Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to start by thanking the member for La Trobe for bringing this issue and highlighting the issue of palm oil labelling and the impact of palm oil cultivation on the environment and local communities. Palm oil is a low-cost and versatile oil, which is increasingly being used by the processed food manufacturing sector. We find it in about half of all packaged products in our supermarkets. It is so widely used now that it accounts for 65 per cent of the global trade in vegetable oils. It is attractive because it is relatively cheap. It is also, as the member for La Trobe has touched on, a high-yielding crop, needing less than half the land required by other crops to produce the same amount of oil. It is also extremely versatile, in that it maintains its properties even when cooked under high temperatures. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil go into that in quite some detail in a recent article on their website, which talks about its cooking properties, its texture, its preservative effects and also the yield from production.

Here in Australia we do not produce a whole lot of palm oil; it is mainly done by small producers and is certainly quite insignificant compared with the levels of production in countries like India, Indonesia and Malaysia. Palm oil is used in a wide range of products that we see daily on our local supermarket shelves—including ice cream, chocolate, soaps and cosmetics—but, as the member for La Trobe has rightly pointed out, many of us would be unaware of this, as it is often labelled as vegetable oil.

In 2015 Australia imported around $100 million worth of palm oil for use in our processed food sector. Under current regulations palm oil can be labelled using generic terms such as 'vegetable oil'; however, food manufacturers can voluntarily label it as palm oil or as 'uses sustainably-sourced palm oil'. Regulations do, however, require the declaration of certain nutrients in the nutrient information panel on food labels, including saturated fat. The total amount of saturated fat from all the ingredients in a food—including palm oil, if it is used—must be declared. Using the nutritional information panel can help consumers to make healthier food choices. FSANZ has previously rejected an application for mandatory ingredient labelling of palm oil when used in food products because the application was about environmental, not health, concerns.

Many food manufacturers are voluntarily labelling their products and some companies are members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which promotes the supply of palm oil sourced from ecofriendly areas. The government review of food-labelling law and policy in 2011, as the previous speaker touched on, recommended that where fats and vegetable oils are added as separate ingredients in a food, it be followed by a bracketed list of the added fats or added vegetable oils. The government response to the recommendation was that FSANZ would undertake a technical evaluation and provide advice on the proposed changes. The latest update is that FSANZ is progressing work on the technical evaluation and expects to provide further advice in late 2016.

In the remaining time I wish to touch on some of the economic and environmental aspects of palm oil production. We know that in some regions palm oil cultivation has caused, and continues to cause, deforestation, and pollution has also been touched on. This is on land that was once predominantly covered by primary forest and, as the member for La Trobe has touched on, the consequence of this is leading to an increased threat of extinction to a wide variety of animals, including orangutans, tigers, elephants and rhinoceros, as well as plant species. However, the notion that we simply replace palm oil with other oils does not withstand scrutiny when all the facts are considered. As the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil observes, palm oil plays an important role in the reduction of poverty for many in the developing world.

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