History and context
Palm oil use exploded from the 1990s as food companies replaced hydrogenated fats after trans-fat regulations, and personal-care companies replaced tallow after BSE. Today palm and palm-kernel oil are in roughly half of packaged supermarket goods worldwide, mostly grown in Indonesia and Malaysia, where their expansion has driven massive tropical-forest and peatland loss.
🐇 The animal-rights angle
Palm-oil expansion is the single largest driver of habitat loss for critically endangered orangutans, Sumatran tigers, Bornean pygmy elephants, and Sumatran rhinos. Peatland burning to clear plantations also kills untold numbers of smaller species and displaces indigenous communities. Avoiding palm oil — or insisting on genuinely deforestation-free supply — is one of the most direct anti-extinction levers on the supermarket shelf.
🌍 The sustainability angle
Palm oil is the highest-yielding oilseed by area, which is why simple boycotts can backfire — replacing it with soy or rapeseed can require 4-10× more land. The pragmatic middle path is to reduce total demand, avoid palm in categories where alternatives are trivially available (soap, biscuits, spreads), and support genuinely segregated deforestation-free supply via POIG, RSPO NEXT, or similar credible certifications where palm is unavoidable.