Someone raised the subject of palm oil - good or bad? - in the LCHF forum, and I thought there might be some general interest in the subject.
Palm oil makes the news occasionally because it's associated with rainforest destruction and "unhealthy fats" (saturated fat). As with most things, these issues are far more complicated than the talking heads suggest.
Let's take the environmental side first. The main product of land clearance is timber. Ripping up 100 hectares of old-growth hardwood and getting it out of the country via traders with the right connections (yes, there are fences who sell wood!) will make approximately as much money as the oilpalm plantation that follows it. A tonne of generic hardwood sells for about $2000; a rough average would be $250,000 per hectare, gross. Some species yield 5-10 times that price. After costs - land purchase, licenses, bribes, labour, transport - you could easily walk away with $20m in your pocket from a moderately-sized rainforest raid. And what then?
Well, even the world's worst governments recognise that leaving 100 hectares to turn to desert is not an ideal outcome; they discovered that the international hemp-sandal brigade make slightly less fuss if they pretend the clearance was done for agricultural reasons - because who could protest growing crops so that poor people can have jobs and hospitals?
That's not what happens, of course. The three most common alternative possibilities are soybeans, pasture, and oilpalm. Soybeans and pasture are low-yielding options that are fundamentally unsuited to ex-rainforest soil. You can force a yield with technology, but soil erosion is inevitable. After abandonment, the forest might regenerate eventually, but usually the land is damaged beyond repair and ends up as a sparse scrub or prairie.
Oilpalm turns out to be the least-bad option. Unlike soybeans, it's a perennial; it's planted once and left alone. There is no ploughing (which is incredibly destructive in the tropics), and few chemicals. It is always grown with a covercrop that protects the soil and restores fertility. The explicit intent of the plantation is to emulate a young forest ecosystem. It has very little species diversity, but at least it's not desert. When it's abandoned (20-25 years after establishment) the surrounding forest will rapidly encroach and take over.
The gross yield from oilpalm is about $25,000/hectare/year, or $2.5m/year for our hypothetical 100ha, of which $1m is cost-of-capital, labour, maintenance, and taxes. So $30m over the plantation's lifetime. Notice how this compares with the first-year timber harvest.
The indisputable issue with clearances for oilpalm is habitat destruction. However, this would happen regardless: the plantation owners want the timber first; the oilpalm is just icing on the cake.
You could make a case that buying palm oil is the environmentally-sound option. I won't stretch the point that far, but consider: if you buy the vegetable oils touted by the health mafia instead, you're supporting an equally-unsound farming model. Soybeans, canola, sunflowers and the like are grown conventionally: ploughing, pesticides and herbicides. Those crops create big deserts of dead, acidified soil in your own backyard. Their economic output is far lower than palm oil because they have very low oil yields: about 1 tonne per hectare for canola compared to 5+ tonnes for oil palm. In other words, oil palm requires only 20% of the land for a given quantity of oil. Farmers growing "healthy" polyunsaturated oilseed rely on government subsidy to turn a profit. So why grow them? Again, the reasons are complicated, but it basically boils down to peer pressure and inertia: dad grew canola on this here land and took the gubmint grants, so dammit I'm going to do it too.
In fact, I'll suggest that the most environmentally-sound source of food oils is pigs, ruminants, and poultry. Left to do piggy and bovine things, these creatures maintain soil fertility and can be integrated with profitable crops. Our forefathers knew this. Back before fossil fuels, some farms kept all biomass on-farm for the animals and exported only meat, milk, and the like, because transport costs ∝ volume, and meat volume is relatively small.
But of course, as we all know, saturated fats cause heart disease. It turns out that people in (say) Malaysia and Indonesia have CVD rates comparable to countries where polyunsaturated vegetable oils are preferred and dietary fat is lower. But hey, let's not let reality interfere with a nice simple theory.
I'm a big fan of eating what nature provides. If nature gives you palm oil, and steadfastly refuses to grow olives, perhaps your best option is to eat palm oil. There are actually wonderful agricultural models for growing the stuff, where oilpalm and coconut is integrated into an almost-natural forest of useful tree crops and annuals. I have several three-year-old coconut trees growing alongside two dozen other species for food, biomass, and animal habitat. These methods are a far cry from thousand-acre soybean monocrops, or even from the artificial-looking standard oilpalm or coconut plantation.
It's a pity so much of modern environmental and food policy is based around theories produced by people tapping away on their computers in comfortable university offices. If they got outside in the sunshine and looked around a little, they might have some more sensible ideas.
