Elephant Family

Clear Labels, Not Forests - The Europe-wide campaign helps to secure vital victory for forests.

 Members of the European Parliament have voted 'Yes' to the labelling of palm oil on food products, allowing shoppers to make choices about what they buy, and supporting vital changes in the palm oil industry as food companies will be encouraged to shift to sustainable sources of the ingredient.

Elephant Family and its supporters have been lobbying MEPs to ensure that a new regulation on food information to consumers includes the mandatory labelling of palm oil on food packaging. On 6th July, with an overwhelming majority of 678 votes, MEPs voted in favour of clear labelling of specific vegetable oils, including palm oil. This regulation will be formally adopted by the end of the year, helping to drive demand for certified sustainable palm oil from Europe. A fantastic result for the world’s forests and their animal inhabitants! Thank you to all those who took action in this campaign - this couldn’t have been achieved without our supporters.

There is an enormous and rising demand for palm oil, and with the rapid expansion of the industry, tropical forests and carbon-rich peatlands are being systematically destroyed to make way for oil palm plantations. The United Nations has stated that the expansion of oil palm cultivation is the most significant cause of permanent forest and peat land loss in South East Asia, causing considerable greenhouse gas emissions and an unimaginable loss of habitat and biodiversity. As a result Asian elephants, orangutans, tigers and rhinos are losing their forest homes and being pushed closer to extinction. 

Clear labelling will provide the impetus for more companies to make time-bound pledges to source certified sustainable palm oil. This will support the palm oil industry in a move towards more sustainable production, reducing a significant driver of deforestation and threat to tropical ecosystems and biodiversity.

As it stands palm oil is normally labelled under the generic term 'vegetable oil'. The new agreement, which requires all vegetable oils to be labelled individually, will come into force early 2012 and the new labelling rules will begin to apply in 2015.