From the video description:

Oil palm an edible vegetable oil that comes from the fruit of oil palm trees. Two types of oil can be produced; crude palm oil comes from squeezing the fleshy fruit, and palm kernel oil which comes from crushing the kernel, or the stone in the middle of the fruit. Oil palm trees are native to Africa but were brought to South-East Asia just over 100 years ago as an ornamental tree crop. Now, Indonesia and Malaysia make up over 85% of global supply but there are 42 other countries that also produce palm oil.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_and_environmental_impact_of_palm_oil

Palm oil, produced from the oil palm, is a basic source of income for many farmers in South East Asia, Central and West Africa, and Central America. It is locally used as cooking oil, exported for use in much commercial food and personal care products and is converted into biofuel. It produces up to 10 times more oil per unit area than soybeans, rapeseed or sunflowers.

Oil palms produce 38% of the world’s vegetable-oil output on 5% of the world’s vegetable-oil farmland.[1] Palm oil plantations, typically monoculture crops are under increasing scrutiny for their effects on the environment, including loss of carbon-sequestering, biodiverse forest land.[2] There is also concern over displacement and disruption of human and animal populations due to palm oil cultivation.[3][4]

In the two countries responsible for over 80% of world oil palm production, Indonesia and Malaysia, smallholders account for 35–40% of the total area of planted oil palm and as much as 33% of the output. Elsewhere, as in West African countries that produce mainly for domestic and regional markets, smallholders produce up to 90% of the annual harvest.

Recent news about palm oil

Note: These articles are meant as a jumping-off point for research, keep in mind that every news media company will be influenced by its class character, the nation it’s based in, who it is owned by, and many other factors.

Channel News Asia: Indonesian farmers protest against rising cost of palm oil export ban

JAKARTA: Hundreds of Indonesian smallholder farmers on Tuesday (May 17) staged a protest in the capital Jakarta and in other parts of the world’s fourth most populous country, demanding the government end a palm oil export ban that has slashed their income. […] President Widodo imposed the export ban on palm oil after earlier policies failed to control domestic cooking oil prices.

Al Jazeera: Indonesian farmers decry palm oil export ban as prices plummet

Small-scale farmers say Jakarta’s ban on palm oil exports has thrown their livelihoods into jeopardy. […] Mansuetus Darto, head of the Indonesian Oil Palm Farmers’ Union, West Java: “The irony for farmers is that they now have to sell fresh fruit bunches at low prices and then buy cooking oil at high prices. We need more refineries in Indonesia and we need to stop the monopoly of the palm oil companies in Indonesia.”

Note: Although I am short on time, I am attempting to make more posts with more information and context going forward. However I am not an expert and as you can see, the sources I have offered here are very cursory, and should only be regarded as a jumping-off point for deeper research. Please let me know if you have any comment about this, as this is my first post attempting to include more context. I also invite anyone to contribute any more information or context about palm oil production and processing to this thread.

  • Joe BidetA
    link
    52 years ago

    So basically palm oil:

    • comes from countries with poor or inexistent labour laws or environmental protection
    • is bound to a monoculture that empoverishes soil and biodiversity by destroying natural habitats
    • depends on heavy industrial process which probably rules out “small producers” fair/bio/eco productions?
    • has to be shipped overseas thus uses amounts of fossil fuel to get to us

    yet it is still the “cheapest” of vegetal oils… and with speculation on raw materials it may well stay that way… in France, due to “recent events” being “exceptional” circumstances, authorities in charge of consumer protection allowed industrials to bypass the mandate for precision in labeling. basically authorization to be vague or to plainly not mention or mis-mention ingredients in food. basically saying “vegetal oil” probably becomes enough…

    What do you people suggest?

    • stop caring and enjoy the delicious food?
    • boycotting palm oil to try to have a personal/local impact on the demand?
    • demanding reformist policies over-taxing such goods with high environmental impact?
    • producing one’s own vegetal oil? (where would you start?)
    • Breadbeard
      link
      fedilink
      62 years ago

      it’s only the cheapest because the workers are heirs and grandchildren of a whole society being genocided, the fear is in their dna and the people who killed their relatives, neighbours, children, friends, brothers, sisters e.t.c. ARE STILL LIVING AMONG THEM and getting richer and more influential by the minute. of course that makes wage agreements & unionisation difficult if it leads to them burning down your house, raping your women and murdering everyone and everything you love. which they have done over and over and over with CIA/NATO support

      palmfat is only cheaper - on top of the slavery-like conditions - because of a european cross-border tax-deduction rule making crossborder trades within the same category basically tax free if the same group of products gets exported and imported at the same time: so subsidized butter goes to the weapons factory in the post-soviet pre-eu corrupt nation run by fascist mafiosi (bulgaria, albania, romania, hungary…) whereas the palmfat gets imported from brasil, indonesia, malaysia (never from a democracy…).

      this way our beautiful tax funded supergreen farming in europe funds war in Donbas and Syria, while none of our products in our supermarkets actually contain the butter we subsidize.