Palm Off

The other day, I met someone who’s been a consultant to the biscuit industry for the last couple of decades.  Over the course of a conversation, I mentioned (initially lightheartedly and later with seriousness) that our family had pretty much stopped eating biscuits (and a whole lot of processed snacks), because they all used palm oil, which was the single biggest cause of deforestation and climate change.   His response was, “Don’t believe what you read, it’s all written by vested interests.” What worries me, I responded, is that palm is now being planted in North-East India as well, and those priceless forests mirror those of Indonesia and Malaysia, which have been devastated by palm.  “There are 7 biscuit factories in the North East,” he responded, now with increasing belligerence “and palm oil provides livelihoods there.  Also, isn’t a palm plantation also providing green cover to deforested areas? One has to be open minded.”

I was astonished, not just at his ignorance, but his spirited defence of the indefensible. Equally, I was worried, for even as wildlife NGOs in India are fighting micro battles, the commercial foods industry, led by business consultants like this guy and others, are pitching the case for large-scale oil palm cultivation in India, particularly in the North East, with gusto.  To me, this is one of the biggest threats India’s  wildlife and forests will face in the near future and the sooner the scientific community, forestry specialists and non-profit organisations take cognisance and action, the better. 

But first the macro-economics of edible oil:  In 2015-16, India’s edible oil demand stood at 24 million tonnes, out of which only about 9 million tonnes was met from domestic production and 15 million tonnes were imported. Over 60% of the edible oil imported was palm oil: illustratively, in December 2017 alone, India imported 7.22 lakh tonnes (source:Economic Times).  

The proponents of oil palm have the following arguments, all of which are supported by economic data:

1.        India’s oil imports in 2015-16 was around Rs. 65,000 crore, constituting around 2.5% of India’s total import bill for that year. 

2.       Oil palm promotes livelihoods/employment and can be part of the overall make-in-India program.  Indeed, oil palm is the most productive commercially grown vegetable-oil crop in the world

3.       Palm oil is used extensively in haircare and beauty products and in the production of soap, not just in food. 

4.       The clear trajectory for per capita consumption of edible oil in India is up, with a current consumption of about 19 kg of oil per person per year (source: ICAR-Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research).

5.       Palm oil is cheap.  Substituting it with other oils fuels consumer inflation.  

Indeed, these arguments have made considerable headway in the offices of policy makers: the government is currently running ‘National Mission on Oilseeds and Oil Palm (NMOOP)’ to improve agro-techniques in oilseed crops, including palm.  In parts of the Western Ghats and in the North East, palm oil plantations are beginning to appear, not just in areas that were earlier planted up with other crops, but in newly chopped forests as the gestation period, prior to productivity, is, as earlier mentioned, about 6-7 years.  So, many planters who have taken to palm, keep their existing lands under another crop and chop up forests, in a case of having the cake and eating it too. 

….and this is the real problem.  Oil palm is doing to the planet what tea, cocoa and rubber have done earlier.   

The ecological costs of substituting imports of palm oil with its domestically produced version are too horrific to bear.  Photographs of rain forest devastation in South East Asia, taken by GreenPeace and others, significantly due to oil palm cultivation can break your heart; large stretches of felled forests up in smoke, beside virgin rain forests that would soon suffer the same fate.  In 2006, the World Resources Institute released satellite images of Borneo in Indonesia that effectively showed a 50% reduction in forest cover over half a century, driven primarily by oil palm cultivation.  Between 2000 and 2005, when oil plantations in Indonesia grew rapidly, the country lost 1.8 million hectares of forest per year or 51 square kilometres every single day (source: Ashish Fernandes, Sanctuary Asia, December 2009).   Now, this loss was not just due to oil palm but for timber and paper as well, but the number itself is mind-boggling.   

 Source: WRI, taken from treehugger.com 

Alongside this widespread destruction of priceless habitat and the burning of forests – which gave Indonesia a dubious emerging-nation status, that of entering the list of the World’s largest emitters of green house gases (about 2 billion tonnes) – has been the killing of orangutans in their thousands, often in the most horrific ways; they have been clubbed to death, buried alive, burnt, shot and speared.  Over 140 mammals identified as Threatened and 15 that are Critically Endangered originally inhabited these landscapes (source: IUCN), and their fate now seems sealed as the destruction goes on: these include the Sumatran tiger and the Sumatran rhino, which is the most endangered of all rhino species due to its rapid rate of decline. Numbers of the Sumatran rhino have decreased more than 70% over the last 20 years, with the only viable population now in Indonesia. The species was declared extinct in the wild in Malaysia in 2015. (source: rhino.org).  By encroaching on rhino habitat, oil palm plantations had, make no mistake, a role to play in that extinction.

Yet, moving that production to India is a horrible solution, for the North East and the Western Ghats are as vulnerable as Indonesia was (and is).  Both these biodiversity hotspots have their orangutan and rhino mammalian equivalents, in addition to a quarter of the World’s bird species diversity.   

The North East has a history of poor local governance, inept or absent institutions and a large population seeking employment opportunities and, finally (and dismally), much of the region has a legacy of hunting.  As the latest forest map of India reveals, the region has lost an enormous amount of green cover in the two years 2015 to 2017, about 1500 square kilometres in all (source: India State of Forest Report 2017).  The entire zone is prone to landslides and earthquakes and floods, and the destruction of forest cover is catalysing a crisis that, ironically, is as unreported as it is serious: rapid loss of biodiversity, increased incidence of natural disasters, leading directly to crises faced by local communities living there.  

Oil palm plantations could take such deforestation off the charts and fuel a wildlife and human-rights crisis, as local vested interests lobby for land acquisition for palm (as has been the case in South East Asia). 

The urgency for action is because India’s taxation policy on palm oil has moved towards import substitution: in late 2017, the import tax on crude palm oil was raised to 30 percent from 15 percent, while the duty for refined palm oil was raised to 40 percent from 25 percent.  

So, if domestic cultivation of oil palm is to be discouraged and our import bill curtailed,  while inflation is kept under control and livelihoods are encouraged, what needs to be done?

There isn’t any one substitute that will sort all of this out, of course, but the primacy of India’s forests must be treated as sacrosanct, not a negotiable factor.  The options that clearly emerge for the Government’s policy makers then are:

      1.        Stop doing the wrong thing.  Ban the cultivation of palm oil in India.

2.       Improve the productivity of existing acreages of other oilseeds.  This process has already begun, but a clear Government impetus is needed.

3.       Encourage the use of non-edible oil in the production of soaps and beauty products: oils such as those of mahua and pongamia, which are used in small quantities today,  are not just far better for the skin, but their usage could improve rural livelihoods in different parts of India and actually protect tree biodiversity. 

4.       Promote the use of healthier oils – palm oil is unhealthy and its derivative, palmolein is particularly heavy on transfats – by increasing taxes further on palm oil and promoting the usage of traditional oils in India.  

The goal that the Government needs to particularly emphasise on is the reduction of palm oil usage in India, whether sourced domestically or imported.  For such actions – as detailed above – to be taken, there must be informed pressure on the Government to act; pressure from scientists, non-profit organisations and citizens, for the demands of industry are the ones being heard as they are the loudest.  Those demands centre around cheap and abundant edible oil.  Yet catering to these demands entail a cost that the country ecology cannot afford to bear.

On March 3^rd – World Wildlife Day – we must rethink our policy on palm.  It’s the least we can do for our planet.