Palm Oil: no need to panic, the supply chain is resilient and sustainablePRESS RELEASE
- 26 April 2022
- Posted by: Competere
- Category: Senza categoria
Palm Oil, Paganini: No need to panic, the Indonesian stop to exports only concerns cooking oil, the supply chain remains among the most resilient and sustainable
Rome, 26 April 2022 – “No need to panic. Emotionality favors speculation and, with it, a senseless increase in prices and populist policies, both of which will have a boomerang effect on Italian consumers and producers. The bloc on export imposed by Indonesia only concerns cooking oil, while crude oil and all other types will continue to be exported with full guarantee of the trading flows” – states Pietro Paganini, founder and president of Competere, a European think tank promoting policies that favor a transition toward resilient and sustainable supply chains.
“The palm oil supply chain has a few advantages over alternative oils: it is both resilient and sustainable. There are many producing countries that export to Europe scattered along the Equator, from South-East Asia to Central America through Africa. Indonesia is the main producer, with about 70 MT of oil that will keep on being exported. Cooking oil is just a small fraction of that, and it will not influence its supply. We Europeans should remain calm, even if problems we are currently facing with sunflower oil (due to the war in Ukraine), and rapeseed and soy oil (environmental degradation) should make us think about the uselessness of the palm oil boycott grounded mostly on ideological and commercial reasoning. Without palm oil, the world would be facing some serious energy and food shortages.
The crises we are living – the pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war – should encourage us to adopt a more rational and propositional approach, thus opening a dialogue with producing countries and avoiding bottlenecks along the supply chains of fundamental commodities, to the benefit of the Italian agrifood industry who is already weighed down by the conflict in Ukraine.
In this scenario, sustainable palm oil – which accounts for over 95% of the palm oil exports in Italy – is essential to guarantee that there is still food on our tables. We must avoid irresponsible speculations that would expose our entire food system to even more serious and complicated challenges than the ones we are already facing” – he concludes.
