual products of oil production are used as animal feed and the juice from the palm leaves is fermented to make palm wine.

Today, more than half of palm oil is consumed as biofuel and burned in power plants to generate electricity and heat. Just under a quarter is used in the food industry for margarine, chocolate spread, crunchy muesli, ice cream, baked goods, instant soups, frozen pizzas and chocolate bars. Just under 15 percent is used as animal feed for cattle, pigs and poultry and around the same amount goes to the chemical, pharmaceutical, detergent and cosmetics industries.

The organic sector also relies on palm oil. The tropical oil is contained in hundreds of organic products from well-known manufacturers. Although the use of pesticides, chemical fertilizers and genetic engineering is prohibited, the cultivation of organic palm oil is also dominated by industrial monocultures.

Palm oil – a climate offender

In the climate debate, the palm oil industry tries to present itself as particularly efficient with high yield and production figures and argues that oil palms require little arable land compared to other oil crops due to their high yields. However, many areas around the world are already being taken over by palm oil monocultures. It is also a fact that oil palms thrive primarily in rainforest-covered areas near the equator, which is why the world’s most species-rich ecosystems are being deforested to create the plantations, endangered species such as orangutans are being driven to extinction and the people living there are being displaced. Deforestation also causes gigantic amounts of stored carbon to be emitted into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Indonesia is one of the world’s largest CO2 emitters, primarily due to rainforest deforestation for oil plantations. Palm oil production also uses a lot of fossil fuels for soil cultivation, fertilisers, pesticides, harvesting, transport and processing. In addition, methane, which is a very strong greenhouse gas, escapes from production residues such as the wastewater from the cooking process in the oil mills. And biodiesel made from palm oil causes three times as many climate-damaging emissions as diesel made from crude oil.

As a result of the public debate, the palm oil industry has created various sustainability labels in recent years. However, as these have not led in practice to a reduction in rainforest deforestation for oil palms or to an improvement in the human rights situation, most environmental and development organisations reject these PR initiatives of the industry, with their financing using taxpayers’ money, considering it consumer deception. Under pressure from consumers, food manufacturers in more and more countries are therefore replacing palm oil with sunflower oil – and advertising with ‘palm oil-free’ labels on packaging.

Are oil palms bad plants?

Oil or coconut palms are neither bad nor good. The problem lies in the enormous demand for vegetable oils and fats on the world market. The huge quantities required by the industry can be produced particularly cheaply on industrial monoculture plantations and under exploitative working conditions.

However, innovative projects and initiatives show that palm oil cultivation can be sustainable. These include agroforestry systems, for example, where the oil palm is part of mixed cultivation.

Sources

Rettet den Regenwald e.V.: Palm oil – the death of the rainforest

Sodi!: History of Food: Oil palm

WWF: Like Ice in the Sunhine. Vegetable oils and fats in ice cream. The example of coconut oil.