{"id":640741,"date":"2013-01-31T13:25:05","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T18:25:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dfid.gov.uk\/?p=13028"},"modified":"2013-01-31T13:25:05","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T18:25:05","slug":"the-secret-ingredient-bringing-palm-oil-back-to-west-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/640741","title":{"rendered":"The secret ingredient \u2013 bringing palm oil back to West Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A bowl of palm fruit. Picture: Henry Donati\/DFID<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It\u2019s an ingredient you\u2019ve probably never heard of, but it features in thousands of everyday items \u2013 from biscuits to beauty products. Palm oil is an edible\u00a0vegetable oil refined from the reddish fruit of palm trees which originated in West Africa. Always a staple part of West African cooking, it first became a sought after commodity in the UK in the second half of the 19th<\/sup> century during the industrial revolution, when it was used as a lubricant on the railways and in other machinery, and later in soap, margarine and candles. As production in countries like Nigeria, Cote D\u2019Ivoire and Ghana fell during the 1970s, Indonesia and Malaysia took the tree native to West Africa and starting producing palm oil on an industrial scale. They created huge plantations and their production soon dwarfed that of all the other West African countries combined; the region where palm oil originated became a net importer of the product. \u00a0Producing on this scale in Asia had a major environmental impact, as vast swathes of rainforest were cut down to provide land for plantations and endangered species were being threatened. There were also accusations of human rights abuses made against palm oil producers. There have been calls for boycotts of palm oil products, and demands that multinationals find an alternative ingredient to use in their products.<\/p>\n

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Women at work sorting palm fruit. Picture: Henry Donati\/DFID<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The sleepy town of Asuom in Ghana\u2019s eastern region seems a far cry from the globalised market. As I\u2019m shaken from side to side as we drive down a track that\u2019s more pothole than road, it\u2019s no surprise to learn that West Africa is the home of the palm tree, and in Ghana, the eastern region is its heartland. Everywhere I look we are surrounded by the trees, and no forests have been cleared here to plant them – they\u2019ve grown here for hundreds of years.I\u2019m here to visit Fulwell Mill, a company working with Serendipalm and Traidcraft, which has just received a UK aid\u00a0Retail Industry Challenge Fund (FRICH<\/a>) grant to help scale up and expand its production of palm oil.<\/p>\n

\"Gladys<\/p>\n

Gladys asks me if I’d like to marry her and stay in Asuom. Picture: Henry Donati\/DFID<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

They first opened the palm oil mill around six years ago, when Dr Bronners, an American luxury soap company, was looking for somewhere to buy organic, fair trade palm oil for its products. When they realised they couldn\u2019t find a source they were happy with, they decided they had to make it themselves.I arrived around 9am, just after the latest batch of palm fruit had been delivered. The women working at the mill carry large bowls of the brownish-red palm fruit and deposit them on the floor of the mill. \u00a0These are divided up and distributed between the groups of local women working there, who carefully peel the fruit off the stalk by hand, and check the quality. In high season 250 women are at work \u2013 perched on stools, they sit in circles, laughing, joking and singing while they pick away the palm fruit stalks. I talked to Gladys, who has been working at the mill since it opened \u2013 she tells me it\u2019s now the biggest employer in\u00a0the area.\u00a0When the women finish their shifts, many will stay and sit around \u2013 keeping their friends and\u00a0colleagues company.<\/p>\n

\"Women<\/p>\n

Women at work sorting the palm fruits. Picture: Henry Donati\/DFID<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The mill also employs around 300 smallholder farmers who supply the palm fruit.\u00a0 Each has about\u00a0two hectares of palm trees, with each palm tree producing around\u00a0three to five\u00a0bunches of fruit every two weeks during the high season. The mill has helped the farmers to achieve organic status \u2013 not many were using pesticides in the first place, but being organic is as much about helping to increase yields \u2013 the mill provides organic \u2018sludge\u2019 left over from the palm oil producing process to the farmers so that they can use it to fertilise the trees. Farmers are offered training and interest free loans (in the form of hybrid seedlings), and the mill also assists with other local community projects.<\/p>\n

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Production: clarifying the palm oil. Picture: Henry Donati\/DFID<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Once the fruit has been separated from its stalks, it is steamed in big vats to soften the\u00a0flesh, then put through a digester, pressing out the oily liquid, and filtering out the \u2018sludge\u2019 which is used as fertiliser. The liquid left over is then put through a clarification process, heated like in distillation, and the oil layer rises above the water and overflows through a pipe into a second tank. This is then stored, before being shipped to Europe where it is further refined, and eventually used in the manufacturing of all kinds of different products. DFID\u2019s support through the FRICH grant is being used to help expand the mill. This includes\u00a0building another processing facility\u00a0which should allow it to increase annual production around seven-fold,\u00a0helping to add value by doing more refining on site, and exploring opportunities to market secondary products like cocoa. Of course small projects like this are never going to be able to rival the size or scale of the plantations in Asia. But they should be able to help create a demand for palm oil that is created in a sustainable way and that benefits the community and the environment. It\u2019s good to see production of palm oil finally coming back home to West Africa. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A bowl of palm fruit. Picture: Henry Donati\/DFID It\u2019s an ingredient you\u2019ve probably never heard of, but it features in thousands of everyday items \u2013 from biscuits to beauty products. Palm oil is an edible\u00a0vegetable oil refined from the reddish fruit of palm trees which originated in West Africa. Always a staple part of West […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}