What's the deal with palm oil?

Following a recent trip to Malaysia, YFM’s Thea Soutar gives us the run down on Palm Oil – why it is used, the downfalls, and how you can get better informed.On a flight into Kualar Lumper recently, I spotted an unexpected advertisement. On the glossy pages of a Malay hipster food mag, I read about something called 'Palm Oil Speed Stakes', essentially a supermarket race, being held to educate Malaysians on the importance of palm oil to the national economy and ways they could use the oil to best benefit in everyday life.A near novice to the palm oil issue, I'd heard enough of the bad press it gets in Australia to know that two different countries were obviously telling different stories about the same product.So what IS the deal with palm oil? According to the guys who'd know at Melbourne's Sustainable Table, it's both complex and simple. Palm Oil is the world's most efficiently produced kind of vegetable oil, harvested from oil palm plants usually grown in tropical climates. Malaysia and Indonesia are our biggest global producers of palm oil, with the industry fueling the economies of these two developing nations.The problem is that the growth of the palm oil industry has been directly responsible for huge deforestation in both Malaysia and Indonesia, where rainforest is regularly cleared to make way for palm plantations. Over 50% of the Orang-utan population has been lost in just 10 years as oil plantations have destroyed habitats. It's not pretty.What's also not pretty is that current labeling laws in Australia make it very difficult to tell if you're already consuming palm oil products at home. With over 50% of products on our supermarket shelves containing palm oil or its derivatives, the chances are you probably are.However, as Sustainable Table explains, the picture isn't all doom and gloom. We, as consumers, have serious buying power up our sleeves. And surprisingly enough, trying to boycott palm oil isn't necessarily the best way to fix the problem. Get up to scratch with the issues and what you can do to help with Sustainable Table's excellent briefing sheet on the who, what and why of palm oil.Top image credit: Daniel Kleeman