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.
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?)
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.
great summary…
why palmfat:
special tax rulings for cross border product transfer within the same product class gets tax deductions, allowing local subsidies for f.e. butter production from large scale but pricey european dairy operations to be laundered for cheap sweatshop/banana dictatorship slave labour products. This way national subsidies are in fact be laundered into ones own pocket or into that of the politician making the deal. This way the local producers can be undercut and hollowed out whereas you can launder tax through an inferior import product - as long as you export the Butter, f.e. to BULGARIA or other ARMS INDUSTRY countries where european/US/canadian firms have taken over soviet style weapons manufacturers f.e. VMZ Sopot, where european consortii can produce fresh grad & rpgs & kalashnikovs for their ISIS & AZOV friends. Yes, they rather take butter, since animal fats are richer in the triglycerides necessary for the powder that goes boom. In exchange you get to fund warcrimes and you get chocoloate that never expires and can thus fill the otherwise empty shelves in your local store. as a sidenote, evil nazi “Rudolf Hess” wrote a book about the butter/war economic issue which - albeit a fucking nazi book - still very much relevant today. “Kanonen und Butter”
2.) JAKARTA METHOD. Watch Senyap/Jagal aka “the look of silence” / “the act of killing”
3.) don’t eat palmfat. i m not saying you should NEVER eat it, but as a rule of thumb: Products that contain palmfat were processed for lengthy shelf lives vs. the short term expiration date of useing real butter, thus it is usually neither fresh nor very nutritious. We can go into the health effects of saturated fats like palmfat, but that’s a whole different can of worms. In general: products that contain palmfat are inferior. Fresh food & produce doesn’t contain palmfat, if you cook fresh, it can’t possibly enter your system and you re not funding the MASSIVE crime that is the colonialist/imperialist palmfat empire and its enourmous massmurder and ecological footprint. And why would the butter of your local farmer not be the superior product to a colonial good that has to travel thousands of miles on diesel ships?
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.
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)
Thank you
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
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…
btw, OFC i am also fascinated by the tantalizing machines, and I want to be that guy:
