Report Links Palm Oil Plantation Abuse to Top Cosmetic Brands

Earlier this year, via some obscure digital conduit, my email address landed on the mailing list of the Palm Oil Monitor, a lobby group for the world’s most invisibly ubiquitous vegetable oil. For several months, I was treated to periodic newsletters and messages from palm oil’s most indefatigable lobbyists.

The Monitor’s articles were linked by a single overarching theme: that palm oil had been unfairly singled out by environmentalists and Western critics, both for its deleterious health impacts and its negative social and environmental externalities. One article about the EU’s attempt to restrict the import of palm oil that had been linked to deforestation described the plan as “a deliberate and calculated strategy to ban Palm Oil from the European market.” Another asked why Ukrainian sunflower oil producers were not subject to the same standards as palm oil sourced in Borneo and peninsular Malaya.

Reading the Monitor, one could easily get the impression that the palm oil was the world’s most wronged industry.

However, a recent investigation by the Associated Press suggests that the industry’s poor public image is very much deserved. The 4,000-word report, published on November 19, offers a harrowing anatomization of the conditions facing female palm oil workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, which between them produce the lion’s share of the world’s estimated $65 billion annual palm oil supply.

The report, which is based on interviews with more than three dozen women and girls working for at least 12 companies across the two nations, follows an earlier AP investigation into the palm oil business. It depicted a largely unregulated industry that was rife with exploitation. It detailed cases in which workers had been cheated, threatened, or held against their will to pay off Sisyphean debts – to say nothing of the atrocious working conditions on some plantations.

The new investigation focuses on the situation facing women workers. It found that women working on plantations were frequently subject to sexual harassment by male overseers. This included verbal harassment, rape, and everything in between. Almost every plantation has problems related to labor,” Hotler Parsaoran of the Indonesian nonprofit group Sawit Watch, told the AP. “But the conditions of female workers are far worse than men.”

Among several harrowing stories detailed in the report is that of a 16-year-old girl who described being raped by her boss after being lured to a remote part of the plantation on which she had grown up, and now worked. Afterward, she said, he held an ax to her throat. “He threatened to kill me,” she told the reporters. “He threatened to kill my whole family.”

According to the report, few women workers file complaints against their abusers, since the charges are frequently dropped. In some cases, social stigma prompts victims’ parents to force them into marriage with their rapists, particularly in cases where the rape results in a pregnancy.

The AP investigation also found that women were tasked with some of the most grueling jobs on the sprawling plantations. The reporters spoke to women who were told to spray toxic pesticides without wearing protective gear or forced to carry loads so heavy that their uteruses collapsed. Given that most permanent positions go to men, the majority of women are hired day-to-day, meaning that most can’t afford health care. Some women even work without pay to help their husbands meet otherwise impossible daily work targets.

Most interestingly, the AP claims that palm oil from plantations and mills where abuses took place has ended up in the supply chains of some of the biggest names in the $530 billion beauty business, including L’Oréal, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Avon, and Johnson & Johnson. The report also details cases in which abuses were linked to mills and plantations that have been certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, an association that promotes ethical production, including provisions to safeguard workers.

Cheap and almost magically versatile, demand for the pale orange oil of the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) has quadrupled over the last two decades. The product can be found in roughly half the products on supermarket shelves, as well as in most brands of cosmetics. The tree’s fiber is as useful as the oil pressed from its reddish pulp. Making it harder to track is the fact that it appears on labels under more than 200 names.

Aside from its calamitous human cost, the two recent AP investigations underline both the ubiquity of palm oil, and the difficulty of tracing its serpentine supply chains from the steamy Borneo back-country to the supermarket shelves of the West. Indeed, the product has insinuated itself into so many manufacturing supply chains that it may be nearly impossible to weed out fully.

While awareness of the true cost of palm oil has clearly grown in recent years – the existence of the Palm Oil Monitor testifies to the industry’s state of siege – its use shows few signs of slackening. After all, the first step to solving the problem is recognizing that there is have one. For now, palm oil remains omnipresent but invisible – the pale slick lubricant of global consumer capitalism.