HOW CONSCIOUS CONSUMERS TACKLE THE PALM OIL CONUNDRUM

Conscious consumerism remains one of the mega consumer trends of our time, and is only expected to intensify. We’ve recently seen how veganism is increasingly being absorbed as part of the flexitarian lifestyle that is easier for mainstream consumers to adopt. Behind the conscious consumer choice lies the urge not only to live more healthily, but to make buying decisions that lessen our negative impact on the planet.

Amid these good intentions, the use of palm oil in everything from pies to lipsticks presents the conscious consumer with a dilemma. On the one hand, highquality palm oil is the ideal product to meet modern consumer demands — of all known vegetable oil crops, the oil palm has the greatest yield per hectare, requiring less land and other resources for its cultivation.

On the other hand, the tree grows only in the narrow band of equatorial forest of Africa, South-East Asia and South America. This is a sensitive biome. Indonesia, where large-scale, commercial palm oil plantations have been established, is also the home of critically endangered animals, such as the orangutan. Deforestation and the disruption of indigenous communities’ livelihoods present a compelling argument against further development of the palm oil industry.

However, the reality remains that if we don’t get the vegetable oil we need from the abundant oil palms, then up to nine times more land is going to be needed for the cultivation of alternative oil crops, threatening biodiversity in other places.

Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN) published its analysis of palm oil impacts on global biodiversity. ICUN Director-General, Inger Andersen, said: “Half of the world’s population uses palm oil in food. If we ban or boycott it, other more land-hungry oils will likely take its place. Palm oil is here to stay, and we urgently need concerted action to make palm oil production more sustainable, ensuring that all parties — governments, producers and the supply chain — honour their sustainability commitments.”

In 2011, Woolworths became the first South African retailer to commit to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a global organisation that works to halt further deforestation due to palm oil. On our Good Business Journey, we are committed to only source certified, sustainable palm oil for all our own-label products by 2020.

Where are we today?

Twenty of Woolworths’ supplier sites are now RSPO members. Almost 60% of the volume of palm oil that we source for our foods products is certified as sustainable by the RSPO through supply chain audits.

A number of key product lines, including pies, rusks and WBeauty soaps, now bear the RSPO logo with WBeauty Skincare and selected WBeauty bath and body ranges following suit early next year.

Woolworths continues to purchase PalmTrace “Book and Claim” RSPO certificates to offset the remainder of our use. This year, we purchased 1,000 tonnes of PalmTrace credits from smallholder farmers in Johor in West Malaysia.

For the conscious consumer who wants to be part of the solution, this means looking beyond the label to see if palm oil is an ingredient and knowing the brand’s stance on the use of sustainable palm oil.