The Independent has had a tumultuous past few weeks. Exposed in late April 2009 as a newspaper with plunging circulation and with its parent company, The Independent News and Media in dire danger of defaulting on a 200 Million Euro bond, the newspaper, interestingly, launched a broadside against palm oil on Mayday 2009.

Rolling out the now boring mantra of palm oil causing massive deforestation, threatening the extinction of the orang utan and displacing native people, the paper published a series of "reports" trundling out these well worn equivocations and half-truths as the gospel truth!

Unfortunately for The Independent, it made an extraordinary Freudian slip as to the real motive behind its "report" when it pointed out that "all this comes amid a surge in demand for the world's cheapest cooking oil!"

Enough evidence has been proffered by this site as to the veracity of the "report", in particular the allegations of deforestation and impending orang utan extinction which have both been exposed as patently untrue.
 

For one, palm oil is clearly far and away, the most sustainable of oilseed crops. Blessed with exceptional productivity, palm oil enjoys an enviable yield of 4.5 metric tons per hectare planted which dwarfs its nearest competitors, such as soy, canola and sunflower which typical has a yield of 0.5 metric tons per hectare. Even the uninitiated can surmise that this means that palm oil requires far LESS land than its competitors to produce the same unit of edible oil.

This explains why Malaysia, which was erstwhile, the largest producer of palm oil, has cultivated the crop for more than a hundred years and STILL can boast forest cover exceeding 55% (the UK where The Independent is based, pales by comparison in its permanent forest cover which currently stands at less than 11%)!