The facts about biodiesel's impact on the growth of palm oil production is...

Many lately have tried to taint biodiesel through associating it with increased Palm oil production. I wondered, what are the facts? Here are a couple:

· The global production of palm is in excess of 10 billion gallons

· Unilever consumes more than 300,000,000 gallons of palm per year (1 mm metric tonnes) Source: Unilever (http://www.unilever.com/Images/Palm%20Oil%20-%20A%20Sustainable%20Future%202002\_tcm13-5315.pdf)

· The entire US biodiesel industry consumed less than 250,000,000 gallons of veg oil in 2006, over 90% of which was soy oil. A maximum of 10% of US biodiesel production came from Palm leaving a maximum of 25 million gallons of palm oil were used for US Biodiesel. Now what is 25M as a percent of 10B? 0.25%.

Now how can the US biodiesel industry that consumed (even by very generous math) less than a quarter of 1% of the palm oil in the world be the root of all palm oil evil? Check the ingredients on your food packages, in your fast food restraunts and your detergents. You will find MUCH more palm oil there.