This essay is cross-posted from https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/rethinking-the-palm-oil-boycott

What if the crusade to save the planet’s forests by boycotting palm oil is actually accelerating their destruction? Palm oil, vilified as the scourge of rainforests and orangutans alike, was ranked by consumers as the most environmentally damaging vegetable oil in a recent survey. That’s despite its lurking in nearly 50% of supermarket products—from doughnuts and pizza to toothpaste and lipstick. Yet, as environmental researcher Hannah Ritchie argues in her book Not the End of the World, this well-meaning activism could be backfiring, driving worse deforestation elsewhere.

Ritchie’s seemingly counterintuitive claim rests on palm oil’s hidden edge: it’s a productivity powerhouse. Oil palms churn out far more oil per hectare than any rival crop, so boycotting it pushes the world toward less efficient substitutes—think soybeans or coconuts. Those alternatives don’t just need more land; they demand a sprawl of it to match palm oil’s output, risking new waves of deforestation in far-flung forests.

Think about how much oil this produces. Now compare that to trying to extract that much oil from coconuts or sesame seeds. Image source

The proof is in the yields: one hectare of oil palms can produce over a metric ton of oil, trouncing soybean oil’s 0.161 metric tons per hectare or coconut oil’s scant 0.041. As the graph below shows, palm oil is remarkably land-efficient—palm oil supplies 40% of the world’s vegetable oil on less than 6% of the land used to produce all vegetable oils.

Palm oil dramatically outperforms other vegetable oils in terms of production efficiency, yielding significantly more oil per hectare. Data Source: Our World in Data

Here’s how Hannah Ritchie puts it:

Here’s another thought experiment to drill this point home: let’s consider how much land the world would need to produce all its vegetable oils from any one of these options. We currently use 322 million hectares to grow oil crops. That’s an area the size of India. If we were to get all of it from palm oil we’d need just 77 million hectares—four times less. We’d free up a lot of land. On the other hand, if we got it all from soybean oil, we’d need more land: 490 million hectares. From olive oil we’d need twice as much land as we currently use—around 660 million hectares. Two Indias.

But instead of usi...

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