Unbeaten productivity
There’s no easy answer. Palm oil is widely used for domestic cooking in Asia, Africa, and South America, and is an ingredient in many food (e.g. cookies, chocolate, ice cream) and non-food (e.g. shampoo, cosmetics, biofuel) products consumed every day. Possible candidates for replacing oil palm – for both food and biofuel production – include coconut palm, sunflower, soybean, and rapeseed. Yet oil palm has higher productivity per hectare than any other widely grown vegetable oil crop: four to nine times as much land is required to produce the same amount of vegetable oil from either coconut, sunflower, soybean or rapeseed.
The high productivity of oil palm does, however, come at the expense of considerable water consumption. As we recently demonstrated
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pressures on local water resources are substantial: mature large-scale plantations transpire even more water than tropical forests, potentially causing water scarcity in oil palm-dominated landscapes
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. Other vegetable oil crops require only 30-70% of the water used by oil palm.
On the other hand, water consumption per kg of oil produced is lower than for other oil crops due to the smaller land requirement of oil palm. Biodiesels derived from oil palm consequently have the lowest water footprint, along with rapeseed.