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Take a look at the list of ingredients on the back of almost any ultra-processed packaged food and you are likely to find palm oil or its derivatives as an ingredient. Its presence is just as ubiquitous in cosmetics and personal care products. 

The consequences of the excessive use of palm oil are far-reaching and impact more than just our health. In this episode, my co-host James Connolly is talking with Jocelyn Zuckerman, author of Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World.

Jocelyn and James dive deep into the history of the palm oil industry and how it came to be in everything, exploring the devastation of natural habitats, corporate corruption, and how many of these practices continue today.

Join them in this enlightening conversation as they discuss:

• Jocelyn’s connection to Nina Teicholz and her inspiration for the book
• The effect of land grabs in Africa in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis
• How Liberia was founded and the palm oil industry there
• The brief summary of Unilever’s violent past from Sunlight Soap to enslaving native populations 
• How the palm oil trade replaced the slave trade after it was outlawed in 1807
• How growing palm oil trees started as a way to alleviate poverty
• The processing oil palm and stats on palm oil usage
• Major brands that use a lot of palm oil
• The perspective of poachers
• The connection between what’s happening in the palm oil industry with other commodity industries
• Tragic stories of modern-day slavery in the agriculture industry
• The current practice of using prisoners as farmworkers and the effect it has on prison sentences 

While topics like this can seem overwhelming and discouraging, I encourage my listeners to see the links below for ways you can find out more and take action.

Resources:

Books & Articles:

• The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz
• Selections of Jocelyn’s articles in Gourmet Magazine here, here, & here
• Selections of Jocelyn’s articles in On Earth Magazine here, here, & here
• Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo by Jules Marchal
• The World for Sale by Javier Blas & Jack Farchy
• Merchants of Grain by Dan Morgan
• The Secret Life of Groceries: The Darkside of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr
• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGee
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
• The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
• How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
• Black Boy and The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
• Articles on prisoners used as farm labor here and here

Websites for Info & Action:

• National Resources Defence Council
• Chain Reaction Research
• Mighty Earth
• Rainforest Action Network
• No White Saviors

Other Resources:

• Natural Habitats Palm Oil
• James’s podcast with Benjamin Lorr: Sustainable Dish Episode 127
• Behind the Bastards Podcast

Connect with [Guest]:

Website: Jocelyn Zuckerman

Instagram: @jocelynzuck

LinkedIn: Jocelyn Zuckerman

Twitter: @jocelynzuck

***

Episode Credits:

Thank you to all who’ve made this show possible. Our hosts are Diana Rodgers, Lauren Manning, and James Connelly. Our producer is Meg Chatham, and our editor is Emily Soape. And of course, we are grateful for our sponsors, Patreon supporters, and listeners.

Quotes:

“There’s a quote from Lord Leverhulme’s Ghost where he says that there has been a surprisingly consistent pattern in the Congo over the centuries. Outsiders want some commodity the territory possesses, they extract the commodity causing the deaths of 10s, of millions of people in the process. They justify their seizure by portraying themselves as generous-hearted. A few brave souls blow the whistle and portray the exploitation that’s been going on. The world briefly pays attention and then the cycle begins anew with a new commodity.”  – James Connolly

“What was then Dutch East Indies and Malaya would then become Malaysia and Indonesia. So today, those two countries together produce about 85% of palm oil globally. So the industry is really based there.” – Jocelyn Zuckerman

“Innocuous basically personality-less. That’s right, it’s got its bright orange. It’s got a pretty strong smell and pretty strong flavor. So they just you know, they bleach it, they deodorize it and it basically becomes just this invisible cheap filler in foods.” – Jocelyn Zuckerman, speaking about palm oil

“About 70 to 75% of the palm oil produced globally goes toward food.” – Jocelyn Zuckerman

“The head of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil was giving a talk in 2010. And he said it is expected that 45 of every 100 additional calories in the period up to 2030 may come from oil crops.” – Jocelyn Zuckerman

“The Soy Research Institute estimates that 8% of the calories in the American diet come from soybean oil. Yeah, and there’s a further 1 to 2% that’s corn. Which is just an incredible amount of calories that you don’t even generally know that you’re eating.” – James Connolly

“Particularly with palm oil. It’s it’s cheap filling. Very few Americans go out and buy bottles or jars of palm oil, right?” – Jocelyn Zuckerman

“I think the figure for orangutans is 100,000 orangutans have been wiped out in the last 15 years. So the orangutans are only on Sumatra and Borneo. These primates, they share 97% of our DNA.” – Jocelyn Zuckerman

“So although smallholders generate $17 billion, which is 6% of the entire chain, the share of the profits is close to zero. So the average smaller group holder makes like $7,000 a year, and I think the average family is four people. So they’re all living on the poverty line. Meanwhile, the estimated total wealth of eight of the top 27 families in the palm oil industry is $88 billion – 8% percent of the country’s GDP.” –  Jocelyn Zuckerman, referencing a 2018 report from an NGO in Indonesia

“We want our cherries and our lettuces. And we’re not going to go out there and harvest that stuff. Right?” – Jocelyn Zuckerman

“And everybody’s saying we are at crisis point, I kind of feel like with the fires and the west coast melting down, concrete buckling that, I don’t know, maybe people are finally getting the message. Buildings crumbling in Florida, that it’s not so abstract anymore. But that’s my hope.” – Jocelyn Zuckerman 

Transcript:

James Connolly  0:00  

Hi, welcome. This is Sustainable Dish’s podcast. I’m James Connolly, co-producer of the film Sacred Cow. Today I’m introducing Jocelyn Zuckerman, who wrote a just a truly wonderful book called Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything and Endangered the World. And I kind of ran across your book, I had been interested in actually understanding this because I’d read Nina Teicholz’s book years ago, and she had a passage in there, but she was talking about this war that was happening in the 80s, between the Soybean Association, and the sort of because at the time, they were using hydrogenation, to make these sort of trans fats that mimics butter in a lot of processed foods. So stable at room temperature, but you could bake with it. And it become, it’s starting to become ubiquitous within the American food system, or at that point had already become very ubiquitous. And then palm oil had started to come in. And there was this real sort of war happening in the newspapers and across media as to what the health implications of palm oil. And it was a waged campaign by a lot of PR and advertising agencies and a lot of special interests. And I hadn’t really ever heard about that before. It’s very difficult to find really good literature that goes very deeply into the sort of palm oil industry. And so I wanted to invite Jocelyn on to kind of talk about this. This book is dense, it is absolutely wonderful. It takes you on a wild ride around the world, across these, this very specific latitude, right in the world where palm oil grows. Thank you. And welcome.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  1:39  

Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

James Connolly  1:43  

So tell me, why palm oil, what’s the sort of origin story behind this focus?

Jocelyn Zuckerman  1:48  

So the funny thing is that that Nina Teicholz’s book that you mentioned that The Big Fat Surprise, actually grew out of an article that I assigned to Nina when I was an editor at Gourmet Magazine. So I knew a little bit about fats through her writing that article, and then I read her book and when it was published, but I knew pretty much nothing about palm oil. And this is despite the fact I was actually on the staff of Gourmet for 12 years ending as deputy editor. And I had also been on the staff of On Earth magazine, which is the magazine of the NRDC, Natural Resources Defense Council, written, you know, a bunch of articles about agriculture, environmental issues, sustainability, nutrition, and nevertheless, still sort of knew nothing about palm oil. And it was 2013 or 2014, I had the idea to write a story about land grabs, which was you and your listeners might remember, in the aftermath of the the food and fuel crisis of 2008. Remember, that’s when there were protests around the world because the prices of fuel and foods were rising. In the aftermath of that phenomenon. There was this this land grabbing that started happening, I think people realizing, you know that just the importance of food and fuel and the, you know, the finitude of the earth, and so wanting to get their hands on these resources. So agribusiness, sort of sovereign wealth funds, land poor countries, were buying up big swaths or signing concession agreements to lease big swaths of fertile land in places like Ethiopia, Madagascar, other places where there’s maybe sparsely populated land and governments that maybe by way of corruption or just just not great governance enabled these these outside forces to come in and get these deals land that often entail pushing people off the land and sort of robbery crisis. Anyway, this was the phenomenon I wanted to explore. And I decided to go do it in Liberia. In part because of the country’s relationship to the States. I’m sure your listeners know it was founded by freeing American slaves. Anyway so when I was doing this story for On Earth Magazine, and I went down to Liberia and started doing this reporting and was traveling across what had been tropical rain forest, it had just been razed to the ground completely for miles and miles. Talking to people who’ve been pushed out of their villages and grave sites destroyed and it was all for palm oil. It was that it was for the plant is the oil palm produces palm oil there’s one area down in the south of the country where they had just you know as I said, we drove for miles and miles and there’s nothing but dirt and dead trees. I mean it just got through this palm oil company knocked everything down, getting ready to plant oil palm and then up north of Monrovia the capital we traveled to another area where a different palm oil company had been in operation for a couple of years. And again drove for miles and miles here It wasn’t just dirt but it was was a monoculture plantations, again all palm oil. And so you know, I was just so surprised I thought, first of all, why is there so much land being devoted to this crop that I know nothing about? And where does it go? What Since when does like Do we need all this palm oil in the world. And sort of what’s the story with this crop? So I got back home and I was doing other stories at the time, I think it was on staff at another magazine, but sort of in between I kept researching, coming back to this topic of palm oil, and managed to sort of get different magazine assignments from… I did one for Audubon, I did one for Vogue, one for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists also. Looking at different things like the ICIJ thing was about how the World Bank underwrites projects that might come back and have malign impacts in years to come. So I looked at through the through the lens of palm oil. For Vogue, I looked at, you know, whether cosmetics companies could be because there’s a palm oil and palm kernel oil are used in cosmetics and personal care products, whether they could be sourcing palm oil sustainably. So I sort of cobbled together this research by doing articles for different sorts of magazines. And that enabled me to sort of travel to different places Get, get more research under my belt, and then finally get this book proposal together. And to get an advance, I also got a fellowship that enabled me to sort of just focus exclusively, sort of what were the environmental implications. And then I went all into the history of the crop and health implications and labor implications and lots of other topics.

James Connolly  6:17  

The book starts out with the sort of history of colonialism in that era. It’s specifically in in the Congo and around where Liberia is. The sort of western coast of Africa. And you go very deeply into one company that I really specifically have just the largest bone in the world to pick with because I was reading Lord Leverhulme’s Ghost, recently. And so this was written by a former sort of, I guess, you would say, an ambassador, who had spent a lot of time in Africa. And he had read in one of the local journals about King Leopold and Lord Leverhulme, and just the, the virtual genocide that it sort of happened there. And he knew nothing about this. He was from Belgium. And so he had written back to the government and wanted to find all of these records. King Leopold had destroyed a lot of them. And he was trying to figure out exactly what was happening. And he had been stonewalled by his own government. And then so for him, he spent the next 30 years of his life really doing a lot of deep research into this and bringing it back to light. You go into the history of Unilever, just a company that I think just gets no… there’s no real oversight of a lot of these companies. And there’s no understanding of the history of colonization and so can you go a little bit into because I think the metaphor is just so sweet. If you think about these things from from like a real like bastardized perspective, his that he started a company makes soap, right? So please go with it. It’s It’s such a wonderful story to kind of begin with because it has this kind of real, real sort of white essence toit. 

Jocelyn Zuckerman  8:02  

Yes. Sunlight, his soap. Okay, so he was born in the industrial town of Bolton around 1870s I believe. He was the seventh child of 10. His dad was a grocer, small time grocer. William Lever was his name. It later, later it became Leverhulme because he sort of merged his name with his wife’s name. Anyway, he was a very ambitious as from a kid he was he was a tiny man. Apparently very small hands and feet. And, and yet, he was just sort of single minded ambition on… while he was very interested in sort of marketing and advertising. Anyway, so he sort of took over his dad’s grocery and at the time, started traveling to Holland and Ireland, I believe, to source eggs and sort of cut out the middleman. That was that was his first step to get a leg up on his competitor. After that, he just went, you know, he figured out every way to short the competitors and win over the marketplace. And so he started around that time people started eating… Well, first it was soap, which people have been the Europeans have been making soap using palm, mainly palm kernel oil sourced from West Africa. For a while for a couple decades. And he built up soap works and sort of took over the whole soap industry. Later went into margarine, using palm oil to make his margarine. And then he was sourcing it from West Africa. But I also talked in the book house or that the infrastructure for the palm oil trade sort of replaced the what had been there for the slave trade once the slave trade was outlawed in 1807. So there were in the Niger Delta sort of coastal Nigeria. There’s this sort of mangrove area and then all these rivers going up into the interior of the country where these oil palm groves grew naturally. They used to use all those rivers as sort of a highway network to the middlemen would go up in canoes and get humans that they then brought down to the coast and traded to the Europeans waiting offshore, who would then transport these humans across the Atlantic. Once that was outlawed and severely restricted with the military then they switch to what they called the legitimate trade of palm oil and use that whole system those same canoes those same middlemen. Went up those rivers and sourced palm oil and then the the European traders, most of them from Liverpool some from London, some from Glasgow, started trading oil palm increasing the palm oil and palm kernel oil. Palm kernel oil use mostly for soap and candles and the palm oil used for margarines. So William Lever, he wanted to basically cut out the middleman mainly so he could maximize his profits. Also the supply waxed and waned. He wanted a steady supply, good quality oil. He was also frankly racist. He didn’t trust the workers in Africa who were producing this oil, and he thought he wanted to go down there and sort of impose some quality control. So he went to the governments of what is now Sierra Leone, I believe and Ghana, and they said, You can’t have land to source this. And then he went to the Belgian Congo. They’ve just gotten rid of this King Leopold, who, as you said, basically murdered 10 million Congolese, either directly or indirectly through sourcing… his system for sourcing ivory and rubber, and building his empire. Anyway, they just gotten rid of King Leopold. The Belgians were embarrassed to come out in front of the world that this guy was a genocidal maniac. So they thought, Oh, this nice businessman, William Lever, who said, I’m a Christian, I’m going to build schools, I’m going to build nice houses and I’m going to you know, run… I’m a very legitimate businessman. I want to go in there and build up this this palm oil business. So he went in there and again, he was in very remote areas and able to get away with a lot and so in the end, took after King Leopold in terms of forced labor, using child labor to source his palm oil. And got wildly rich off of his soap works in his margarine works.

James Connolly  11:57  

Yeah. And I think, you know, you see by the 1870s, there’s what they call the Scramble for Africa, where all of the European nations went in… many of them under the guise of civilizing the African world. King Leopold specifically wanted to go in because he said he wanted to get rid of that nasty Arab slave trade that was still continuing up until that point. There’s the three C’s that they use, who’s to bring civilization, commerce, and Christianity, which William Lever was, was a big fan of. He had this sort of very Puritan puritanical work ethic personality. So this is the beginning of Unilever, he was able to use a lot of the same techniques that Leopold soldiers had used, which is, in essence, conscription, penury, and then sort of forcing all of these…

Jocelyn Zuckerman  12:49  

And impose like indigenous tax. And because your currency at the time, the only way the guys the tax was on the men, the only way they could pay it off was by working it off. So they would be conscripted. And then they also sort of colluded with local chiefs to round up men from these villages and transport them to the areas where he had established these plantations for harvesting the palm oil and then also using children to less for harvesting, both harvesting sort of off of the ground and the palm oil fruits that fell down on the ground.

James Connolly  13:18  

There was a an interesting quote from Lord Leverhulme’s Ghost where he says that there, there has been a surprisingly consistent pattern in the Congo over the centuries. Outsiders want some commodity the territory possesses, they extract the commodity causing the deaths of 10s, or millions of people in the process. They justify their seizure by portraying themselves as generous hearted. A few brave souls blow the whistle and portray the exploitation that’s been going on. The world briefly pays attention and then the cycle begins a new with a new commodity. It’s just said these I just want is

Jocelyn Zuckerman  13:52  

That it’s still going on today with the coltan, right?

James Connolly  13:55  

Yes, yeah. Right, uranium, timber, diamonds, gold, and coltan. So now now talk to us about how this this tree that is indigenous to this area, now starts to go out into the rest of the world follows that sort of latitude all over the place, because you really go into Indonesia, Sumatra, Burma, Colombia, Honduras. These are all countries that have, in essence been clear cut to get and open up resources for palm production.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  14:31  

So many It was around the turn of the century, it was in large part trader, European planters and Scandinavian who were growing rubber and coffee and what was then Dutch East Indies and Malaya would then become Malaysia and Indonesia. So today, those two countries together produce about 85% of palm oil globally. So the industry is really based there. The plant is not indigenous to Southeast Asia. It’s It’s from Africa. But it was around that time, there were some guys who worked for Unilever and some other companies in Africa. But there have been some oil palm plants in the Botanical Garden in on Java. But at that point, they sort of brought them over and started planting it experimentally, where they had the rubber plantations and their coffee plantations and working with it to see you know how much they could adapt it to the land. And then when synthetic rubber came along, and sort of the bottom dropped out of the market for natural rubber. So a lot of them pulled out their rubber trees and replanted it with oil palm. So that was sort of the beginning of the industry, as I said, it was about around the turn of the century. And then after, after, when those two countries got their independence in the 19… late 1950s, both governments looked to oil palm as a sort of poverty alleviation scheme. So they had, they had big populations of very poor people. And they had all this forested land. So they sort of gave people parcels of land, cut down the rain forests, gave them oil palm and some rubber seedlings and said, you know, grow these crops to make a living. So that was the idea. You know, it’s like all these unforeseen consequences. So there was nothing nefarious about the industry, though, I mean, I guess originally, there wasn’t because it was European planters who were going in and taking land that was not theirs. But at this point, it was the governments of these countries who were trying to help their populations. So that was the idea. And then as the decades went by, they learned how to, we find the oil and figured out all these different uses for it and kept growing the market around the world. So the industry just grew and grew grew. 

James Connolly  16:35  

Yeah, I was surprised at the chapter where you talk about the processing of oil palm. Just because it seemed to me, a fruit that was oily in and of itself that has its own saturated fat would have to go through the same chemical processes of deodorisation and hexane and all of that stuff that this soy plant goes into. And then we use for corn oil as well. Is that just just to make it as ubiquitous and singular wherever you are in the world?

Jocelyn Zuckerman  17:05  

Innocuous basically personality-less. That’s right, it’s got its bright orange. It’s got a pretty strong smell and pretty strong flavor. So they just you know, they bleach it, they deodorize it and it’s basically becomes just this invisible cheap filler in foods. And as you said, it’s it’s the the palm oil is 50% saturated fat. The oil that you get from the kernel is 80% saturated fat. So yeah, when you don’t need to hydrogenate that it’s semi solid at room temperature. So you talked about earlier, the trans fats that result when you hydrogenate other liquid oils. That was in the mid 80s, when the health establishment figured out the trans fats were really bad for us. Food manufacturers realize, Oh, we can use palm oil, just swap in for that. And we don’t need to do that hydrogenation and we won’t result in those trans fats. 

James Connolly  17:49  

I think you have a quote statistic in there is 70% of the world’s processed food contains palm oil in it.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  17:58  

I’m not sure I know it’s about 70 to 75% of the of the palm oil produced globally goes toward food. As opposed to like personal care products and, and makeup is about 7%. Biodiesel is an increasing, but it’s mostly in food and it is you know, ultra processed foods and deep fried foods. It’s used a lot as a cooking oil now in India and across Southeast Asia.

James Connolly  18:22  

Yeah, the the percentage increase of importation in India over the course that you’ve talked about is mind boggling.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  18:32  

I was actually just reading over something, the head of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil was giving a giving a talk in 2010. And he said it is expected that 45 of every 100 additional calories in the period up to two and 2030 may come from oil crops. I mean, I know that’s been documented that the percentage of vegetable oil in our in our diet has increased. People always think it’s all sugar and sweeteners that have gone up in our diet. But it’s vegetable oil more than any, but the fact that this guy is boasting that 45 of every 100 additional calories are going to be from oil crops that like that’s kind of horrifying. Half of the calories we’re going to be ingesting are coming from oil that are 50 and 80% saturated fat.

James Connolly  19:19  

Yeah, the there’s a Soy Research Institute and they estimate that 8% of the American diet, the calories in the American diet come from soybean oil. Yeah, and there’s a further one one to 2% that’s corn. Which is just an incredible amount of calories that you don’t even generally know that you’re eating

Jocelyn Zuckerman  19:41  

Right now you don’t know it all. I think particularly with palm oil. It’s it’s cheap filling. Very few Americans go out and buy bottles or jars of palm oil, right? It’s like you were conscious of ingesting so much.

James Connolly  19:54  

The local supermarket that I have has one sustainable, it a deep red palm oil that is sells.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  20:02  

But I’m actually looking forward to it from a good operation. It’s from a company called Natural Habitats that they sourced. It’s all organic and they do sourced from smallholder farmers only in Ecuador. That was pretty small operation but from what I saw that it was it was impressive.

James Connolly  20:17  

What are these are like household products that people are buying that contain palm oil? National brands, like what are we looking at? I know you talked about Nutella.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  20:27  

The big companies that source a lot of palm oil are PepsiCo, so it’s an all those Frito Lay products. And men’s products have a lot of palm oil. I think their parent company now is Grupo Bimbo, a Mexican company. Unilever, as we said. Kellogg’s, not so much in the US but in other parts of the world, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s. All those fast food. KFC they use palm oil for frying and in their foods. And then personal care products like I mean companies like Colgate Palmolive and Procter and Gamble also source a lot of palm oil.

James Connolly  21:00  

Let’s talk about two. Specifically, we’ll focus on Indonesia and Sumatra. What is happening in these areas, these ecologically rich, diverse landscapes that hold probably 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Let’s talk about some of everything that’s kind of happening with that. Because there’s a huge section of it that I didn’t necessarily want to get into. But I think it’s really important to to have audio viewers to know like what is actually happening there, the Sumatran tiger, the number of animals that are being displaced.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  21:33  

Right I think the figure for orangutans is 100,000 orangutans have been wiped out in the last 15 years. So the orangutans are only on Sumatra and Borneo. These primates they share 97% of our DNA. So you spend any, any amount of time around these creatures. I mean, they’re just they’re so human, it’s it will truly break your heart. I spent time in a rehab place where these animals, their lands, their habitat has just been wiped out. So it’s like they’re pushed into smaller and smaller areas of forest and there’s not enough food so they’ll sort of go wandering into villages where people are annoyed by them because they might tromp through their crops. And they also take they will like kill the mother orangutans and steal the babies for trading on that the pet trade. They spear them and they shoot them with pellet guns. Anyway, they they turn up often in in villages and our views so they have to be sort of rescued and brought to these rehabilitation centers. And then to the extent that they can, if they’re if they’re able to be rehabilitated, then there are a couple centers than that, then they will transport them to areas of the rain forest that are still intact, and that might be able to support whatever size population of these creatures. So that’s that. I also reported on helmeted hornbills, which was amazing birds that have this sort of solid casque, they call it red ivory or red gold. It’s used particularly among the Chinese for sort of carving. It’s almost like a jade texture. So they carve it into little trinkets and jewelry and things. And the more you eat away and work on the forest and establish plantations, and you put roads in there, it makes it easier for poachers to go in there and get these wild animals and birds. What I tried to get across in that that chapter that I wrote about the helmeted hornbills was I hung out with some of these poachers, these guys who were actually shooting them. And they were sweet guys, they were like, We don’t want to do this. We just we have to support our families and we can sell we shoot down these birds we can sell them and there… It’s like enough food for I forget what they said three weeks, you know, for three families. So part of it is that these these folks made their you know, everything they in Sumatra, also in Liberia and other other places. Guatemala, people said the forest is our supermarket. You know, we get our, we get our protein from the little animals, we get our fish, we get our freshwater, we get our building materials, we get our roots and our berries. And anyway, so you get rid of the forest. And then if you put in these agrochemicals, then their water is polluted. So they’re just kind of screwed and ruined. And so they’re forced to do things like sell a baby orangutan or shoot down these endangered birds to try to make a living. The complication of it is like these aren’t evil people. You know, it’s not like everybody’s like, Oh, look, cuts cut down the rainforest. Who cares? They’re just it’s mostly the corporations and a lot of corrupt government officials. Many of them still trace to Suharto, the former of dictator of Indonesia, who handed out these concessions. It’s a lot of the same families. The wealth is really concentrated up above. In fact, this report came out just like two weeks ago. Are you familiar with this organization Chain Reaction Research in DC? They were related to an NGO called Mighty Earth that does really good deep research into deforestation. Anyway, they did this report on sort of where the income from the palm oil industry where along the value chain the money lands. And it’s fast moving consumer goods companies generate 66% of the gross profit and 52% of the operating profit. So although smallholders generate $17 billion, which is 6% of the entire chain, they’re sharing the profits is close to zero. So the average smaller group holder makes like $7,000 a year, and I think said that they the average family is like four people. So they’re all sort of living on the poverty line. Meanwhile, this, an NGO in Indonesia, did a report in 2018. They found that the estimated total wealth of eight of the top 27 families in the palm oil industry is $88 billion. 8% percent of the country’s GDP, eight families. If you sell so, so much this wealth and I I quoted a guy in the book, he was a hotelier in Jakarta. But he was he was a British guy, but he was based in Jakarta. And he said, You’ve seen that movie crazy rich Asians? Did you see it?

James Connolly  26:03  

Well, I couldn’t get through it. But I got it.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  26:06  

To put the iceberg like that. That wasn’t an exaggeration. He said you on a Friday night, Saturday night. The Rolls Royce and the Ferraris lineup in front of the hotels. And he said it’s it’s like a handful of families that are in their wealth is from the natural resources of this country mining palm oil, still. So the wealth is so concentrated, and so extreme I give the net worth of maybe the five sort of top palm oil companies. The guy the CEOs, and they’re they’re all in the billions of dollars, some like 13 billion, and meanwhile that so much of the population, much of it sort of involved in in the oil, palm trade, whether plantation workers or smallholder farmers are living at the poverty line. That wealth is not trickling down. I mean, that’s that that’s the line of the palm oil lobby. If you take issue with the industry, then the they say, you know, how can you you’re oppressing our smallholder farmers and your prejudice against our… this is crop apartheid. But in fact, the the smallholder farmers say we are not this wealth is not coming down to us. It’s staying concentrated among these corporations.

James Connolly  27:13  

Yeah. And you talk about the sort of PR campaigns the sort of National Geographic esque photographs of farmers that the these industries will kind of release every time somebody comes after right after them

Jocelyn Zuckerman  27:27  

Done by the DCI group which is this big Republican affiliated… They’re based in they’re based in Washington DC. They say oh, these are the these campaigns are is made by the Malaysian smallholder farmers. Not true at all. This is the massive corporate effort to the tune of millions of dollars masquerading as this they call them astroturf is the same thing with the tea party here. You know, they make it look like Oh, is this just these hard working people? And these are their issues and how dare you oppress them when in fact, it’s all bullshit.

James Connolly  27:58  

Yeah, funded by the Koch brothers. The last year has been really trying to study the commodities brokers, the Archer, Daniel Middlin, Cargill, it’s called ABCD, Bungie and then Louis Dreyfus

Jocelyn Zuckerman  28:15  

Look on the website of This Mighty Earth, because they are, they’re very focused on that, in fact, they, they did a report last year. I think it was titled like, Cargill is the worst company in the world or something. It’s a really deep dive into into those traders. So you will find a lot of valuable information there.

James Connolly  28:35  

Yeah, it’s it’s spectacular how they, I mean, I had to look up the Dreyfus family, a bunch and like, these are these, nobody follows them at all. They seem they don’t give press interviews. They don’t even do shareholder meetings or anything like that. They’re, they completely operate under the radar. And there’s a there’s a book that came out recently called The World for Sale. It’s by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. And, man, it’s just it’s an incredible story about how Archer Daniel Midland specifically was involved in something called the Great Grain Robbery, which was in the late 60s, early 70s, where they essentially convinced American farmers to just plow all of their fields, fence row to fence row, and just create all of these commodity products that were then sold to Russia. It was subsidized and paid for by the American taxpayer. But then sold to Russia at an incredible profit. There was a book that kind of came out in the 80s called Merchants of Grain that I’ve been kind of working my way through as well, because sort of very deeply into how these companies operate. And the World is for Sale.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  29:48  

They’re all involved in the palm oil trade as well. They’re in arms. in Willmar, which is the biggest palm oil trader in the world.

James Connolly  29:58  

They’re involved in whatever the commodity is. It does not matter whether the country is run by a dictator or, you know, a monster, it does not matter to them. It is about profit over everything. And they seem to operate with impunity globally. And so it’s this sort of the, the true Invisible Hand of the market that’s really running the show. And you talked about it a little bit in your conclusion, because I think they do have the power to kind of push a lot of these governments to really do do substantive change. Because if you cannot sell on the commodities markets, then you have nothing, no place for your product. And so they have a huge amount of power and influence over whether or not we’re actually going to do anything going forward in terms of greening the planet, or sustainability or any of these climate goals or anything like that.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  30:52  

As consumers, we need to let them know, we know what’s going on. Right? As you said, there’s, there’s like, no accountability. And so I just that was part of the reason I’m writing the book. I thought I knew about food systems and international trade, and I knew so little about palm oil, you know, that’s part of the game plan, right? Keep it a secret, and then we can get away with what we want. But so part of my aim was to hopefully make people aware of this and get involved in these these various campaigns. As I said, Mighty Earth is really calling those traders to the carpet to show their be more transparent and showing up at shareholder meetings. And same with the Rainforest Action Network is really good about that. So I think your listeners could go on the websites of these companies and just tell them, actually, we’re watching and we want accountability. We want transparency. We want to see that you’re actually making change.

James Connolly  31:43  

Yeah, the one of the first interviews I did was Benjamin Lorr’s book, where he talks about the that sort of dark side of the supermarket. And he goes really deeply into the trucking industry.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  31:54  

It just came out like six months ago? 

James Connolly  31:54  

Yeah, maybe a little bit longer

Jocelyn Zuckerman  31:54  

 He like hung out in… He was in in a truck. He was with a trucker for a long time. Yeah, like, at the fish counter at Whole Foods. Yes. Yeah. It sounds great. I heard him on Terry Gross or something. Sounds great.

James Connolly  32:13  

Yeah. One of the things that he decided to focus on in one of the chapters was about the shrimp industry. It’s a really heavy focus on all of the recruitment that kind of happens in Thailand, from neighboring nations, bringing people in, which is essentially a sort of modern day slave industry, putting people on boats to do all of the bycatch that they need in order to feed the shrimp. But he was talking about, he said that the Omidyar Network, he’s one of the founders, I think of maybe Facebook, they had about…

Jocelyn Zuckerman  32:45  

 eBay 

James Connolly  32:46  

eBay, yeah. He, he wanted to focus on it like a product around the world. And so they gone through, I think they’re out of the 10, they ended up with shrimp. And they said that they found that because he had enough wealth in order to really have that degree of focus on one specific subject alone. He said, If he had focused on any one of those other 10, he would have found exactly the same thing. You know, and I think the UN estimates that there are 36 million people still living in slavery around the world. Most of it is economic. A lot of it has to do with agriculture. I think a majority of it is agricultural. The sheer absurdity of the fact that we feel like we’re making progress, you know, really keeps me up at night.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  33:29  

Yeah, same. The story… It was actually two AP reporters. They won the Pulitzer about four years ago for their series on seafood slaves. Remember, they sort of got these guys freed, who were anyway, they they let end of last year beginning this year, they also did a series for the AP on labor issues in the palm oil industry. In other reports, there was one from the Wall Street Journal, Amnesty International is written about Human Rights Watch. And it’s a similar thing. So Indonesia has got this big population. But Malaysia the population is much smaller, and much higher standard of living. So there’s not a lot of Malaysians who are sort of interested in plantation jobs. So the country is dependent on, I have a figure – 337,000 migrant workers from countries like similar to the to the shrimp slaves, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia, and very similar system. So the people have told stories in their in their villages in Bangladesh, and these recruiters come in, we can get you a job in a restaurant or in a hotel. They pay money actually to go with these recruiters to get these good jobs. They get on a boat, their passports are confiscated. They’re given very little water, very little food, told stories about how people got sick, they threw them overboard. They slashed their stomach so they wouldn’t float so the evidence would go away. And then they you know, they’d land in Thailand, traffic them down into basically prison camps in Malaysia. Again, pay them nothing, put them in horrific accommodations, give them very little food, very little water and then traffic them onto these oil palm plantations where they have to work horrific hours and make no money. And many of them, you know, have to try to escape under cover of night. Very similar to the seafood slaves story.

James Connolly  35:24  

Yeah. And similar to California here.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  35:27  

Sorry, actually, the, the US Customs and Border Patrol announced that they were stopping imports of palm oil from two major Malaysian palm oil companies because of the documented links to slave labor. That’s still a situation. So shining a spotlight helps. But you wonder how long, how long we’ve helped support sort of falls out of the public eye. And then, yeah, Malaysian government does something so that they can wash that under the rug, and then they push that under the rug, and then they start importing again from them.

James Connolly  36:00  

Yeah, the US had done that in the 60s and 70s, with sugar plantations, mainly from the Philippines. They were flying people in for harvesting. And, you know, look, I think if you look at California’s migrant labor, you’re seeing all of the same processes happening. Since Trump spent a lot of time trying to close the borders, the US has started to go and take prison… .US prisoners, nonviolent US prisoners, to go and work up a lot of the harvest, which is then incentivize lawmakers to come in and give harsher sentences for misdemeanors and nonviolent crimes. So they’re trying to keep these prisons that capacity so that they can farm them out to a lot of the local farms for for harvest and, and stuff like that. Well,

Jocelyn Zuckerman  36:50  

Wow. I don’t know about this. How recent phenomenon is that?

James Connolly  36:53  

As we speak,

Jocelyn Zuckerman  36:55  

Did you find that in Mother Jones or something?

James Connolly  36:57  

I read a lot of Tom Philpott, Mother Jones. I’ll see if I can find your article on it.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  37:02  

And now in 115 degree heat?

James Connolly  37:05  

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Civil Eats is doing a lot of good work on that talking about those in the National Farmers Union is really on it. I don’t necessarily know, yeah I know, Canada was going through the same problem as well. A shortage of because of these talking points, like immigrants are coming and stealing our jobs and as our countries went sort in further locked down, it became… 

Jocelyn Zuckerman  37:29  

We want our cherries and our lettuces. And we’re not going to go out there and harvest that stuff. Right?

James Connolly  37:34  

Correct. Yeah. Sorry, I spent a lot of time looking at the worst that humanity can produce. But I do think maybe it’s just my feed, maybe it’s the people that I follow. I am finding a real sort of groundswell now of people saying this is enough is enough. And I do think…

Jocelyn Zuckerman  37:52  

In particular, do you follow a lot of climate change, folks? I mean, I that’s sort of probably the lion’s share of my Twitter feed is climate change. And I do feel like, you know, I follow these people. And everybody’s saying this is, you know, we are at crisis point, I kind of feel like with the fires and the west coast melting down, concrete buckling that, I don’t know, maybe people are finally getting the message. Buildings crumbling in Florida, that it’s not so abstract anymore. But that’s my hope.

James Connolly  38:22  

Yeah, I mean, I follow less people involved in climate change. I follow more people involved in social justice movements, workers and civil rights. You know, there’s a, there’s a great Kenyan group called No White Saviors. Because very deeply into all of the things that are kind of happening generally in Kenya right now. And I follow. So I’m going to give a huge plug to my absolute favorite podcast, it’s called Behind the Bastards. He’s just such a great guy. 

Jocelyn Zuckerman  38:50  

Where is he based?

James Connolly  38:51  

So I think he’s based in Portland. He was embedded during all of the protests that were there, I think 61 over 60 days, he was out every single night as part of the protests. I would probably define him as an anarchist, but he’s a citizen journalist or a lot of his followers will pay for him to go to obscure places in the world to do reporting on the things that kind of matter to him. He’s a conflict journalist. So he spends a lot of time in in places like that. But his podcast is primarily about the worst people in history. So he’s got like a two parter on King Leopold. He’s got Henry Morton Stanley he’s got a two parter on. He you know, he did a whole thing on phrenology. Obviously, phrenology has been used by the Belgians to…

Jocelyn Zuckerman  39:36  

There are all in my book. And yeah, Stanley and Leopold and phrenology all thing there. Yeah.

James Connolly  39:43  

You know, and it was it was responsible for the genocide in Rwanda. These identification cards that separated the Hutus and the Tutsis, but it’s it’s just a really great podcast, and he’s able to really give you some amazing sort of history of some of the worst atrocities but with like comedy in the background. Which I feel like you need Yeah, I do feel like there is a groundswell. I think people are in the Black Lives Matters protests, the level of awareness that that people have nowadays and what’s what feels like genuine oppression on on all over the world by these despotic rulers. I think people are very tired of it

Jocelyn Zuckerman  40:27  

Just the systemic racism. I think all of us who fancied ourselves enlightened are still learning like legacy of slavery was not that long ago and just learning you know, these books that I’m the one with the swimming pool on the cover came out about six months ago, and, and that idea that rather than integrate swimming pools in the 1950s, I guess. Sort of local governments just filled them in, they were like, we’d rather not have a swimming pool than have to have our white kids share the swimming pool with black kids. Yeah, there have been a lot of books. Did you read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi?  that story? I haven’t. It’s just I just feel like there’s there’s so much both scholarship and sort of fiction that is really bringing home to all of us how… You know, The Warmth of Other Suns. These these different books that are just showing like it was it was so recent, connecting this to why everything is the way it is today. It’s not It’s not that isn’t ancient history that is all reverberating in sort of everything that’s happening around us. And yeah, it’s time to like really take that on and talk about fixing

James Connolly  41:39  

The Warmth of Other Suns and her new book, Caste, are both just absolutely wonderful books. I found I actually tried to get her on this podcast, I got no reply. Oh, maybe I’ll reach out again. Maybe she was busy.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  41:55  

The other book that I read recently is How Beautiful We Were by a Cameroonian novelist. She lives in upstate New York actually. And it’s about it takes place in a fictional African country. It’s sounds like Cameroon, it could be Sierra Leone, it could be a lot of places, but it’s about how a petroleum company comes in and basically, you know, pollutes the the groundwater and everybody gets sick. And how these villagers, you know, finally take matters into their own hands. But I was so struck, reading it, it could have been a palm oil company, like was so so all the stories that I read, but she’s just a beautiful writer. I was very sad to see it end. These new voices now in the conversation that that weren’t there before. And I think it’s, it’s helping all of us sort of get a much more realistic perspective.

James Connolly  42:44  

Yeah, I’d spent last summer reading Black Boy and the autobiography of Malcolm X, which I read in high school. And Richard Wright has a book that was short story that he had wanted to make into a longer one that was recently released. It’s called The Man Who Lived Underground. And it’s really truly wonderful. It’s it, I found that I found this story very difficult to stand on its own. But he has a letter that he writes to his grandmother, after the story ends, that completely blew my mind. Absolutely blew my mind. He was trying to come up with a metaphor for how oppressive religion had been to the Black community. And so he he creates a metaphor of this man who has to kind of live outside of that system. He’s accused of murder. He’s beaten by the cops and told to confess, you know, very similar to like a sort of, you know, Catholic confession. You’re born with original sin type of thing. And so he opts out and he lives underground, he views the world through that prism of his own freedom. And it’s very, very similar to Ellison’s Invisible Man, can one ever fully remove themselves from their Blackness in America and just exist on their own? And I think the two were probably corresponding back and forth. But what a profound book, I mean, really just amazing. I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s possible to understand America unless you’re reading Black writers. I think that the way they… the history that they write is the same his… you know, this is American history.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  44:17  

Did you see Mike Pompeo’s tweet a couple days ago? 

James Connolly  44:20  

No, God, no.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  44:21  

He’s right up there. He’s tied with Trump. For me for you basically said there were no flaws in our Constitution. There’s nothing racist about our country, and I can’t find it but but people should look because it’s just it’s so outrageous. And so um, it’s not ignorant because it’s just, it’s just a lie. There’s certainly still the forces that are very reluctant to acknowledge our true history. 

James Connolly  44:48  

Yeah. Who’s Mr. Sweater Vest who ran for president? He said that there was there was no, there’s nothing here before the settlers came.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  44:59  

Yeah, no culture.

James Connolly  45:00  

No culture. We brought them everything. Look at I think I have to believe raising children in this world that things are changing. And I see it in the kids.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  45:10  

And you have children?

James Connolly  45:12  

 I have three. Yeah. And I do.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  45:15  

There’s this tweet from three days ago. If we teach that the founding of the United States of America was somehow flawed, It was corrupt. It was racist. That’s really dangerous. It strikes at the very foundations of our country. You should see the responses. It’s like…

James Connolly  45:31  

Well, thank you so much for coming on. This is I was so excited to talk to you about this book. It’s again I’m going to I was I was telling you before, but don’t tell the audience. I’ve actually bought two copies of the book, and I bought the audiobook. It is a truly wonderful like analysis of everything that’s happening from colonization to neocolonialism to this of the fact that we’re still living through civilization, commerce and, you know, maybe less Christianity. And I really recommend that people pick it up and read it. It’s called Planet Palm. Jocelyn Zuckerberg, How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything and Endangered the World.

Jocelyn Zuckerman  46:14  

Thank you so much. I appreciate not just your interest in the book, but you’re sort of wide-ranging interest in all these other topics and deep dive into these systems from which all of these other things flow.