Amazing Oil Palm Fruit Harvesting Machine - Palm Oil Processing in Factory - Palm Oil Production
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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 flesh...

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.

  • @afellowkid@lemmygrad.mlOPM
    2•2 years ago

    Thanks for this detailed information. I’m curious to know more about these tax loopholes you’re talking about regarding butter subsidies and butter being used in the arms industry. I will try to look around for more info on that and also check out the titles you mentioned.

    Based on what you wrote here as well as in your other comment, I did some searching and found this article: The Palm Oil Fiefdom. It’s long so I haven’t finished it yet, but it appears to be covering much of the historical and political background of palm oil production in Indonesia.

    Some excerpts from the beginning sections of the article, in case you or anyone else wants a general idea of the article’s angle/premise:

    This is the first installment of Indonesia for Sale, an in-depth series on the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land rights crisis.

    This agricultural surge is routinely cast as an economic miracle, rapidly bringing income and modernity to undeveloped regions. In this narrative, expansion was planned, controlled and regulated. The harm to the environment was an unfortunate side effect of the moral imperative of development.

    But there is another version of the story, one that played out through backroom deals and murky partnerships. In this story, unaccountable politicians carved up other people’s land and sold it to the children of billionaires. Farms that fed the rural poor were destroyed so that multinationals could produce food for export. Attempts to rein in the bupatis were undermined by their ability to buy elections with palm oil cash, and they came to be known, in a nod to Suharto, as “little kings.”

    Not sure how long it will take me to finish it but when I do I will add more detail to this post.

    Edit: Having read more of the article, it is primarily about specific individuals involved in various incidents and corruption schemes. It’s very detailed and informative about that topic, but the subject matter is not very broad in relation to the palm oil industry as a whole.

    • Breadbeard
      3•2 years ago

      I recommend the books " the jakarta method" by Vincent Bevins and the movies “Jagal - the act of killing” and “Senyap - the look of silence” by Joshua Oppenheimer (not necessarily in this order)

    • Breadbeard
      2•2 years ago

      addendum: why is butter used in arms industry rather than palmfat: because it is richer in triglycerides, which are the precursors to many chemicals that go boom. the movie “fight club” comes to mind… also: butter is subsidized in most european economies and most butter producing nations with subsidies have overproduction capacities which they can trade. this bring us to the “gruppenbesteuerungsbefreiung” which is a taxation rule in european countries allowing tax free trade exchanges of products within the same product category. (butter equals oil, palmfat equals oil, oil equals oil… hence all the supermarkets full of palmfat products in gas stations of europe. this happens because these companies get together under a common subsidiary which organizes the trade among these products.

      the kicker is: you get to rake in the subsidies. it is like the CUM EX scandal or the “Einkommenssteuer-Umgehungs-Karussell” in which you get taxes back for a service you declared but de facto never paid taxes for. why: because by exporting the butter you subsidized or sending it over to another country to be manufactured, you get to import the same tonnage of products that go by the same group category (oils…/natural fat, declared for cosmetics or disguised as some economic assistance package for extra charity tax deductions). so you import oil or palmfat, there is no tax on this exchange yet your product was subsidized and the product you received produced under minimal environmental overisght, complete lack of human rights, originating in post-colonial fascist dictatorships who get run by the very companies extracting these products (palmfat, oil) and are under these subsidiary/trading structures that allow this siphoning off of european agricultural subsidies and by the same token helping arm terrorists and nazis with soviet type weapons - and if you produce grads and kalashnikovs in some old post-soviet extracted arms industry run by a western corporate austro-canadian arms industry i m not gonna name here - in say, f.e.: Bulgaria) then these need a filler that goes boom…

      and these countries are usually southeast asian or southamerican countries that produce palmoil AND regular oil. Chevron Texaco, saudi aramco and the usual suspects (bush) are relevant here

    • Breadbeard
      2•2 years ago

      regarding the article, it is rather the second. too many tourists on bali are bathing on the bones of people disappeared in rivers and sea, whose villages were burned down and made into tourist resorts. it was usually poor communist or chinese minority fishing villages. a process we can see all over the world pretty much everywhere you have hotel towers next to beachfront resorts…