It’s in your cereal box, in your shampoo, in your ice cream and in your makeup too. The Hershey’s chocolate bar you just bought, the mascara by L’Oreal you have been dying to try and even the Lysol cleaning products you use to disinfect your home from COVID-19, they contain it too. Palm Oil is the essential ingredient in products ranging from food to cosmetics, and it is the cause of a variety of human rights violations and modern-day slavery throughout the world.
Palm Oil is the fruit that provenes from the palm trees, which yields crude palm oil and palm kernel, the latter being the key ingredient in popular products for brands of conglomerates such as Uneliever, Nestle and Mondelez. It is a great problem environmentally, for it is the cause of many fires in forests in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia and the leading cause of the extinction of Orangutans as their habitats are destroyed in the harvesting of this fruit. But, additionally, the extraction of Palm Oil is the gateway for a variety of human rights violations ranging from sexual harassment in plantations, child labor and modern-day slavery in peripheral countries.
In Sept. 2020, the Associated Press released their research analyzing multiple instances of abuse faced by people in Palm Oil plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia. Most are introduced to this type of labor as soon as they are old enough to be able to work like Abang, a 14-year-old girl from Indonesia who has not returned to school since she began working in the plantation with her family when she was about 9 years old; or Alex, who was 12 when he began working, and has likewise not returned to school since and who is ordered to carry weights heavier than himself on his back on a daily basis.
An unnamed 16-year-old girl explained that she began working on a plantation when she was only six years old to help provide for her family. She went on to recall the first time her boss raped her, he took her to an isolated part of the estate and threatened to kill her and her family. As a result, she birthed a child, for which her boss has taken no responsibility at all.
Many of these children don’t have access to an education given how remote the plantations are. Some children in Indonesia have had the fortune of their government sending their own teachers to the plantations where they often only attend half-day classes if any at all. Glorene Das, executive director of Malaysian nonprofit Tenagatina, expands this further and poses the questions, “Why aren’t companies playing a role in setting up schools in collaboration with the government?… Why are they encouraging the children to work instead?” promoting the thought that such an obvious idea is not happening given that in the capital interests of these companies, education and their right to life is meaningless.
Through this all, plantation workers along with their small children suffer from being in constant contact with pesticides. Ola, a day worker from Indonesia, explains that after spraying the pesticides her “nose bleeds occasionally,” and that she can’t wear a mask because it makes it hard to breathe in the middle of all the hard physical labor she performs daily. She continues to expand on her experience by explaining that sometimes the liquid of pesticides hits her face and runs through her body itching and hurting all through her skin, an issue that women specifically face, given that they can’t properly wash their skin due to the male gaze.
Researcher Kartika Manurung points out that these people are stuck in cycles of chronic poverty in which they are consistently brought into these plantations’ generation after generation, and are robbed of an opportunity to receive an education and have any agency over their lives. A 27-year-old woman named Indra explained to the Associated Press that given that her entire family since her great grandmother has worked and lived in the plantation, “I feel it’s already normal.” This is an even greater concern because due to their lack of access to education and therefore illiteracy and innocence, oftentimes people are becoming accustomed to these situations and not aware that there is a better life that they deserve. When Manurung asked the children at the plantation what they want to be when they grow up, the girls often say that they want to become wives of a palm oil worker.
Instances such as these are quite common in these plantations, in contrast to the exceptional instances in which the state takes responsibility or enforces action for the abuses that are continuously allowed to occur without consequence. There is no single solution to this other than having governments install consequences to inducing child labor, sexual abuse toward women and their need to provide equal opportunity to them, but given that this would come at the cost of capital from these companies, it doesn’t seem like this would change in the near future. Currently, the Palm Oil industry employs some 16 million people worldwide, and over 33,000 children just in Malaysia working under these hazardous conditions. Ola concluded her statement by saying, “Oh my God! Pay attention to our lives,” when shown the type of products made with palm oil that is sold to an eager consumer base in developed nations.
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