Why the right choice for baby might be the wrong one for the Orangutan

The other day I was idly looking through the ingredients of the Organic baby biscuits that I had paid so handsomely for and to my horror, even though they are organic, I found that they contain palm oil. So I pulled out the rest of the biscuits I had in the cupboard (of which there were few as nothing keeps in our house) and from this unscientific study of one biscuit tin it seems that practically all shop-bought biscuits contain palm oil too, probably because it’s the cheapest source of vegetable oil. But its price belies its real environmental cost because generally speaking, most palm is grown on land that was once home to the vast rainforests of Borneo, and the natural habitat of the orangutan.

Nine years ago I went to Borneo. It was an extraordinary place full of lush forests and mangrove swamps. But even then, the conversion of forests to palm plantations was occurring on a massive scale, with large-scale logging and road networks being built. According to http://www.orangutans-sos.org/ it is these factors that are responsible for the loss of over 80% of orangutan habitat over the last 20 years. On our trip in 2001 we visited a protected area called Sepilok which is dedicated to the rehabilitation of orphan orangutans, where 80 apes now live free. It is an amazing place where I saw for myself the extraordinary likeness between a human baby and an orangutan infant and was left feeling powerless about the demise of this beautiful creature as a result of deforestation.

But the really sad thing that I am coming to realise is that as a consumer in the West, it is my consumer power that is actually (unwittingly) fuelling demand for the orangutan’s habitat - because I buy biscuits. Looking into this issue further I found a BBC Panorama investigation into clear-cutting in Borneo which claimed that the thirst for land on which to plant palm plantations is actually growing exponentially. The programme also criticised manufacturers for their dubious sourcing policies. The BBC said: “Many of the big manufacturers who buy palm oil via European wholesalers say that while they are starting to find oil from sustainable sources, they are not yet in a position to trace the origin of all of the oil they use. Currently, only 3% of the world's palm oil is certified sustainable, meaning it comes from plantations that pass an environmental and social impact test."

So as a consumer I have to make a stand. While I will watch with interest the progress of UK retailers and manufacturers who have joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the best thing for my baby in the short term is home made biccies. I'd better get those recipes off my mum. That will be my small contribution to saving the rainforests. Whether he’ll like them or not is another question...