COCONUT OIL THREATENS MORE SPECIES THAN PALM OIL?

Coconut oil production threatens more species than palm or olive oil, according to researchers at the University of Exeter who claimed that production of coconut oil affects 20 threatened species of plants and animals per million tons of oil produced, Emma Gatten of The Telegraph reported on July 7, 2020.

This is, they argued, since coconuts are mostly harvested from tropical islands rich in unique species. In comparison, the researchers claimed that only 3.8 species are threatened by palm oil, by far the most widespread oil, and 4.1 by olive oil, Reuters added.

Coconut oil and water have boomed in popularity in recent years and researchers said the study, which was published in the journal Current Biology, highlights the difficulty for consumers of making fully informed “ethical” choices. The environmental costs of palm oil production, which has driven mass deforestation in SouthEast Asia and contributed to the decline of orangutans, are relatively well known, they said. Coconut-producing countries like the Philippines have been fighting tooth-and-nail against attacks by producers of palm oil and other types of oil and they would likely regard the study as “simple, neat and wrong.”      

“The outcome of our study came as a surprise,” said lead author Erik Meijaard, of Borneo Futures in Brunei Darussalam, who also does orangutan conservation for a palm oil company. “Many consumers in the West think of coconut products as both healthy and their production relatively harmless for the environment. As it turns out, we need to think again about the impacts of coconut.” Its cultivation is believed to have contributed to the extinction of a number of island species, including the Marianne white-eye in the Seychelles and the Solomon Islands’ Ontong Java flying fox. Existing species that are threatened by coconut production include the Balabac mouse-deer, which lives on three Philippine islands, and the Sangihe tarsier, a primate living on the Indonesian island of Sangihe.