Seeing red: Ghana’s palm oil industry and sustainable futures
Ian Packham hits the road in West Africa to witness local, small-scale palm oil production firsthand, learning the truth about its history, role in society, and misrepresentation.
Head along the unusually rutted road to Butre, a tiny coastal village in Ghana’s south, there’s plenty of evidence of the country’s palm oil industry.
Family market stalls have fallen scarlet-coloured kernels brightening the unsurfaced ground, trucks trundle to and fro weighed down by watermelon-sized fruiting bodies known in the trade as Fresh Fruit Bunches [FFBs], and artisan ‘factories’ stand in the open by the roadside, soot blackening the bases of the cauldrons in which the kernels are boiled down. Meanwhile, on the highway running east-west across southern Ghana, and you’ll pass the empty structures of a former British palm oil processing plant.
It’s not only the kernels, or fruits, of the oil palm that are an intense red colour. The oil extracted from them also has an unnervingly red hue. Its liquid appearance may not be all that familiar to us in the west, however its name surely will be.
That’s because palm oil is found in everything from bars of soap to packets of biscuits, often under alternative names in ingredient lists. Like sodium lauryl sulphate and glyceryl. Chester Zoo estimates that 50% of all products in the average UK supermarket contain palm oil. Even with the best will in the world, it’s almost impossible to avoid the stuff, and each of us now consumes about eight kilograms of the stuff each year without realising it.
But palm oil has also become a dirty phrase for anyone with environmental concerns, instantly bringing to mind vast monoculture plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia. Landscapes rendered near-lifeless, which were, within my 40-year lifespan, an unbroken canopy of primary rainforest home to orangutan and countless other species.
The massive expansion in the use of palm oil over other types is largely due to the fact it’s so cheap to produce. I buy two kilograms of kernels at a local market for the equivalent of £1. That’s enough to get you a cup of tea, but not much else.
A roadside palm oil salesman in Ghana
At the same time, its use has become so controversial that large-scale multinational corporations – who, it might be said, don’t tend to do anything unless forced to – are now looking for sustainable versions of this wonder ingredient.
They’ve even clubbed together with international environmental partners to create CSPO status, or Certified Sustainable Palm Oil. The emblem is a palm tree, and it’s branding I hadn’t noticed until I started to look for it, only to realise it’s there on every cheap bar of UK supermarket soap I’m using while in Ghana.
The latest estimates suggest 77% of palm oil brought into the UK for processing is sustainable, although this doesn’t account for products containing palm oil manufactured elsewhere in the world. And again, there are a lot of them.
To obtain the CPSO standard, it must be proved that the palm oil used doesn’t come from deforested land or land that has damaged forest. In this instance, what’s good for the natural world can be good for us too. And smallholders in Ghana are reaping some of the benefits from this movement.
Palm oil is not native to Southeast Asia but to West and Central Africa – countries like Ghana – where it has been produced locally for hundreds, probably thousands of years. One of Ghana’s most popular dishes is called red red, a bean stew named after the colour given it by the addition of palm oil. The plant was only taken to Southeast Asia as a botanical quirk.
Although it’s often thought of as a modern crop, palm oil has been harvested for commercial soap production in Ghana as early as the start of the 1800s, hence the abandoned British palm oil processing plant. Known locally as dende, Ghana is one of the largest producers of palm oil in Africa, yet still ends up importing £160m worth of the stuff in any given year.
The country’s own palm oil industry is focussed around the richly fertile Eastern Region immediately north of the suburbs of the capital, Accra, close enough to the Atlantic that export to Europe is logistically easy.
The United Nations Development Programme estimates up to 80% of Ghana’s palm oil is produced by small scale and artisanal farmers – many of whom are women. I’ve seen plenty of bottles of home-produced red oil being sold along the roadside. The major problem is that palm oil kernels are often boiled down in large open vats using rudimentary tools, resulting in emissions – polluting smoke that’s harmful to the health of those involved, and our atmosphere.
Replacing this basic equipment with modern efficient ovens and filters not only removes unwanted air pollutants, but can also reduce the processing time needed from two weeks to five hours, hastening the oil’s entry into the marketplace. So while palm oil is often considered the elephant in the room of our modern consumerist lifestyles, there are ways its use can support the natural environment and support individuals desperate for an income.
Current alternatives aren’t all that better, either. To replace oil palms with other oil-producing crops, such as rapeseed or even coconuts would reduce the income small-scale farmers receive. Coconuts, a distant relative of oil palms, produce just half the amount of oil, while you’d need nine times as much space to obtain the same amount of oil from rapeseed crops.
For now at least, it seems like West Africa’s certified sustainable artisan palm oil producers could be our best hope, and cleanly-produced palm oil could be theirs.
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Images: Ian Packham