Planet Palm

How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything — and Endangered the World

Joyce Zuckerman

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781787383784
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787386235
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

It's in our instant noodles and chocolate bars, our lipsticks and fuel tanks. But what even is palm oil, and how has it come to dominate our lives so completely? Jocelyn C. Zuckerman travels across four continents and back two centuries to find answers about the most widely used vegetable oil on Earth. The little oil palm fruit has played an outsized role in world history and economic development. But the multi-billion-dollar palm oil business has been built on stolen land and slave labour; it spurred colonisation and swept away lives and cultures. Today, its fires and mass deforestation generate carbon emissions to rival those of entire industrialized nations, and they've pushed animals like the orangutan to the brink of extinction. Combining history, travelogue and investigative reporting, Planet Palm offers an unsettling, urgent look at a global industry that has become an environmental, public health, and human rights disaster.

PART I

UNGUENT OF EMPIRE

1

Goldie Goes In

The elders consulted their Oracle and it told them that the strange man would break their clan and spread destruction among them.

—Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

IN MY mind’s eye, George Dashwood Taubman Goldie is sipping a glass of absinthe at a sidewalk café on the Boulevard Haussmann when the news hits, on the evening of September 19, 1870, that Prussian soldiers have surrounded the French capital. It had been just a few weeks since the rangy twenty-four-year-old had convinced the family governess to run off with him to Paris, and now this? He doesn’t yet realize just how bad his timing has been.

The fact is that Goldie, though raised in an aristocratic family, had been a screw-up for most of his life. After a coddled upbringing in a stone mansion overlooking the sea on the Isle of Man—his dad was descended from Edward I—he’d trained at the Royal Military Academy but lasted just two years in the army’s Royal Engineers. “I was like a gun powder magazine,” he would later tell a friend, adding that he’d been “blind drunk” when sitting for (and passing) his final exam.

Then there were the three years spent wandering the Egyptian Sudan with a young Arab woman he’d met after unexpectedly landing a family inheritance. He’d eventually left his “Garden of Allah” behind, only to lead “a life of idleness and dissipation” back in England. The Parisian adventure with the governess, a young woman named Mathilda Catherine Elliot, had been intended as a sort of fresh start. Instead, the young lovers would spend the next four months holed up and surviving, like the rest of the city during the historic siege, on the likes of dog and rat meat. They slunk back to England in February 1871 and were married a few months later. So when Goldie’s eldest brother, John, confided to him in 1875 that he had just bailed out his father-in-law by purchasing the older man’s near-bankrupt trading firm, Goldie jumped at the idea that he might be the one to save the thing. Holland, Jacques & Company had been sourcing palm oil from the West African coast since 1869.

Trade between Europe and West Africa was nothing new, of course. In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had dropped anchor off the coast of what is now Ghana and begun exchanging cloth, iron, and copper for gold sourced from the continent’s interior. Other European powers followed, and by the sixteenth century, the traffic in human beings was well under way. By 1792, some one hundred thousand enchained Africans were disembarking on the shores of the New World every year. Roughly half of them arrived on ships that had originally set sail from Liverpool.

Though Parliament outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the institution was foundational to Britain’s commercial empire. Between 1750 and 1780, for example, some 70 percent of the government’s total income came from taxes derived from its slave-powered colonies. (No one ever asks where all those young men looking for wives in Jane Austen novels got their money, a Ugandan friend noted recently.) The Niger Delta, in particular, spreading some two hundred seventy miles along the coast from Lagos to the Cameroonian border, had proven a lucrative hunting ground. Over the course of decades, Liverpool merchants had invested millions of pounds in ships and labor and built relationships with the African middlemen who coordinated the ferrying of people from the hinterland. (The internal traffic in humans had existed for centuries, though under a very different guise.) City-states such as Bonny, New Calabar, and Brass, situated along the low-lying plains of the Delta, had grown up around their slave markets.

Its wealth notwithstanding, the Delta was no French Riviera. “I believe,” wrote the explorer Mary Kingsley in her 1897 memoir Travels in West Africa, “the great swamp region of the Bight of Biafra [the eastern part of the Delta] is the greatest in the world, and that in its immensity and gloom it has a grandeur equal to that of the Himalayas.”

The Niger Delta circa 1870.

She was being kind. The labyrinth of tidal creeks and inlets had a reputation as a ghastly place, all mangrove swamps and malarial menace. Europeans referred to the “unwholesome miasma” that emanated from the coast, where the mosquitos were fearsome and the soil too wet to grow much of anything. For the duration of the slave trade, the Europeans mostly kept to their ships offshore rather than brave the diseases and other unknowns lurking beyond the coastline. Upon his appointment as consul to the Bights of Benin and Biafra in 1861, the explorer Richard Burton had cursed the officials who’d determined his post. “They want me to die,” he wrote to a friend, “but I intend to live, just to spite the devils.”

Still, there were fortunes to be made, and for that the Europeans kept coming. They were none too pleased, then, when Britain began enforcing its slave ban with a naval blockade. The commerce in humans continued sporadically for years, finally dying out only after other countries enacted prohibitions of their own. In the meantime, the traders began turning their attention to the “legitimate” product that was palm oil. Elaeis guineensis grew wild in the forest belt behind the mangrove swamps.

With the Second Industrial Revolution transforming life back home in England, vegetable oil was suddenly in hot demand as a lubricant for the era’s new railroads and machines. Palm oil also proved ideal as a tinning flux, and it was the basis for most of the candles being made at the time. An exploding population of workers, many of them traveling to gritty factory-line jobs in the shadow of belching smokestacks, fueled a new market for soap, which, thanks to the discoveries of a French chemist named Michel-Eugène Chevreul, had just begun to be mass-manufactured using vegetable oil. By 1850, Liverpool was producing some thirty thousand tons of palm oil–based soaps every year. At the same time, Manchester and other European towns were cranking out greater volumes of goods for exchange with Africa, from textiles woven with American-grown cotton to alcohol and cheap muskets.

By the time Goldie got in the game, the value of palm oil exports rivaled that of the slave trade at its peak, with the Niger Delta ground zero for the boom. “I have seen it written by a hand which sets down the truth in all things,” wrote a lieutenant named John Hawley Glover in 1857, “that supercargoes [merchant-ship officers] then could make their 6,000 pounds a year in commission and yearly fortunes besides for the far-off owners of the time, and in a few years set up as merchants in their turn. A hundred pounds laid out in beads and coloured cloth brought thousands in the value of the oil, and no wonder that they called them the golden days of prosperity.” Another John, one Sir Tobin of Liverpool, had funneled the profits he made from the early days of the palm oil trade toward an 1819 mayoral campaign in that city. He is said to have paid out six shillings for every vote in what was described by the local newspaper as one of “the most barefaced acts of bribery that ever disgraced even the electioneering annals of this venal rotten borough.”

So potentially lucrative was the trade that it drew an entirely new class of merchants. Whereas most Europeans shipping out to the “Dark Continent” in those days tended to frame their missions in terms of explorer David Livingstone’s “Three Cs,” the men chasing palm oil made no pretenses toward Christianity or civilization. These guys were in it for the cash. Rude, uneducated types who drank and caroused with abandon, they resorted to violence to settle the tiniest of disputes and well earned the nickname that would stick: “palm-oil ruffians.” Edward Nicolls, an officer serving in the Delta during the 1830s, complained of “the total want of principle amongst the greater part” of this new gang. “There is no infamy or enormity that some of these Liverpool commanders will stop at.”

George Goldie, detail from 1899 oil painting by H. Von Herkomer.

Goldie was cut from a different cloth entirely, but his piercing blue eyes were similarly trained on the bottom line. And if Holland Jacques had failed to capitalize on the new commodity, he damn well didn’t intend to. Say what they might about the guy’s misspent youth, there was no question that he possessed a stellar mind. (Eight-year-old Goldie had been ejected from a “Calculating Man” performance on account of his having shouted all the answers to the audience-posed math problems before the purported genius on stage had figured them out.) Having finally stepped foot in the famous Delta mud, though, Goldie discovered that the situation was more complicated than he’d realized.

Looking on as scores of canoes shuttled back and forth to the ships anchored offshore, their African crews chanting as they paddled, he surmised that a relatively efficient system had been put in place. From 5:30 a.m. until well after three in the afternoon, crewmen heaved the oil-heavy barrels up on deck, where other workers, drenched in sweat despite the makeshift roofs of bamboo and palm fronds, pounded and tightened additional wooden casks or boiled and strained the viscous oil to preserve it for the journey back to Europe. Aside from the additional labor required up-country to convey the oil to the river’s edge—unlike captives, the unwieldy barrels couldn’t be force-marched across the land—the riparian highway network that had facilitated the traffic in people lent itself readily to the trade in oil.

The problem was with the folks in charge. The palm oil business, Goldie learned, operated under a system of barter known as “trust.” The U.K. traders—most hailed from Liverpool, with a smattering from Bristol, London, and Glasgow—would offload their muskets, booze, and various useless trinkets to African middlemen and then hunker down offshore, sometimes for several months, as the latter ferried the goods inland and restocked their canoes with oil. Like the traders, the middlemen had pivoted readily from appeasing the European appetite for human labor to quenching its thirst for oil. “The kings of the countries where the palm tree grows find that the labour of their subjects, in collecting the fruit and extracting the oil, is far more remunerative to them than the selling of these subjects into slavery,” a chemist named Leopold Field told a London audience in 1883. “Being as keenly alive to their own interests as any white men can be, they have become humane as a matter of business. By encouraging the influx of European goods for their native productions, they have brought about their own civilization far more rapidly than could have been effected by the simple spiritual pressure of missionaries unendorsed by self-interest.”

Over the years, the leading Delta middlemen had built up corporation-like entities known as “houses” by acquiring people, both slave and free, through a complicated political system involving routine skirmishes with neighbors and rivals. The more “clients” a middleman could claim, the more expansive his geographical domain and the greater his potential to source oil. While the smaller houses numbered in the hundreds of clients, “royal” ones might claim oversight of many thousands. (Middlemen often were chiefs and kings whose power had derived from family lineage, though in rare instances they had risen from the lower rungs of society.) Competition among the houses was fierce, with ongoing clashes leading to the buildup of military fleets: canoes mounted with cannons and large-caliber guns would glide through the creeks alongside those ferrying oil. At other times, the middlemen might conspire to hold back their oil if they felt the prices were too low. “They are a people of great interest and intelligence,” noted the anthropologist Percy Amaury Talbot in a self-owning passage from his 1932 book Tribes of the Niger Delta, “hard-headed, keen-witted, and born traders. Indeed, one of the principal agents here, a [European] of world-wide experience, stated that, in his opinion, the [Delta traders] could compete on equal terms with Jew or Chinaman.”

Things had begun to change around the middle of the century, when the introduction of quinine had made it possible for Europeans to begin penetrating the malarial interior. At the same time, the arrival of steamships on the continent meant that traders could, during the rainy season, travel hundreds of miles up the main course of the Niger River. By the 1860s, newly arrived traders had pushed as far north as the towns of Aboh and Onitsha, located in the palm oil-producing regions, constructing crude storage and processing facilities known as “factories” on the riverbanks along the way. When their vessels tried to steam back downriver laden with fruit and oil, the traders often would come under attack by locals allied with the coastal middlemen. (Annoyed at losing out on the relationships they’d built up over decades, the Liverpudlians were happy to provide their native allies with arms and ammunition.) Swamp-bound as they were, the middlemen could access little more than fish and relied on trade with the interior for feeding their populations. In response to the ongoing assaults, including, at one point, the sinking of a Holland Jacques steamship, the British consul—the first having been appointed to the region in 1849—would send gunboats upriver, burning villages along the way to remind the natives who was in charge.

As tensions rose, the traders increasingly turned to London for help. The Invisible Empire was all well and good, insofar as a handful of consuls and gunboats could keep business interests in line at little cost to the taxpayer back home, but by now the stakes had risen considerably. In an 1871 memo to the Foreign Office, Charles Livingstone, the brother of David and then serving as consul for the Bights of Benin and Biafra (having succeeded Burton), noted that no fewer than twenty palm oil companies were trading in the region, having established sixty factories on seven r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Oil Crisis
• Part I: Unguent of Empire
• Part II: Something’s Rotten
• Part III: Fate of a Fruit
• Epilogue: Post-Pandemic Palm
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Permissions
• Index
• About the Author