Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what discussions he has had with supermarkets on ending the sale of products using palm oil.

The UK Government is committed to supporting sustainable palm oil production, import and use. Oil palm is a very efficient crop, producing more oil per hectare than other vegetable oil crops. Substitution of other oils (e.g. soybean, rapeseed, sunflower), which typically require significantly more land to produce, may lead to greater deforestation as more land is converted to agricultural use. The Secretary of State has therefore not had any discussions with supermarkets or manufacturers on ending the sale or manufacture of products using palm oil, and does not support a movement away from the sale and use of palm oil in food imports and production.

The Government is working closely with industry, including with supermarkets and manufacturers, to support sustainable production and use of palm oil. In 2012, the Government established the UK Roundtable on Sourcing Sustainable Palm Oil which brings together key UK businesses and supports them to shift to fully sustainable palm oil supply chains. Latest reports show that 70% of palm oil and palm kernel oil imports into the UK were certified sustainable in 2019 – up from 16% in 2010.

Following recommendations from the Global Resource Initiative in 2019, we are also introducing world-leading due diligence legislation to make it illegal for larger businesses in the UK to use key forest risk commodities produced on land illegally occupied or used. Forest risk commodities are those associated with wide-scale deforestation, and we will consult later this year on which specific commodities to regulate through secondary legislation. This is just one piece of a much larger package of measures that we are putting in place to tackle deforestation and we are working internationally to tackle the drivers of deforestation and protect the world’s vital intact forests.

As part of our Presidency of COP26, we launched the Forest Agriculture and Commodity Trade (FACT) dialogue in February of this year, bringing together major producer and consumer countries of agricultural commodities to work together to support economic development and sustainable production whilst protecting forests and other vital ecosystems.

The Government works with other consumer countries through the Amsterdam Declarations Partnership to increase the market for sustainable palm oil. To this end, we also provide support to develop new market standards and approaches to deforestation-free palm oil through Partnerships for Forests, a UK government programme (£120 million, 2015-23) which works with businesses to catalyse investment into sustainable land use and forest protection.