Basic Facts About Orangutans and the

Palm oil is a highly versatile vegetable oil used in everything from processed foods, cosmetics, shampoo, cleaning products, candles, soaps and more. It’s also used as a bio-fuel and a protein source to fatten livestock.

Globally, it is the most heavily produced vegetable oil and it’s presence in consumer products is staggering—90% of the palm oil produced is used in consumer products, nearly 78% of foods contain it, 70% of cosmetics use palm oil derivatives as emulsifiers and surfactants, and nearly 50% of palm oil imported into the EU is used as biofuel. It’s ease in growing, high yield, and low production costs make palm oil popular crop for large and small-scale growers.

Demand for palm oil has exploded in the past 20 years and Indonesia supplies over half the world’s palm oil. Massive deforestation of primary forest—key to survival of Orangutans and all the plants and animals of this rich biodiverse habitat, is attributed to the advent of palm oil plantations, especially large-scale growers.  Additionally, with such fragmented forest, human-orangutan conflict is increasingly common around palm oil plantations as orangutans in search of food enter the plantations.  In this regard, they are often treated like “pests” and riddled with pellet guns, clubbed, or attacked with machetes. Palm oil cultivate on isn’t the only threat to Orangutans, but it is one of the key threats, and continues to squeeze Orangutans onto ever shrinking, degraded and fragmented parcels of forest.

The topic of palm oil is a highly controversial and polarizing one with no easy solutions. For purposes of saving Orangutans and all the other forest-dwelling inhabitants, Save Orangutans Now recommends eliminating or substantially limiting palm oil products and only choosing products that contain RSPO palm oil.  Learn more about managing your consumption of palm oil below.