Durians, everybody loves them, and by everybody I mean everyone that can stand their unique smell. I personally find them to be pleasantly fragrant. Their smell invokes childhood memories of sitting by the roadside with my family, breaking open thorny fruit and picking out the creamy yellow flesh. Despite its newfound value as a world famous export crop, it will always be a humble village fruit in my heart.
I really like palm oil. I like the golden crispy things that come out of it. So many things can be deep fried in the golden boiling liquid. One of my favorites is fish, coated in turmeric and salt and then deep fried. Even the bones get fried into a crispy treat and very little remains when I'm done with it. Many of my friends come from families that grow oil palms, they managed to escape poverty and get an education because of the crop. But all is not good, there's the deforestation, carbon emissions, haze and horrible human costs that are associated with it. Like everything, it is a very complicated love.
There was once an ad that featured a cute cartoon of a baby orang utan coming into a little girl's room and it explaining that it lost its home because of palm oil. Cue images of machines coming and destroying rainforests and cartoon animals fleeing. The little girl then urges the viewer to boycott palm oil to stop this destruction. Curiously missing from this ad were the people that actually plant the palm oil. They were reduced to grey evil machines instead of human beings. Every time I watch these types of ads, I wonder why they always value the cute orange orang utan over the dreams and aspirations of the brown people that also share the land.
I don't trust anything that has to do with history, politics, race or religion that I find on social media. These are all complex issues with a ton of nuances that need to be properly examined before making decisions. But put it in the format of an ad, a tweet or post, and a lot of the nuances are lost, creating the illusion of a simple black and white world. It turns into good guys and bad guys, where the good guys are the group that you identify with and the bad guys are whoever you don't like. If there's something we need to be careful about in the 21st century, it's the temptation of thinking that the world works on simple principles and one small thing that you have to do to change everything.
The boycott palm oil ad campaign was a great success. People in Europe began viewing palm oil as 'the cruel oil'. Legislation and consumer demand prevented export to Europe. It was a great plan, use market forces to stop deforestation. Well, it would have been a great plan if the world was simple and the people that plant oil palms were just slaves to a market and didn't have any autonomy or ingenuity of their own. The 'boycott palm oil' campaign succeeded in its objectives, but the world wasn't simple. Deforestation still happened, not slowing down one bit. On the ground, it was just too complex to solve with one simple trick that the palm oil industry hates.
Unable to sell palm oil to Europe, farmers found alternatives to plant on their land. The durian industry took off, spurred by demand from a newly affluent China that was demanding exotic fruit and R&D that allowed it to be frozen for export. Durian turned from a village fruit into a luxury commodity crop. Forests were cut down to chase the new craze. The locals had outmaneuvered the palm oil boycott and created a new market when the old market was unfavorable. Working on a simple model of supply and demand, the environmental lobby succeeded in their metrics but failed to address the real problem. They underestimated the complexity of the problem.
The point of this long story is not that this world is made up of a tangled web of interaction and unforeseen consequences. As complicated as it is, I still had to oversimplify it for readability. The oil palm lobby, the environmentalists, the Chinese middle class, the durian industry, they all created this complex web of interactions that create the real problem: I can't aford to eat durians as much as I would like to! I remember when people would give durians for free! Now they are charging outrageous prices for some stupid cloned durian! Why is it such a luxury item now? It used to be an impulse buy, now we have to think long and hard about getting some! I just want to enjoy eating durians dammit!