Palm Oil

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Palm Oil Factsheet

Palm oil touches our lives every time we take a trip to the supermarket. Palm oil and its derivatives are used in a ubiquitous array of packaged foods, including ice cream, cookies, crackers, chocolate products, cereals, breakfast bars, cake mixes, doughnuts, potato chips, instant noodles, frozen sweets and meals, baby formula, margarine, and dry and canned soups.

Truth and Consequences: Palm Oil Plantations Push Unique Orangutan Population to Brink of Extinction

A manmade inferno inside the globally renowned Tripa rainforest in Aceh, Indonesia is pushing this forest’s unique population of Sumatran orangutans to the brink of extinction. Destruction inside palm oil plantation leases is driving the end of this great lowland forest, despite years of efforts by local communities to defend their forests and livelihood.

Girl Scouts and Palm Oil

When they were just eleven years old, Michigan Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen discovered an alarming fact while completing research for their Girl Scout Bronze Awards: most Girl Scout cookies are packed with palm oil, an ingredient that causes the destruction of irreplaceable rainforests and threatens the survival of humankind’s closest relative, orangutans.

Undesired Consequences of the Industrial Food Complex

The connection between deforestation-related emissions and agricultural expansion is well documented. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), agriculture and deforestation account for roughly one third of global greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. Take for example, the rapid expansion of three globally-traded agricultural commodities into tropical rainforests: soy, palm oil and cattle.