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.
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
Thank you for this detailed additional information