WILL STONE fact-checks the colourful life of Ozzy Osbourne
Greasing the palm of global disaster
The profit motive drives the unbridled monoculture of the most widely used vegetable product on earth and a new book eloquently demonstrates why that is such a threat, says SUE TURNER
DAMAGING MONOCULTURE: A palm oil plantation in Cigudeg, Bogor
[Achmad Rabin Taim/Creative Commons] 
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Planet Palm
by Jocelyn C Zuckerman
(Hurst, £20)
THE TITLE of this book gives a strong sense of the ubiquity of palm products today: its oil is the most widely used vegetable product on the planet and accounts for a third of all vegetable oils.
It’s found in processed foods — margarine, confectionery, ready meals, snacks — and also in cosmetics, cleaning products, animal feed and biofuels. Palm oil is cheap to produce, stable in processing and has a long shelf life.
Indonesia and Malaysia produce 90 per cent of the world’s palm oil and to facilitate the proliferation of oil palm plantations, Indonesia has destroyed 60 million acres of rain forest — equivalent in size to Britain — between 2001 and 2017 alone. Malaysia’s figure is 20 million acres in the last 20 years, with the destruction continuing apace.
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