Did You Know That palm oil which most of us use everyday harm orangutans and other wildlife?
First of all what is palm oil and where we can find it:
Palm oil is the most widely used vegtable oil in the world, Half the packaged food products found on supermarket shelves now contain palm oil. Cookies, bread, potato chips, chocolate and milk are only exaples.
Palm oil is also extensively used in cosmetics and toiletries like soaps, shampoos, detergents or toothpaste. Increasingly, palm oil is used as a biofuel.. to sum up I can say that Palm oil is just ubiquitous!
What we should know before we buy products with palm oil:
Oil palms only grow in the tropics and need much water. Originally native to South America and West Africa, palm oil plantations have now spread throughout the wet tropics to Papua New Guinea, parts of Asia, Kenya, and also back to countries in West Africa and South America where the palms are native. The problem with palm oil is that vast areas of virgin tropical rain forest are clear cut to open up land for cultivation.
In Sumatra at least 10.8 million hectares have been opened up for palm oil plantations. Similar is the situation in Borneo. Much of the land on which palm oil plantations have been established consists of peat swamp forest. The draining, burning, and conversion of peat swamp forests to palm oil has been especially damaging to the world’s climate as it has led to Indonesia being the third largest contributor of carbon to the world’s atmosphere after China and the United States.
Wildlife such as orangutans have been found buried alive, killed from machete attacks, guns and other weaponry. Government data has shown that over 50,000 orangutans have already died as a result of deforestation due to palm oil in the last two decades. This either occurs during the deforestation process, or after the animal enters a village or existing palm oil plantation in search of food. Mother orangutans are also often killed by poachers and have their babies taken to be sold or kept as pets, or used for entertainment in wildlife tourism parks in countries such as Thailand and Bali.
Palms plantations are another buisnes on our Earth where the money win with wisdom and decency. This problem has been touted by most environmental organizations as WWF and Greenpeace, but this does not work.
No one can stop this barbarism except us.
Lets check ingredients of products we buy for our health and good conscience.
Sources:
Comments
You can check the blog called 'czytajsklad' where many different products are compared to choose the healthiest ones. In many cases lack of palm oil in ingredients is one of the condition to qualify product as a healthy one.
The reason of it, is because it’s probably the cheapest source of fat, and not many people are aware of consequences of using it.
http://www.ethicalcoffee.net/fair.html
Maybe then people from rich countries would start to consider what are they buying. Also it might be good idea to increase taxes, or sometimes forbid products containing such ingredients. But, in my opinion, most effective way would be to just stop eating products containing palm oil, and replace it with local food. C'mon guys, you know you can make nutella on your own! And it is probably the only product with palm oil that you cannot live without.
https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/homemade-nutella