You may have never heard of palm oil, but chances are you’ve used it. The palm tree derivative appears in everything from lipstick to cookies and chocolate to shampoo, yet producing it exacts a largely hidden environmental and human toll.
Palm oil production has doubled over the last decade and experts estimate that it will double again by 2050, for both food and non-food uses, including biofuels. In Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of the oil, growers have burned down whole swaths of tropical forest to make way for new plantations. These forests are irreplaceable, and their destruction imperils the habitats of endangered species, such as orangutans and tigers.
Bjørn Christian Tørrissen
In recent years, environmentalists have targeted corporations that buy palm oil for use in their products, including Unilever, Nestlé and Colgate-Palmolive. Unilever, the British-Dutch conglomerate, has taken the lead in responding, setting the goal of buying only certifiably sustainable palm oil by 2020.
But Unilever and other companies are again under fire for practices pertaining to the palm oil industry. This time it is not environmentalists, but Amnesty International, which issued a report last November detailing abusive working conditions on Indonesia’s palm oil plantations.
Unilever and other companies are under fire for abusive working conditions on palm oil plantations.
The human rights group surveyed five plantations belonging to subsidiaries or suppliers of the Asian agribusiness giant Wilmar, which provides palm oil to numerous consumer product companies. It found a litany of problems, including child labor, forced labor and sub-minimum wages, as well as situations where workers were threatened with punishments or deductions if productively quotas were not met. And it found that some women workers were spraying pesticides—including the European Union-banned paraquat—without adequate protection.
After the release of this report, titled The Great Palm Oil Scandal: Labour Abuses Behind Big Brand Names, Unilever promised to “investigate the grievances” raised.
On May 25, Unilever responded to questions on the results of its investigation. The company said the abuses are “industry-wide” and still unresolved, but “some progress” has been made. It found that Wilmar “is moving in the right direction,” citing “objective and independent reviews of their own operations and conditions in plantations.” It vowed continued vigilance.
Unilever, the maker of such products as Dove soap and Magnum ice creams, added that “we do not tolerate any form of labour abuse in our supply chain.”
But, as Amnesty International noted in its report, companies like Unilever have been relying on the sustainability certification system to check conditions on the plantations. “Certification assessments cannot and should not be used as proof of compliance with workers’ human rights,” it said.
By failing to take stock of human rights, the report concluded, “all of these companies are benefiting from, and contributing to, severe labour abuses in their palm oil supply chain.”
Companies have an obligation to ensure that the products they sell are not contributing to environmental degradation or labor abuses in other countries. And consumers can play their part by demanding this.
Branden Phillips
Braden Phillips is a freelance multimedia journalist living in Barcelona, Spain.