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While the worlds’ coconut beaches are all very quiet from the pause in global tourism caused by the SARS-COV2 virus, coconuts have been in the news in a negative way, on two fronts.
First, the Thai coconut industry got hit by a documentary of the ‘slave labour’ of monkeys, specially trained to harvest coconuts without respect for animal rights. Several global companies responded quickly with news that they would no longer buy from the companies implicated but the Thai authorities tried to deal with the issue by a combination of denial (… it only happens in a few places, as a tourist attraction…), reference to traditions along with economic claims that it isn’t even profitable.
Then, a paper ‘Coconut oil, conservation and the conscientious consumer’, comparing the biodiversity impacts of various vegetable oils appeared to suggest that coconut oil has a far greater negative biodiversity footprint than any other source, including palm oil. An eye-catching graphic showed a stark difference. As coconuts are often grown in agroforestry systems, this negative image may come as a surprise, certainly in comparison with palm oil.
A closer look at the data that was used for the analysis, however, shows a number of challenges.
- The comparison depends strongly on the metric used. For oil palm, the number of threatened species per million tonnes of oil is 3.79 and per million hectares it is 17.0. For coconut, these numbers are 18.33 and 5.3, respectively [using data provided by the authors in supplementary material]. Thus, expression per unit oil shows coconut oil as the worst but expression per unit area shows the reverse.
- The data on biodiversity threats have been primarily obtained at country level. While there are more than 90 nations that have recorded coconut production, far more than any of the other vegetable oils compared, three countries (Indonesia, Philippines and India) together are responsible for almost three-quarters of the total and ten countries for 90% of the total, leaving 10% for the other 80 countries. Most of the biodiversity threats are in these 80 other countries, many of them small islands with high degrees of endemicity and numbers of globally threatened species.
- In fact, the distribution of number of threatened species per unit area of coconut production is extremely ‘skewed’ (asymmetrical) in statistical terms. For such types of distributions, an ‘average’ has very limited meaning. Sorted by impact, 90% of the total production has a lower impact than the 5.3 that was presented as the average for coconut.
- Similar data for the other vegetable oils are not provided by the authors but there will be far fewer countries involved, and no ‘small islands’.
Statistical distribution of the number of threatened species per unit area of coconut production across 90 countries weighted by their total production
Note: Data in supplementary material of the Meijaard et al paper. Calculations by this author.
So, who is to blame? The coconuts or the people who settled on the islands? Indeed, without coconuts it might have been more difficult for people to make a living in remote places because coconuts provide food, shelter (fronds as roofs, poles as wood), fibre (for making ropes, for example) and if inflorescences are tapped, sugar.
But what economic options do small-island nations have beyond coconuts? Tourism appeared attractive but events as we experience now show that it is very risky to rely on travellers from around the globe. Environmentally, tourism tends to deplete the scarce freshwater resources on many islands, while polluting seas and coral reefs.
Before we can conclude that there really is a problem of biodiversity loss caused by coconut production, other types of attribution of the recorded biodiversity threats need to be considered.
We can agree with the authors that accurate information on the consequences of all types of vegetable-oil production are needed but we need a higher standard than what has been provided so far.
Read more
Meijaard E, Abrams J, Juffe-Bignoli D, Voigt M, Sheil D. 2020. Coconut oil, conservation and the conscientious consumer. Current Biology D-20-00608.
Alberts EC. 2020. That coconut oil you love? Species have gone extinct over it. True story. Mongabay 6 July.
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