CrowdScience: Should I Stop Eating Palm Oil?

Australian listener Lizzy has been trying to reduce her footprint on this planet and has been trying to figure out what to do about palm oil.

It’s everywhere - in her toothpaste and shampoo and even biscuits and spreads. In fact, WWF say it is used in 50 percent of all supermarket products, so it's something most of us will come into contact with every day.

Lizzy wants to know how bad palm oil is. On the one hand, she sees emotive adverts depicting dying orangutangs, deforestation and burning peatlands, releasing vast amounts of climate changing gases like carbon dioxide. On the other, she has read that palm oil is the most productive of the vegetable oils, using far less land than others (it produces 38 percent of the world’s vegetable oil on five percent of the land). So would boycotting palm oil displace and worsen the problem elsewhere, she wonders? Would buying sustainable palm oil be best? How sustainable is it anyway?

For some answers, Graihagh Jackson heads to one of the biggest producers of palm oil: Malaysia. She visits small holder plantations, who collectively provide 40 percent of the world’s palm oil, to find out how palm oil is grown and to ask them about their perspective on a product that provides them with their livelihood.

What would incentivise them to engage in greener practices? And what would that look like? For the latter question, Graihagh speaks to the largest sustainable certifier of palm oil, the RSPO, and looks to science to see how we can meet the ever-growing demand for palm oil without cutting down any more rainforest.

This is part of the Crossing Divides season, which runs from 18-24 November.

• Produced and presented by Graihagh Jackson, with help from Marijke Peters for the BBC World Service

Publicity contact: EM3