Palm Oil – An Evil Comes in Many Disguises
byFanny Bucheli
It takes hours to complete my weekly grocery shopping, but I try to do the ethically responsible thing. Culprit number one is without question that one little ingredient, often well hidden in tiny print, camouflaged in fuzzy terminology and almost always completely unnecessary – Palm Oil.
Palm Oil was hailed the saving grace of the food and cosmetics industry a couple of decades ago. Falsely celebrated as a healthy alternative to butter, palm oil has managed to sneak into absolutely everything we consume, be it food, beauty products, detergents and even candles. It is in virtually everything that is industrially produced and available in your supermarket.
Why is palm oil so bad? Doesn’t its production create countless jobs for entire populations? Yes, it does. But along with it comes significant increase in cardiovascular diseases, a new kind of slave trade of poorly treated migrant workers and indigenous communities being cheated out of their ancestral lands without compensation.
Palm oil consumption has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years – Malaysia and Indonesia take the lion share of 85% of worldwide production. Our ecosystem can simply not cope with the demands. The equivalent of 300 football fields worth of rainforest is razed by fire and plough every hour in South East Asia, 80% of the orangutans’ natural habitat has been destroyed. At this rate, these gentle herbivores will be extinct by 2020, and 98% of all rainforest in the region will have disappeared forever.
Are we really willing to sacrifice our rainforests, biodiversity, birds, elephants, tigers, orangutans to the luxury of a relatively inexpensive loaf of bread? Are we willing, as we munch on a cereal bar, to take a hard look at the photos of thousands of slow-moving orangutans burned to death as they are unable to escape their burning habitat?
Source: causes.org
Are we willing, while we enjoy the smell of our scented candle, to hear of Peni, the baby orangutan who, barely alive and trembling, clung to her dying mother’s chest, as she was tied, beaten and drowned in a pond. Killed by ignorance rather than by malice, when her only crime was to come too close to humans in search for food after her forest had gone up in flames?
Source: Feri Latief/International Animal Rescue
There is talk of so-called sustainable palm oil in the future. But until then, by all means shop with your magnifying glass in hand. Find palm oil, vegetable oil, sodium laureth sulfate or pretty much any other word you don’t recognize on the ingredients list of your baked goods, chips, instant noodles, chocolate, ice cream, milk, margarine, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, lipstick, detergents. If it’s processed, it’s got palm oil - it’s that simple. Put it back on the shelf, help end this holocaust and safe an orangutan from dying an unimaginably cruel death.