Is palm oil vegan, and is it as bad as beef for forests?

The objection

“Vegans lecture about deforestation while pouring palm oil into everything. Orangutans die for your cookies, you’re no better.”

The answer

In Indonesia, the world’s largest producer, about a third of the old-growth forest lost between 2001 and 2019 ended up as oil palm, 3.09 of 9.79 million hectares (Gaveau et al. 2022) [1]. WWF-UK, a conservation charity, names the orangutan, pygmy elephant and Sumatran rhino among the endangered species whose habitat palm oil has destroyed (2022) [2]. Borneo lost more than 100,000 orangutans between 1999 and 2015, and land clearance caused the steepest local declines (Voigt et al. 2018) [3]. Most of the losses, though, were in logged or primary forest that was still standing, which the authors say fits with hunting as a major cause [3]. Where the charge fails is “just as destructive”: far more forest has given way to pasture for farmed animals than to oil palm, and palm oil reaches meat eaters as well as vegans.

Is palm oil vegan?

Palm oil is vegan: it comes from the fruit of the oil palm [2]. The Vegan Society in the UK counts it as suitable for vegans while calling the palm oil and palm timber industries “rife with very bad practices” [4]. It turns up in everyone’s shopping, whatever they eat. Over two-thirds (68%) of the world’s palm oil goes into food, including feed for farmed animals, 27% into soaps, detergents, cosmetics and other industrial uses, and 5% into biofuel (Our World in Data, 2021) [5]. WWF-UK puts it in close to half of packaged supermarket products (2022) [2]. Cutting it out completely takes more than reading labels, since the Vegan Society points out that in the EU palm oil in food has to be named but ingredients derived from it do not [4].

Does palm oil destroy as much forest as meat?

Pasture for cattle has replaced more than four times as much forest as oil palm: 45.1 million hectares worldwide between 2001 and 2015, against 10.5 million, according to the World Resources Institute, an environmental research non-profit (2021) [6]. WRI’s figures record what was planted where forest was lost, and it says they cannot prove the land was cleared because of that crop [6]. The same report notes that landholders may turn forest into pasture to speculate on land or to secure tenure [6]. The rate at which oil palm replaced forest, mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia, fell sharply after 2012, while pasture’s showed no noticeable change [6]. Soy replaced another 7.9 million hectares [6], and most soy is fed to farmed animals: 77% of the world’s crop went to livestock in 2018 (Our World in Data, 2021) [7].

A newer study by Singh and Persson (2026), covering 179 countries from 2001 to 2022, found the same order [11]. Pasture, mainly for beef, accounted for about 42% of the deforestation it linked to farming and forestry, and 52% of the carbon emissions from that clearing [11]. Oil palm, soy and every other oil crop put together came to 16% of the clearing and 14% of the emissions [11]. Palm’s share is far larger on peat: draining peatland after clearing added 2.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the 41.2 billion from the clearing itself, and oil palm alone was behind nearly 55% of the peat emissions [11]. Behind all of these figures is the land animals take. Foods from animals use 83% of the world’s farmland in Poore and Nemecek’s estimate (2018), and supply 18% of its calories and 37% of its protein (Our World in Data, 2022) [8].

Would boycotting palm oil help?

A worldwide boycott would most likely move the damage elsewhere, because oil palm yields about 2.9 tonnes of oil a hectare, around four times as much as rapeseed or sunflower (Our World in Data, 2021) [5]. In 2017 it supplied 36% of the world’s vegetable oil from 8.6% of the land used for oil crops [5]. Our World in Data allows that some switching to European rapeseed or sunflower oil could do less harm than clearing rainforest, but meeting the world’s demand without palm would need more farmland [5], which is also why WWF-UK opposes boycotts [2].

Is certified sustainable palm oil any better?

Certified palm oil is somewhat better, though by less than its label suggests. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) certifies about a fifth of the world’s production (2023) [5]. WWF-UK counts 70% of the UK’s palm oil imports in 2019 as sustainable, but names a substantial gap: palm-derived ingredients in feed for British chickens, pigs and cows, much of which is unlikely to be certified (2022) [2]. In Indonesia, certification cut the rate of forest loss inside certified plantations by a third, to 6.6% a year from an expected 9.8% (Carlson et al. 2018) [9]. Most of those plantations had little forest left by the time they were certified, so by 2015 they held less than 1% of the forest remaining inside the country’s oil palm plantations [9]. Certification also made no difference to forest loss on peat or to fires [9].

Those data end in 2015, before the RSPO tightened its standard in November 2018 [2]. Among its rules, plantations set up since 2005 must not have replaced primary forest or areas rich in biodiversity [5]. The 2018 standard added a requirement to halt deforestation, based on the High Carbon Stock approach [12], and plantings proposed since then must not go on peat or clear High Carbon Stock forest [13]. Neither rule reaches land cleared before its cut-off date, the gap Cazzolla Gatti and Velichevskaya (2020) examined with satellite images going back to 1984 [10]. Most certified concessions and supply bases in Sumatra and Borneo, they found, lie in areas that were tropical forest less than 30 years before the study, and habitat for orangutans, rhinos, tigers and elephants in the 1990s [10].