Stop using Palm Oil!
I’m a product that goes into lots of different foods like chips, donuts, soap and much more. People have to cut down or burn native trees to make me.. Lots of animals die when I’m made, mostly orangutans. Have you ever heard of palm oil? That's what I am. My name is Bruno and i’m going to talk to you about why we should stop using palm oil.
The problem is that palm oil comes from palm trees which need to be planted but there is not enough space so people plant palm trees in lots of different forests like the Amazon and forests in Africa. The problem with this is that they burn down these forests before they plant the palm trees. This takes away the home of lots beautiful orangutans, those poor orangutans!
Did you know that 3.5 billion to 7 billion trees are cut or burnt down every year due to palm oil. Wow thats a lot, that is about the size of New Zealand being burnt down. Here in New Zealand we have a big impact on this because the food that we feed to our cows have lots of palm oil in it. Did you know that in the year 2000, 75 percent of farms feed their cows grass food but now its gone down to 10 percent. Thats means more palm oil, less native trees and more dying native animals. Talking about dying animals this leads next idea.
One of my main concerns with all of this is about the orangutans and the other animals that are dying because their homes are being cut down. For the animals this means nothing to eat, nowhere to play and nowhere to live. This means that they are all slowly dying. It’s hard to imagine that this one product is killing all these harmless animals and destroying all these but beautiful forests. The Sumatran Rhino and Borneano Orangutan are super endangered because of palm oil.
You know about global warming? Palm oil is making it even worse, jez, how bad can this get. It’s making it worse because when they burn down the rainforests the smoke floats up into the air. This make the world hotter so Antarctica melts, then the sea level rises. Which mean those people living close the coast are losing their land.
So after you leave school today, I challenge you to stop using palm oil. All you have to do is look on the back of a food packet and check if it has palm oil in it and if it does, don't by it. Can you do it, Will you do it? You can at least give it a go and help save the Sumatran Rhino and Borneano Orangutans!
