If you recall, the palm oil crop can be used in many different products spanning different industries. It’s a cheap source of cooking oil for many, compared to the more expensive olive or sunflower oils. It’s component fats and oils are also used in cleaning products such as soaps and shampoos. If one scours our homes, we can easily find that most consumers goods that we use will contain an ingredient that can be derived from palm oil.

A small list of products containing palm oil

Source: World Wildlife Fund

The sheer number of products made with palm oil and its derivatives makes it hard to target a specific industry or even to regulate the palm oil industry without a ripple effect on other industries. Doing so would cause disruptions to the supply chain of many industries, dramatically raising prices. As consumers, while we can lobby our governments to regulate and mandate companies to use palm oil substitutes, the effects of it can be limited and ineffective. As mentioned, the large variety of products that use palm oil would cause the prices of most consumer goods to increase. Second, palm oil is already one of the most efficient crops for producing vegetable oils in a given land space.

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A position statement by the World Wildlife Fund in 2018 stated how palm oil substitution in Germany led to greater environmental consequences given that other substitutes such as soybean and sunflower produce less oil in the same land area compared to palm oil.

Palm oil vs its substitutes

Source: IUCN

The infographic above shows that it is nether practical nor beneficial to remove palm oil from the supply chain. NGOs advocate instead for sustainable practices in the agricultural cultivation of palm oil. However, why have countries been slow to implement these approaches? The answer, politics and economics.