Palm Oil

Palm oil is a vegetable oil found in one in 10 UK supermarket products - including crisps, bread, detergents and lipsticks.

Products containing palm oil

It is the second most consumed edible oil in the world, behind soy, and is set to take the lead in less than a decade.

The establishment of palm oil plantations to meet the growing demand for one of the world's most popular vegetable oils is driving devastating rainforest destruction in South East Asia.

The lowland forest favoured by the palm oil industry is the only remaining habitat of the orang-utan. The unrelenting spread of palm oil plantations is the biggest threat to the species.

Orang-utans are threatened by palm oil plantations

Deforestation and community impacts

The clearance of rainforests to make way for oil palm plantations is exacerbating the problem of deforestation which contributes between 10-30% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Palm oil plantations also often benefit large companies at the expense of local communities who can lose their land and access to important forest resources and ecosystem services.

In Indonesia over 100 million people depend upon access to rainforest resources for their survival. Their way of life is severely under threat from plantation companies who are often associated with human rights abuses and violent conflicts when removing people from their land to make way for the plantations.

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)

From September 2005 Friends of the Earth local groups campaigned to get the UK's major supermarkets signed up to the RSPO. By the summer of 2006 local groups could celebrate as their hard work paid off when the last of the UK's big supermarkets joined.

The RSPO is a conglomeration of companies and NGOs who support the production and trade of sustainable palm oil.

They work on various projects that include producing mechanisms to credibly verify that plantations have met RSPO principles and criteria, creating a means to trace palm oil from its production to the market, and ensuring that smallholder producers are not excluded from their initiative.

The RSPO is the only initiative to source sustainable palm oil in the world.

Our campaigning on palm oil has delievered many successes and has also acted as a case study during our campaign for better company law.

Palm oil campaign successes >>

Image © Tamsyn East/Friends of the Earth
Orangutan Foundation
Helen Buckland