Palm oil

Cultivation & yield

Oil palms are three times as productive as rapeseed and take up about 1/6 of the area of soya for the same yield. The main areas of cultivation today are Western Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Brazil and Colombia. The extraction of the raw palm oil from the fruit flesh which cannot be stored is done by sterilizing the berries, removing the seeds, boiling, pressing and then and cleaning. The orange-red colored crude oil, which has a characteristic odor (violet-like) and a pleasantly sweetish taste and is solid at room temperature, is usually refined to a white to yellowish solid fat.

The origin of the oil palm is probably in the tropics of East America and West Africa. It is proven that as early as the 15th century, the inhabitants of West and Central Africa extracted the oil from the fruit. Oil palms were first reported in Europe in 1443 by the Portuguese navigator Gil Eannes. It was not until 1850 that the oil was imported into Europe in order to compensate for the growing population's need for fat. With the invention of margarine around 1869 and the increasing use of vegetable fats, demand rose again. This resulted in the increased cultivation of the plant, so that today the crops are spread over the tropics all over the world.