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.