Palm oil
Unilever is one of the world's largest buyers of palm oil - we purchase 1.5 million tonnes a year. However, rising population, together with the growing affluence of India and China, is creating unprecedented demand for palm oil -a phenomenon exacerbated by the rush into biofuels.
Palm oil is one of the drivers of deforestation, and Unilever is convinced that we have to break this link between cultivation of oil palm , climate change and the loss of high biodiveristy value forest and wetlands in tropical countries.
In the mid-1990s, we started developing Good Agricultural Practice Guidelines for oil palm (link to palm oil GAP). We are also a founding member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) (link to working in partnership page) - a body which we currently chair. In May 2008 we formalised our commitment to draw all our palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015, and in November 2008 we bought purchased some of the first certified sustainable palm oil produced. Unilever has agreed to support a moratorium on any further deforestation in South-East Asia.
Read more about our 2015 sustainable palm oil commitment.
See Press Release: First shipment of sustainable palm oil.
For more information on the RSPO please visit http://www.rspo.org/