NOVEMBER 4 — At the 2026 Oils and Fats International Conference (OFIC), a paper laid bare a question that has long perplexed the industry: why does palm oil—the most land-efficient oil crop in the world—remain saddled with a negative label in Western public discourse?
The evidence says only about 2 per cent of global deforestation can be attributed to oil palm expansion. Yet almost no one talks about the other 98 per cent. When wildfires break out in the West, the default narrative is “climate change” and “global warming”; when fires and haze occur in Southeast Asia, fingers point squarely at palm oil companies.
According to research published in Europe PMC, forest conversion driven by oil palm expansion declined sharply after 2015—from an annual average of 342,000 hectares to roughly 80,000 hectares. Oil palm’s share of global forest loss fell from 12.2 per cent before 2015 to just 2.2 per cent after 2016. A 2026 study in Nature Food likewise found that, between 2001 and 2022, pasture expansion accounted for about 42 per cent of global commodity-driven deforestation. In terms of land-use efficiency, oil palm occupies just 5 per cent to 5.5 per cent of global oilseed crop area yet meets roughly 40% of global vegetable oil demand. If the world is looking for a way to produce the most oil from the least land, oil palm is virtually irreplaceable.
