Palm oil

Palm oil estate in Malaysia

File:Palm oil Ghana.jpg

Palm oil from Ghana with its natural dark colour visible, 2 litres

Palm oil block showing the lighter colour that results from boiling.

"Palm oil" is agrobusiness jargon for an edible plant oil derived from the fruit of the oil palm Elaeis guineensis which the UDSA describes as "obtained from the pulp of the palm berry." "Palm kernel oil" is the jargon term for the plant oil extracted from the (seeds) of the same fruit. These two oils are chemically and physically different. Palm oil is high in palmitic acid whereas palm kernel oil is high in lauric and myristic acids. The oil from palm fruit is widely used as a cooking oil, as an ingredient in margarine, and is a component of many processed foods. On the other hand, palm kernel oil is an important raw material used in the production of many soaps, washing powders and personal care products.

Because coconuts also grow on palm trees, consumers often tend to perceive that palm oil is the same thing as coconut oil.

Like all other vegetable oils, palm oil is cholesterol-free.

Since palm oil has relatively high saturated fats than softoils like soybean oil, corn oil and sunflower oil, it can withstand extreme deepfry heat and is resistant to oxidation. When placed in the freezer, palm oil becomes jelly-like while softoils remain liquid. It is this natural characteristic of palm oil that makes it ideal to be made into margarine straight away without hydrogenation.

In 2008, world production of oils and fats stood at 160 million tonnes. Palm oil and palm kernel oil were jointly the largest contributor, accounting for 48 million tonnes or 30% of the total output. Soybean oil came in second with 37 million tonnes (23%). About 38% of the oils and fats produced in the world were shipped across oceans. Of the 60.3 million tonnes of oils and fats exported around the world, palm oil and palm kernel oil make up close to 60%. Malaysia contributed nearly 11% to the global oils and fats output through 17.7 million tonnes of palm oil. It also maintained dominance of the palm oil trade, holding 45% of the market share.

History

Palm oil (from the African Oil Palm, Elaeis guineensis) was long recognized in West African countries, and among West African peoples it has long been in widespread use as a cooking oil. European merchants trading with West Africa occasionally purchased palm oil for use in Europe, but as the oil was bulky and cheap, palm oil remained rare outside West Africa. In the Asante Confederacy, state-owned slaves built large plantations of oil palm trees, while in the neighbouring Kingdom of Dahomey, King Ghezo passed a law in 1856 forbidding his subjects from cutting down oil palms.

Palm oil became a highly sought-after commodity by British traders, for use as an industrial lubricant for the machines of Britain's Industrial Revolution, as well as forming the basis of soap products, such as Lever Brothers' "Sunlight Soap", and the American Palmolive brand. By c.1870, palm oil constituted the primary export of some West African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria, although this was overtaken by cocoa in the 1880s.

Palm was introduced to Java by the Dutch in 1848 and Malaysia (then the British colony of Malaya) in 1910 by Scotsman William Sime and English banker Henry Darby. The first plantations were mostly established and operated by British plantation owners, such as Sime Darby. From the 1960s a major oil palm plantation scheme was introduced by the government with the main aim of eradicating poverty. Settlers were each allocated 10 acres of land (about 4 hectares) planted either with oil palm or rubber, and given 20 years to pay off the debt for the land. The large plantation companies remained listed in London until the Malaysian government engineered their "Malaysianisation" throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

In Malaysia, B.C. Sekhar was instrumental in setting up the Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia (Porim) and was its founder and chairman. Sekhar established Porim as one of the premier centers for oils and fats research in the world.

Chemistry and processing

Palm oil and palm kernel oil are composed of fatty acids, esterified with glycerol just like any ordinary fat. Both are high in saturated fatty acids, about 50% and 80%, respectively. The oil palm gives its name to the 16-carbon saturated fatty acid palmitic acid found in palm oil; monounsaturated oleic acid is also a constituent of palm oil while palm kernel oil contains mainly lauric acid. Palm oil is the largest natural source of tocotrienol, part of the vitamin E family. Palm oil is also high in vitamin K and dietary magnesium.

Napalm derives its name from naphthenic acid, palmitic acid and pyrotechnics or simply from a recipe using naphtha and palm oil.

The approximate concentration of fatty acids (FAs) in palm oil is as follows:

Fatty acid content of palm oil Type of fatty acid pct Palmitic C16   44.3% Stearic C18   4.6% Myristic C14   1.0% Oleic C18   38.7% Linoleic C18   10.5% Other/Unknown   0.9% green: Saturated; blue: Mono unsaturated; orange: Poly unsaturated

Fatty acid content of palm kernel oil Type of fatty acid pct Lauric C12   48.2% Myristic C14   16.2% Palmitic C16   8.4% Capric C10   3.4% Caprylic C8   3.3% Stearic C18   2.5% Oleic C18   15.3% Linoleic C18   2.3% Other/Unknown   0.4% green: Saturated; blue: Mono unsaturated; orange: Poly unsaturated

Fatty acids are saturated and unsaturated aliphatic carboxylic acids with carbon chain in the range of C3 up to C28. An example of a fatty acid is palmitic acid, CH₃–(CH₂)₁₄–COOH.

Splitting of oils and fats by hydrolysis, or under basic conditions saponification, yields fatty acids, with glycerin (glycerol) as a byproduct. The split-off fatty acids are a mixture of fatty acids ranging from C4 to C18 depending on the type of oil/fat..

Palm oil products are made using milling and refining processes: first using fractionation, with crystallization and separation processes to obtain solid (stearin), and liquid (olein) fractions. By melting and degumming, impurities can be removed and then the oil filtered and bleached. Next, physical refining removes smells and coloration, to produce refined, bleached & deodorized palm oil, or RBDPO, and free sheer fatty acids, used as an important raw material in the manufacture of soaps, washing powder and other hygiene and personal care products. RBDPO is the basic oil product which can be sold on the world's commodity markets, although many companies fractionate it out further into palm olein, for cooking oil, or other products.

Palm is also used in biodiesel production, as either a simply-processed palm oil mixed with petrodiesel, or processed through transesterification to create a palm oil methyl ester blend which meets the international EN 14214 specification, with glycerin as a byproduct. The actual process used varies between countries and the requirements of different export markets. Next-generation biofuel production processes are also being trialled in relatively small quantities.

Biofuels and bioproducts

Palm oil, like soybean and rapeseed, can be used to create biodiesel for internal combustion engines. Biodiesel has been promoted as a form of biomass that can be used as a renewable energy source to reduce net emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Therefore, biodiesel is seen as a way to decrease the impact of the greenhouse effect and as a way of diversifying energy supplies to assist national energy security plans.

Some scientists and companies are going beyond merely using the palm oil and are proposing to convert the entire biomass harvested from a palm plantation into renewable electricity, cellulosic ethanol, biogas, biohydrogen and bioplastic. Thus, by using both the biomass from the plantation as well as the processing residues from palm oil production (fibers, kernel shells, palm oil mill effluent), bioenergy from palm plantations can have an effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Examples of these production techniques have been registered as projects under the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism.

By using all the biomass residues from palm oil processing for renewable energy, fuels and biodegradable products, both the energy balance and the greenhouse gas emissions balance for biodiesel from palm oil is improved. For each tonne of crude palm oil (CPO) produced from fresh fruit bunches, the following residues, which can all be used for the manufacture of biofuels, bioenergy and bioproducts, become available: around 6 tonnes of waste palm fronds, 1 tonne of palm trunks, 5 tonnes of empty fruit bunches (EFB), 1 tonne of press fiber (from the mesocarp of the fruit), half a tonne of palm kernel endocarp, 250 kg of palm kernel press cake, and 100 tonnes of palm oil mill effluent (POME). Some of the waste biomass form the palm processing is incinerated to generate power for the processing plant. In short, a palm plantation has the potential to yield a very large amount of biomass that can be used for the production of renewable products. . POME can be a good source for biogas (CH4) production and electricity generation. Anaerobic treatment of POME has been practiced in Malaysia and Indonesia. Like most wastewater sludge, anaerobic treatment of POME results in domination of Methanosaeta concilii[3]. Tabatabaei et al. comprehensively studied the microbial population of POME when anaerobically treated in Malaysia [51].

However, regardless of these new innovations, first generation biodiesel production from palm oil is still in demand globally and will continue to increase. Palm oil is also a primary substitute for rapeseed oil in Europe, which too is experiencing high levels of demand for biodiesel purposes. Palm oil producers are investing heavily in the refineries needed for biodiesel. In Malaysia companies have been merging, buying others out and forming alliances in order to obtain the economies of scale needed to handle the high costs caused by increased feedstock prices. New refineries are being built across Asia and Europe

Regional production

Palm oil output in 2006

Malaysia

In 2008, Malaysia produced 17.7 million tonnes of palm oil on 4.5 million hectares of land. While Malaysia's palm oil production is less than Indonesia, it is still the largest exporter of palm oil in the world. About 60% of palm oil shipments from Malaysia head to China, the European Union, Pakistan, United States and India. They are mostly made into cooking oil, margarine, specialty fats and oleochemicals.

Malaysian government agency Federal Land Development Authority (more commonly referred to as FELDA) is the largest plantation operator, with 811,140 hectares of oil palms, mainly across Peninsular Malaysia, Sarawak and Sabah. It also operates plantations and oil mills in Indonesia.

The IEA predicts that biofuels use in Asian countries will remain modest. But as a major producer of palm oil, the Malaysian government is encouraging the production of biofuel feedstock and the building of biodiesel plants that use palm oil. Domestically, Malaysia is preparing to change from diesel to bio-fuels by 2008, including drafting legislation that will make the switch mandatory. The government had planned that from 2009, all diesel sold in Malaysia to contain 5% palm oil.

Malaysia is emerging as one of the leading biofuel producers with 91 plants approved and a handful now in operation, all based on palm oil. Most are aimed at supplying regional demand, though exports to Europe are also planned, with China currently the main importer of Malaysian products for biodiesel.

On 16 December 2007, Malaysia opened its first commercial biodiesel plant in the state of Pahang, which has an annual capacity of 100,000 tonnes and also produces by-products in the form of 4,000 tonnes of palm fatty acid distillate and 12,000 tonnes of pharmaceutical grade glycerine. Neste Oil of Finland plans to produce 800,000 tonnes of biodiesel per year from Malaysian palm oil in a new Singapore refinery from 2010, which will make it the largest biofuel plant in the world, and 170,000 tpa from its first second-generation plant in Finland from 2007-8, which can refine fuel from a variety of sources. Neste and the Finnish government are using this paraffinic fuel in some public buses in the Helsinki area as a small scale pilot.

Indonesia

Growers in Indonesia are also increasing production of palm oil to meet the global demand spurred by biofuels, with the government looking for it to become the world's top producer of palm oil. FAO data show production increased by over 400% between 1994 - 2004, to over 8.66 million tonnes (metric). In 2007, Indonesia became the top producer of palm oil, surpassing Malaysia.

In additional to servicing its traditional markets, it is looking to produce biodiesel. There are new mills and refineries being built by major local companies, such as PT. Astra Agro Lestari terbuka (150,000 tpa biodiesel refinery), PT. Bakrie Group (a biodiesel factory and new plantations), Surya Dumai Group (biodiesel refinery) and global companies such as Cargill (sometimes operating through CTP Holdings of Singapore, building new refineries and mills in Malaysia and Indonesia, expanding its Rotterdam refinery to handle 300,000 tpa of palm oil, acquiring plantations in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Indonesian Peninsula and Papua New Guinea) and Robert Kuok's Wilmar International Limited (with plantations and 25 refineries across Indonesia, to supply feedstock to new biodiesel refineries in Singapore, Riau, Indonesia, and Rotterdam).

However, fresh land clearances, especially in Borneo, are contentious for their environmental impact. NGOs and many international bodies are now warning that, despite thousands of square kilometres of land standing unplanted in Indonesia, tropical hardwood forest are being cleared for palm oil plantations. Furthermore, as the remaining unprotected lowland forest dwindles, developers are looking to plant peat swamp land, using drainage that unlocks the carbon held in their trees and begins an oxidation process of the peat which can release 5,000 to 10,000 years worth of stored carbon. Drained peat is also at very high risk of forest fire, and there is a clear record of fire being used to clear vegetation for palm oil development in Indonesia. Drought and man-made clearances have led to massive uncontrolled forest fires over recent years, covering parts of Southeast Asia in haze and leading to an international crisis with Malaysia. These fires have been variously blamed on a government with little ability to enforce its own laws while impoverished small farmers and large plantation owners illegally burn and clear forests and peat lands in order to reap the developmental benefits of environmentally-valuable land

Colombia

In the 1960s about 18,000 hectares were planted with palm. Colombia has now become the largest palm oil producer in the Americas, and 35% of its product is exported as biofuel. In 2006 the Colombian plantation owners' association, Fedepalma, reported that oil palm cultivation was expanding to a million hectares. This expansion is being part-funded by the United States Agency for International Development in order to resettle disarmed paramilitary members on cultivatable land, and by the Colombian government which proposes to expand land use for exportable cash crops to 7m hectares by 2020, including oil palms. However, while Fedepalma states that its members are following sustainable guidelines, there have been claims that some of these new plantations have been appropriated on land owned by Afro-Colombians driven away through poverty and civil war, while armed guards intimidate the remaining people to depopulate the land, while coca production and trafficking follows in their wake

Other producers

Benin

Palm is native to the wetlands of Western Africa and south Benin already hosts many palm plantations. Its government's 'Agricultural Revival Programme' has identified many thousands of hectares of land as suitable for new oil palm plantations to be grown as an export crop. In spite of the economic benefits, NGOs such as Nature Tropicale claim this policy is flawed as biofuels will be competing with domestic food production in some existing prime agricultural sites. Other areas comprise peat land, whose drainage would have a deleterious environmental impact. They are also concerned that genetically-modified plants will be introduced for the first time into the region, jeopardizing the current premium paid for their non-GM crops.

Kenya

Kenya's domestic production of edible oils covers about a third of its annual demand, estimated at around 380,000 metric tonnes. The rest is imported at a cost of around US$140 million a year, making edible oil the country's second most important import after petroleum. Since 1993 a new hybrid variety of cold-tolerant, high-yielding oil palm has been promoted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in western Kenya. As well as alleviating the country's deficit of edible oils while providing an important cash crop, it is claimed to have environmental benefits in the region, as it does not compete against food crops or native vegetation and it provides stabilisation for the soil.

Ghana

Ghana has a lot of palm nuts vegetation which can be build a sector of its own within the agricultural sector of the Black star region. Although Ghana has palm tree of different species ranging from local palm nuts to other species locally called agric. It is only maketised within the nation locally and other neighbouring countries. Because of low funds and other economic constraints the local farmers and trader's are finding hard to cope but it is lucrative.

Impacts

Social

Not only does the palm represent a pillar of these nation's economies but it is a catalyst for rural development and political stability. Many social initiatives use profits from palm oil to finance poverty alleviation strategies. Examples include the direct financing of Magbenteh hospital in Makeni, Sierra Leone, through profits made from palm oil grown by small local farmers, the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance's Food Security Program, which draws on a women-run cooperative to grow palm oil, the profits of which are reinvested in food security, or the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's hybrid oil palm project in Western Kenya, which improves incomes and diets of local populations, to name just a few.

Environmental

Main article: Environmental impact of palm oil

Palm oil is under increasing scrutiny in relation to its effects on the environment. Some of the impacts include, deforestation, loss of biodiversity and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Health

Palm oil is a very common cooking ingredient in the regions where it is produced.

Its heavy use in the commercial food industry elsewhere can be explained by its comparatively low price, being one of the cheaper vegetable or cooking oils on the market, and by new markets in the USA, stimulated by a search for alternatives to trans fats after the Food and Drug Administration required food labels to list the amount of trans fat per serving.

Red palm oil is known to be healthier than refined (discolored) palm oil. This is a result of several mitigating substances found in the red palm oil. These compounds are:

• betacarotenes (present in higher amounts than in regular palm oil),
• co-enzyme Q10 (ubiquinone),
• squalene,
• vitamin A,
• vitamin E.

Palm oil is applied to wounds, just like iodine tincture, to aid the healing process. This is not just done for its oily qualities; like coconut oil, irrefined palm oil is supposed to have additional antimicrobial effects, but research does not clearly confirm this.

Palm oil, an ideal trans fat free solution

Since the 1960s to early 2000, many food scientists hydrogenate softoils like soybean, canola and sunflower so that these oils can be solidified to be made into margarine, bakery fats and shortenings. But the unfortunate side effect of hydrogenation is the formation of trans fat, a deadly fat that raised blood cholesterol levels and increase the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

This has prompted many governments in the US and Europe to ban trans fat. In the last decade, food giants in Europe and the US turn to palm oil as a natural and healthy substitute to harmful partially hydrogenated oils. Now, food companies like Nestle, Unilever, Kraft, Kellogg and Sara Lee turn to trans fat free bakery and confectionary fats, that are essentially a blend of softoils and palm oil.

Blood cholesterol controversy

Contrary to this heading, there is no controversy as to the harmful effects of palm oil among legitimate nutritionists. This article is so lopsided, so full of misinformation and so calculated to advance the interests of the tropical oil industry that I am going to make no more effort to provide peer-reviewed refeerences than have the corporate shills who have taken over a number of Wikipedia articles as an aspect of marketing. These associations of plantation owners and exporters can afford to hire legions of spokespersons to work full time to muddy the waters and present the illusion of a controversy through the handy conduit of the internet, much as fossil fuels companies and automakers have done with the global warming “controversy.” Furthermore, hucksters promoting the “benefits” of these harmful substances have pretty much taken over the web, with 100 quackery sites for every scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal dryly recounting the dangers of tropical oils. The best that can be said for palm and other tropical oils is that they’re a little better for you than trans-fats, though a little worse for you than butter. Now that trans-fats are being phased out, much of the Big Food Industry is turning, once again, to the next worst thing, tropical oils: cheap, with a long shelf life and palatable to the public.

I don’t get paid to rebut TO promoters, and no skin off my nose if you want to endanger your heart, other than the pain the loss of tropical rain forests causes me. Here is a snippet from an article by members of the tropical oils industry’s main bete noir, CSPI (which is a true non-profit): “Palm oil and human health Palm oil is used around the world in such foods as margarine, shortening, bakedgoods, and candies. Biomedical research indicates that palm oil, which is high insaturated fat and low in polyunsaturated fat, promotes heart disease. Though less harmful than partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, it is far more conducive to heartdisease than such heart-protective liquid oils as olive, soy, and canola. The NationalHeart, Lung, and Blood Institute, World Health Organization, and other healthauthorities have urged reduced consumption of oils like palm oil.” The same goes for the other tropical oils. I return you now to your advertisement. Many health authorities state that palm oil promotes heart disease, citing research and metastudies that go back to 1970. For many years now, it has been established that the primary cholesterol-elevating fatty acids are the saturated fatty acids with 12 (lauric acid), 14 (myristic acid) and 16 (palmitic acid) carbon atoms with a concomitant increase in the risk of coronary heart disease. The World Health Organization (WHO) states there is convincing evidence that palmitic oil consumption contributes to an increased risk of developing cardiovascular diseases. Research in the US and Europe support the WHO report.

In a response to the WHO report, the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) argued that there is insufficient scientific evidence to produce general guidelines for worldwide consumption of palm oil and cited a research study in China comparing palm, soybean, peanut oils, and lard (all of which contain saturated fats) showing that palm oil increased the levels of good cholesterol and reduced the levels of bad cholesterol in the blood, and that palm is a better solid fat to use in products where trans fats would otherwise be chosen.

These findings are supported by a previous study of various oils and cardiovascular health. A study by the Departments of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science and Medicine, University of Alberta showed that although palmitic acid had no hypercholesterolaemic effect if intake of linoleic acid was greater than 4.5% of energy, if the diet contained trans fatty acids, LDL cholesterol ("bad cholesterol") increases and HDL cholesterol ("good cholesterol") decreases.

The palm oil industry emphasizes that palm oil contains large quantities of oleic acid, the healthy fatty acid also found in olive oil and canola oil, and claims that palmitic acid also affects cholesterol levels much as oleic acid does. Monounsaturated fatty acids such as oleic acid are as effective in reducing serum total and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels as polyunsaturated fatty acids such as alpha-linoleic acid. For example, a 1996 study found that changing the source of 8.5% of the energy from oleic acid to palmitic acid in a diet with adequate linolenic acid increased total serum cholesterol by 0.25 mmol/L, with a probability of 0.0012 that the result was due to chance.

Palm oil futures

Crude palm kernel futures and crude palm oil futures are primarily traded on Bursa Malaysia in Malaysian Ringgit(MYR) and US dollar denominated contracts. Their codenames are FPKO, FCPO and FUPO, respectively. Bursa Malaysia and CME Group had in August 2009 announced plans for crude palm oil futures to be traded on the Chicago Board of Trade. Palm oil futures are also traded on other commodity futures exchanges around the world under different contract specifications:

• MDEX: Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Exchange
• DC: Dalian Commodity Exchange
• NCDEX: India's National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange

See also

• Tropical agriculture
• Food vs. fuel

External links

• Palm Oil - Production, Consumption, Exports, and Imports Statistics by Country
• Blood on the Palms: Afro-Colombians fight new plantations by David Bacon, July/August 2007 Dollars & Sense
• Palm Oil as a Fuel for Agricultural Diesel Engines: Comparative Testing against Diesel Oil