Nutella Made With Palm Oil

[sur4z]

...never knew this...scary!

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/01/12/which-products-contain-palm-oil-nutella-cancer-causing-concerns/96483558/

[XYZ]

Rather than somewhat breathless & tenuous links to cancer (*yawn*), looking at ballooning obesity rates - pardon the pun - in the world today, there are probably better reasons not to consume massive amounts of Nutella than that they now use palm oil in its manufacture.

Anyone who has been around oil palm culture knows there is no such thing as "sustainable" oil palm production. This is greenwashing at its most cynical and any certification body working with it should be blackballed. If you care about lowland tropical wet forest conservation AT ALL, you avoid products that contain palm oil like you would the bubonic plague.

J

[Zeeth]

13 minutes ago, stone jaguar said:

Rather than somewhat breathless & tenuous links to cancer (*yawn*), looking at ballooning obesity rates - pardon the pun - in the world today, there are probably better reasons not to consume massive amounts of Nutella than that they now use palm oil in its manufacture.

Anyone who has been around oil palm culture knows there is no such thing as "sustainable" oil palm production. This is greenwashing at its most cynical and any certification body working with it should be blackballed. If you care about lowland tropical wet forest conservation AT ALL, you avoid products that contain palm oil like you would the bubonic plague.

J

I've heard of some local farms in places like Uganda that are supposedly sustainable, but it's hard to say anymore. I use Palm Oil in Soap-making, but it's become so difficult to source sustainably that I've just resorted to planting oil palms in my garden with plans to harvest my own once they mature.

[XYZ]

Again, if you have ever worked with this crop you know that it's simply not sustainable in the genuine sense of the word, unless you would also buy into "sustainable" surface mineral mining as a viable concept in the wet tropics. Greenwashing oil palm is only providing cover to the industrial users and bamboozling consumers. I doubt there is any event since the boom in grass-pastured cattle in the late 60s-early 70s that can be so directly linked to devastating, permanent tropical deforestation of megadiversity ecosystems than the rise of African oil palm. See also well-documented links to organized crime laundering money through oil palm plantations throughout LatAm, but particularly in Guatemala, Honduras and parts of SE Asia.

FYI, I led a WWF/US-funded tropical agroecosystems research initiative from 1986 until 1994 and partnered (as the first NGO to do so) with the Rainforest Alliance in the original green seal program for tropical commodities in the early 1990s. While the green seal concept has been abused by some marketers purely for profit motive, I think it is a good thing overall. But in this particular case, you can't shine sh*t.

J

[Kai]

yeah I noticed it on the ingredient declaration. Many many other products as well you never knew about. It would be a fulltime job to avoid palmoil while shopping for groceries... Just companies using the cheapest raw material options for the manufacture of their products...

[Gonzer]

2 hours ago, stone jaguar said:

 there are probably better reasons not to consume massive amounts of Nutella than that they now use palm oil in its manufacture.

 

That's the dang truth! The stuff gives ya the runs in copious amounts.

[XYZ]

Note: easy to avoid palm oil if you steer clear of highly-processed, ostensibly edible crap (i.e. "Junk foods") and low end body wash products. If you consume palm oil, you are DIRECTLY contributing to the loss of lowland tropical biological diversity, in particular, locally threatened palms with relatively localized distributions.

Full stop.

Expansion of the agricultural frontier to plant African oil palm, driven by the appetites of the developed world, needs to end right now. Even if you are indifferent to the loss of faunal biodiversity due to oil palm cultivation, stop underwriting the rush to extinction in some lowland licualas, pinangas, chamaedoreas, reinhardtias, geonomas, etc.

Read labels. Don't buy greenwashing. Avoid anything containing palm oil. Unilever, Kellogs, Pepsico, et. al. can also read sales reports.

BTW, I loathe cartoon "environmentalists", so you can imagine how strongly I feel about this topic.

J