Climate Sankalpa #2 - Let's buy 'Palm-Oil-free' and source locally

Palm fruits may seem like these harmless cute things growing on pretty palm trees! Well, not if we are growing them on an industrial scale for export. 

Malaysia and Indonesia put together produce 90% of all palm oil used in the world. Over the past 70 years, look at what we have done to the Indonesian and Malaysian forests, home to some of the world's best diversity of life, as we clear them for palm oil plantations. 

 

And these forests are cleared by burning them down with entire populations of orangutans, rhinos and elephants trapped and burnt in them without any way to escape!  

But none of us use palm oil at home! Where does it all go? And more importantly, what does it mean to boycott 'palm oil'? 

Almost all the packaged food and personal care products we buy from the supermarket use palm oil!

If the product has any of the following names in its label, then it most probably has palm oil in it.

Read here about how the palm-oil market grew explosively from the 1990s. 

CLIMATE SANKALPA #2

Let us buy from local stores which know their suppliers and what ingredients they use. Like reStore and OFM. I currently buy all my cleaners from Probiotics House which uses zero-palm oil. You may contact them to supply to your stores / neighbourhoods too. You can also look for palm-oil free label on the products.

Finally, if it is not "practical" for you to avoid products with palm oil, a great place to start is to pause for a moment, connect to the sadness, grieve the immense loss our actions are contributing to, and continue to keep up our efforts.