Apparently, it is not only indigenous people or threatened species who are harmfully affected by the deliberately lit forest fires that clear way for new palm oil plantations—something I wrote about in a previous blog post.

In July, a forest fire in the Indonesian province Riau, caused a record-breaking haze that spread throughout Southeast Asia. Deadly smog travelled to Malaysia and Singapore. Schools closed down, masked public servants evacuated children from playgrounds, and tensions arose between governments of Southeast Asian countries.

People wearing masks in Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping area
© Edgar Su / Reuters

What can be done to resolve such issues? 

Doing what is right may not always be easy, but when one is obviously doing more bad than good, action needs to be taken. Fault needs to be recognised. Palm oil businesses need to take responsibility for the harms they have caused. Leaders of the corporations need to think about what they’re doing. They need to remember that their priorities lie in satisfying their stakeholders: consumers, local communities, and regional and national governments, who have all been crying out for better management practices. Only when palm oil corporations recognise and respect their stakeholders will they listen to them, and through this, they can promise to better their ways.

About a year ago, I joined the TYE Program, a teen entrepreneurship competition in Vancouver. Teams were to create business plans and present them in a venture challenge—the winner competing again in the global competition in Washington DC.

What I learnt in this experience, however, was not that business plans are necessary. Simply surveying a landscape and writing a report does not help start up a company. Because business plans have to be specific, they may be rather make-believe. No matter how extensive your research is, there are too many things you have to assume. I felt this when my team—consisting of my four siblings and myself—created a business plan. We won both the local and global competitions for our written and presented business plan, but that didn’t matter in the real world. Things didn’t go the way we wrote our plan. Of course they didn’t. For example, we didn’t know if suppliers would work with us. Things don’t go as planned almost all of the time, so it doesn’t help when you measure your success based on how close you are to your business plan. In this sense, I believe that business plans aren’t a useful tool for startups.

I have a bone to pick up with the palm oil industry. I believe that the biggest of this industry’s issues concerns the way corporations expand palm oil plantations.

Palm oil, deemed the world’s most popular vegetable oil, is used to produce a variety of products, from shampoo to margarine and biodiesel. 90% of the world’s palm oil is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia, with production increasing 7% each year.

Because of the increasing demand for palm oil, companies figured that they needed to expand their plantations. Hand in hand with the industry comes deforestation. Logging, however, did not satisfy the wishes of the corporations. Businesses then decided to burn down forests to create land for their plantations—the already disappearing forests with critically endangered species and diminishing biodiversity; forests with native people, who are forced to relocate.

Dead maroon leaf-monkey lying in a new palm oil plantation in Kalimantan
© Alain Compost / WWF

Why does this happen?

Leaders of palm oil corporations obviously have more than sufficient knowledge of what happens in their businesses and their businesses’ hazardous nature. The only logical explanation is that they simply don’t care enough about things that won’t benefit them because no decent human being would ever be okay with profiting from such horrors.