Trading Orangutans For Palm Oil

Context: The National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm comes with serious environmental, health and investment concerns.

Need for a new policy on Palm oil

• High demand: On account of high usability of Palm oil.
  • Oil doesn’t spoil at room temperature. It’s colourless and doesn’t have strong smell suitable to use in pizza, chocolate and doughnuts apart from its staple use in Asian cuisines.
  • It is also used in deodorant, shampoos, toothpaste and lipstick. It can also be used as bio-fuel.
• High import dependence:
  • India imports 60% of its cooking oil and more than half is sourced from Malaysia and Indonesia.
  • Import bill of edible oil comes around 80000 crores.

About National Mission on Edible Oils – Oil Palm

• A Rs.11,000-crore mission to incentivise palm oil production.
• Targets adding 6,50,000 hectares of land for new palm oil cultivation and tripling of palm oil production.
• Special focus on new plantation areas in Andaman & Nicobar archipelago, and the Northeast.

Concerns associated with promotion of palm oil cultivation

• Environmental concerns:
  • Palm is monoculture crop. In Indonesia and Malaysia alone, it led to the deforestation of over 10 million hectares of tropical forest and ruined habitats of rare species like the orangutan, pygmy elephant, the Sumatran tiger and the Javan rhino.
  • It’s a water intensive crop every tree consuming around 300 litres of water every day.
• Health concerns: There are many health advisories indicating that it is not a healthy cooking medium.
• Goes against first world policy towards palm oil: Citing environmental concerns, European Union (EU) has an advisory that recommends import bans on palm oil. Sri Lanka also bans import of palm oil.
  • This can hurt investment interest in India.

Way forward: Balance off import bill without risking environmental degradation

• An alternative: Setting up of orangutan, pygmy elephant and java rhino sanctuaries in target areas of Andaman& Nicobar, north-east.
  • It can attract forex reserves through high end tourism, orangutan safaris etc.