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The contents of a jar of Nutella
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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Palm oil = deforestation.
Or is that just propaganda to prevent palm oil from taking to much marketshare?
You need at least 3 times as much farmland to make an equal amount of any other form of vegetable oil.
Most farm oil used in Europe is from sustainable farming, Indonesia makes 50% of the palm oil on the global market, and they claim to have regulated palm oil farming to be sustainable.
Palm oil is an excellent oil, it is efficient to grow because of very high yields, and it's been used for thousands of years.
I heard that palm oil plantations deforest where orangutans live and I wouldn't want to destroy their habitat. Why can't America grow palm oil instead of so much corn and soy beans?
Oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments. Environments that when left undisturbed would be tropical rainforest. Decoupling palm oil from deforestation is therefore very hard. Certified sustainable palmoil is simply from farmland that the farmers have proved not to have been deforested recently but that same land still has the potential to return to tropical rainforest after restoration.
Regarding America specifically probably only Hawaii could support it. But land there is scarce and is used for much higher value crops like fruit crops. Harvesting palm oil is also quite labor intensive since the fruit bunches are harvested manually. It therefore does not make economic sense to grow it in countries with high wages.
I absolutely love Orangutans, but then any action should be against the countries that fail to protect orangutans, not demonizing palm oil which dozens of countries depend on.
Demonizing palm oil reeks of industry manipulation, to protect agriculture in Europe or USA.
Ok but you could be Mr monopoly guy behind the keyboard astroturfing your palm oil empire on Lemmy.
But seriously why isn't the USA producing palm oil?
Well, I hope you are correct and that there are no reasons for Indonesia to be lying about that.
Demand has only gone up in the past few decades. It’s in more and more highly processed foods.
I don’t think any of this changes past deforestation, either.
Since oil palms only grow in humid tropical environments it really comes down to which land we value the most. By using 3 hectares in Europe we could save 1 hectare of land in rainforests. What is worth more, 1 hectare rainforest in Indonesia or 3 hectares of native woodland in Europe? It's not really clear cut. One could argue that 1 hectare of rainforest is more valuable because of the higher biodiversity. However there is not one natural answer to this question and ultimately subjective.
Palm oil is almost or entirely unique among plant oils in that it is solid at room temperature without hydrogenation, so it's a plant oil that behaves like an animal fat in recipes. How's it compare to lard in sustainability?
Excellent point, compared to lard it's probably more like 30 times more efficient in the amount of farmland needed.
The problem is not palm oil, the real problem is that the global population has increased from 5 to 8 billion in 50 years. Without palm oil, deforestation would probably have been worse.