In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jocelyn Zuckerman, who is a writer and editor and has written a number of pieces in magazines and for other publications. She has a strong focus on environmental and social issues, and questions of international development. One of the things that we’re talking about today is her book titled Planet Palm, which was published in 2021 and was a powerfully written exposé of the abuses of many kinds of the global palm oil industry.

Intro

[00:00:00] Dr Miranda Melcher: Hello, and welcome to Just Access. In this podcast series, we talk to some fascinating people, including legal experts, academics, and human rights advocates from all walks of life. Through these conversations, we explore ideas about the future of human rights and improving access to justice for all. Our goal is to educate the wider public and raise awareness about human rights. After all, our motto is, everyone can be a human rights defender. 

[00:00:35] My name is Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I’m a senior legal fellow at Just Access and the host of this podcast. In this episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jocelyn Zuckerman, who is a writer and editor and has written a number of pieces in magazines and for other publications.

[00:00:50] She has a strong focus on environmental and social issues, and Questions of international development. One of the things that we’re talking about today [00:01:00] is her book titled Planet Palm, which was published in 2021 and was a powerfully written exposé of the abuses of many kinds of the global palm oil industry.

[00:01:11] Let’s get into the conversation.

Interview

[00:01:14] To start off with, obviously one of the reasons that we are particularly interested in having you speak to us is because of the thing you wrote called Planet Palm. It’s incredibly powerful, it’s obviously great investigative journalism and storytelling, but also goes through so many aspects of agriculture, environment, social welfare, international development, corporate power, world trade, so many things come together in this book.

[00:01:47] Of course, the heart is palm oil. For those who haven’t read it, could you give us a brief introduction? What is palm oil?

[00:01:55] Jocelyn Zuckerman: Sure thank you, first of all, for those nice words about the book. So palm oil is [00:02:00] the most used vegetable oil in the world. It comes from a plant that is native to West and Central Africa. And there’s actually two kinds of palm oil. So there, it comes from these little fruits that are about the size of a plum, bright orange.

[00:02:12] And there’s the palm oil that you get from that orangey flesh, and then there’s a kernel in the middle, and there’s a white oil that you get from that, known as palm kernel oil. And both of these oils are used throughout all sorts of foods, personal care products animal feed, all sorts of things.

[00:02:27] Dr Miranda Melcher: Okay, that’s a very helpful introduction, so thank you for starting us off with that. Speaking of beginnings, you open the book by talking about your first encounter with where this is all produced, and palm oil plantations what this is like for the environments there, what’s it like for the communities.

[00:02:45] Can you take us there? What’s this like?

[00:02:49] Jocelyn Zuckerman: Sure. So that first trip where I encountered palm oil was in Liberia, in West Africa, and I was working for a magazine called Unearthed at the time, an environmental magazine, and I had pitched a story about [00:03:00] land grabs, which is a phenomenon your listeners would probably remember around 2008 when corporations and governments were buying up huge swaths of land during the food and fuel crisis.

[00:03:11] Buying up these big bits of land in, mostly in the global South and places where, you know land rights are easy to abuse. So that’s what I went down to report on. And I got down to Liberia and encountered these oil palm plantations just going for miles and miles and also scenes of what had been tropical rainforest and what had been villages just raised to the ground.

[00:03:33] These corporations had come in and cut down all of the all of the greenery, knocked down people’s grave sites to plant this thing called oil palm. A lot of what I saw were just little shrubs in the ground just planted. And then as I said, there are other places where they just cut everything down.

[00:03:49] There was nothing but dirt literally for miles and miles. And I had worked at Gourmet Magazine for 12 years. I thought I knew, the food beat, the environment beat. And I’d heard of palm oil, but [00:04:00] I really, I didn’t know what it looked like. I, at the end of my trip, after about two weeks, I was like, can we go see what this fruit actually looks like?

[00:04:06] Cause I hadn’t even, the trees weren’t mature enough for me to see the fruit. So we had to go to an artisanal place because the Liberians make artisanal palm oil. They’ve used it for centuries. But this was on an industrial scale. That was an entirely different thing.

[00:04:21] Dr Miranda Melcher: I want to pick up on something you mentioned of the kind of, you were expecting it to be a rainforest and actually it had been really cleared. There’s obviously that immediate environmental impact, especially in terms of biodiversity and clearing away the ecosystem that was there. And of course, this is also happening in the context of climate change happening globally as well.

[00:04:42] Can you take us through the different environmental impacts of this?

[00:04:46] Jocelyn Zuckerman: Sure. As you mentioned, biodiversity, that’s a hugely important one. So the oil palm tree grows best at 10 degrees to the north and south of the equator. And this is a swath of land that corresponds with the planet’s tropical rainforests. Tropical [00:05:00] rainforests, though they cover less than 10%, I believe, of Earth’s land surface, support more than half of the world’s biodiversity.

[00:05:07] So these are just super rich in terms of plant life, insect life mammal life And as these tropical rainforests are being knocked down particularly in Indonesia and Malaysia, all of these animals, insects, plants we’re losing them to, to monocultures. So something like seven, I believe it’s 75 percent of the world’s palm oil is grown in Indonesia and Malaysia.

[00:05:30] And I, so I spent a lot of time reporting from Indonesia, from mainly from Sumatra and Borneo. And there, as your listeners may know, orangutans, Sumatran tigers, Sumatran rhinos all sorts of birds like Hamilton hornbills are now all critically endangered in large part because of the palm oil industry, because those, their habitat has just been decimated.

[00:05:53] Dr Miranda Melcher: And it’s not just the environmental impact. You also talk about in the book social justice issues involved in all of [00:06:00] this. We’re talking really here about mass production, about big corporate actors going into places that haven’t necessarily seen a lot of that before. What’s the social side for humans like?

[00:06:11] Jocelyn Zuckerman: There are so many aspects of it, but since I mentioned the Helmeton Hornbills, I will talk about that a little bit. When I was in Sumatra on one of my trips, I met with a few poachers. These were guys who had made their living as smallholder farmers. That’s pretty much everyone there had.

[00:06:25] And now they had no land. The land had been taken away by these corporations and they had no, no form of income. They didn’t have a lot of schooling. So they were poaching these Helmeton Hornbills. These birds have these hard casks on their beak that are, particularly popular in China for carving into trinkets and jewelry.

[00:06:43] So they were going into what was left of the forest, shooting down these birds and then selling them. And one of these poachers said to me, I hate doing this. I love these birds. I would do anything else, if I could think of it to feed my family. And he told me how he had actually paid money to have his gun like tinkered with because I [00:07:00] think it was 4. 5 millimeter pellets it was made for. And he said they’re small and sometimes they hit the birds, but they don’t kill them. And so he had it upgraded so that he could use 5. 5 millimeter bullets so that they would kill the birds on impact because he said he couldn’t stand to see them suffer.

[00:07:15] Like he was like, this is the last thing in the world that I want to be doing, but I have no other means of feeding my family. So there’s that, there’s the loss of land to grow food also because these are big industrial plantations, there’s lots of chemicals involved, so a lot of these folks said, our water source is now polluted the river where we used to get our drinking water, our cooking water we can’t use anymore.

[00:07:37] And their diets have vastly changed, and there was a study in Indonesia a few years ago that, that tracked people’s diets living on the periphery of a plantation, folks who were probably working at the plantation, and then indigenous diets folks still living in intact forests, and those indigenous people had much better metrics in terms of the nutrients they were getting, the body weight because [00:08:00] these folks now living on the periphery of the plantation are basically buying fast food at little kiosks run by the plantation owners.

[00:08:09] Dr Miranda Melcher: Obviously our interest, I mean we’re called Just Access our interest is in access to justice and its lack and trying to improve that. Given what you’ve just described for us in terms of the environmental impacts, the impacts to the communities as well, what do you think is the role of access to justice or lack of justice in maintaining this corporatist economy?

[00:08:32] Jocelyn Zuckerman: Oh, I think we probably before we go to that, we should also talk about the workers, the labor issues, because that’s all bound up in that as well. So, again, because these are huge plantations in often in very remote parts of the world, where nobody’s keeping close track the workers are, paid pitiful wages exposed to dangerous chemicals with often without any sort of safety gear.

[00:08:54] And in some places in Malaysia in particular a lot of the workers are trafficked in there. They’re brought in under false [00:09:00] pretenses from places like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar. Recruiters will come and tell them, Oh, we can get you a job in a hotel or a restaurant and they lure them onto boats, take their passports and then bring them to these plantations in very remote parts of Malaysia. And so they really have no access to justice. They’re maroon there unless they try to escape, but there’s been violence involved in people trying to escape. I reported from Honduras and some plantation workers there told me that they had tried to unionize and they were all fired and also roughed up. There was violence involved. 

[00:09:35] The access to justice is scanty on the ground. There is, something called the roundtable on sustainable palm oil or RSPO, which was formed, I believe, in 2004 thanks to lobbying by folks from Greenpeace, Global Witness, Friends of the Earth calling out the industry for environmental labor abuses. So this organization was formed. I tracked it in my book.

[00:09:59] I [00:10:00] think there were 12 members in all and I think nine of them were industry folks and then there were maybe two from NGOs and one from I don’t know, an education organization or something, but it’s largely tilted to industry. Anyway, so people can bring complaints to the RSPO if they feel like land has been stolen, or workers rights are being abused.

[00:10:21] So there is some oversight in terms of that, but those cases tend to drag on and unfortunately there was one case, I think two years ago, where a company was brought, a case was brought against it. And rather than fess up to what it had done and deal with what the RSPO wanted, the changes it wanted it to make, it just quit the RSPO.

[00:10:40] So the problem is that there is some oversight, but there’s always a market for palm oil, so if the people, they don’t want to clean up their supply, unfortunately, they can find places to buy cheap palm oil where people are looking the other way in terms of environmental labor abuses.

[00:10:57] Dr Miranda Melcher: Is this then a reasonable way forward [00:11:00] to improve access to justice? Do we need other institutions or mechanisms?

[00:11:06] Jocelyn Zuckerman: I think we need us, right? I think consumers, we’re the ones who are ingesting so much of this palm oil. So I think as consumers on the other side of the world, we can relabels also maybe not eat so much junk food because basically palm oil is in processed foods. It’s if you’re eating a pretty healthy whole food diet, you’re not going to be getting a ton of it, but if you are eating processed foods, read the label, see if it’s, if the food has palm oil in it, you can look on the company’s website, see most people, most companies now have sustainable palm oil policies.

[00:11:35] They have something on their website where you can see where they’re getting it and call them out if it looks like this palm oil might not be coming from a place where the environment and the workers are being looked after properly.

[00:11:47] Dr Miranda Melcher: So is that the main thing that readers of the book or listeners to this, is that the, if you could only have them do one thing as a response, is that what it would be?

[00:11:57] Jocelyn Zuckerman: I think that’s what it would be. Also, maybe lobbying [00:12:00] governments. I think this is again, we can we talked about climate change a bit, but I think all of this has to be taken in the context of these big global issues because they’re all bound up together. I think, we’re realizing that so much carbon is in these tropical rainforests and these, a lot of these governments in the global South, maybe don’t have the income to keep them standing without our help and so I think there needs to be legislation that recognizes the importance of these environments and that we play our part to keep them intact.

[00:12:32] Dr Miranda Melcher: If we zoom out from discussing the book, this is obviously not the only part of your career that has been involved in long form journalism. You mentioned that one of the ways you got involved in this was working with magazines. You’ve done storytelling for a long time. How did you get involved in this?

[00:12:51] Jocelyn Zuckerman: So I studied English and French literature in college. I wasn’t a journalism major. I didn’t work for a newspaper then, but then I went to in my mid [00:13:00] twenties, I went to Kenya to serve as a Peace Corps volunteer. Will your readers, your listeners know what the Peace Corps is? So I lived in a little village in Western Kenya very rural, no running water, no electricity worked as a teacher there teaching English and math.

[00:13:14] And that really opened my eyes to how the world works outside of suburban New Jersey and New York City. And that really, so I came, when I came back to the States, I had an idea that I wanted to do, to be a foreign correspondent. I wanted to, travel around to these sorts of places and tell the world how, what’s going on and how so many people live in a way that I think many of us would find unimaginable.

[00:13:38] So I went to journalism school with that plan to be a foreign correspondent, got involved with the guy who’s now my husband, who was not interested in moving to Monrovia or any place like that, so I shifted my focus to cultural reporting rather than foreign, international affairs.

[00:13:54] And that’s why I got this job at Gourmet Magazine. I was working assigning stories mostly about food, but we did [00:14:00] broaden the sort of food mandate to do a lot of environmental stories and In terms of food, everything came back to the environment. It’s, you’re talking about agriculture and you’re talking about water supply and land use and biodiversity.

[00:14:12] So I just, I kept getting more interested in that side of things than in terms of sort of restaurant celebrity chefs. So eventually left Gourmet to be a freelance writer and explore those same sorts of environmental. And also, I also wanted to, I was, I had been at a desk job for 12 years.

[00:14:29] I wanted to get back out into the world and travel and tell more international stories. So since then I’ve written for all sorts of different outlets, but often coming back to those themes of environment, global South, women’s issues.

[00:14:43] Dr Miranda Melcher: Why do you think you keep coming back to those themes?

[00:14:46] Jocelyn Zuckerman: Because they’re so intransigent. There’s still, so much to do in terms of I mentioned women’s rights that, that was something in, in terms of the palm oil industry, there was sexual abuse on plantations, women [00:15:00] making much smaller wages, and, you look at the environment today and with abortion rights in the States, it just seems one step forward, two steps back.

[00:15:10] So I think we need to keep shining a light on these issues that are all bound up together. 

[00:15:14] Dr Miranda Melcher: And speaking not just of the content, but of the storytelling aspect of it what is so powerful to you about exploring these issues and raising awareness on these issues through stories?

[00:15:25] Jocelyn Zuckerman: I think in order to get people to pay attention, you need to tell a story, you need to draw them in, have characters that they can relate to. If you’re just rattling off a bunch of statistics, people are going to nod off or stop reading. So I think the idea is to draw them and take them down on the ground someplace by describing what it looks like, what it sounds like, what it smells like, so that they feel like they’re there and they’re engaged and can get to know these characters and care about their fates.

[00:15:56] Dr Miranda Melcher: Obviously, one of the big pieces of writing you’ve done is Planet [00:16:00] Palm, but as you’ve mentioned, You’ve covered a huge range of issues in so many places with these kind of themes you keep coming back to. Obviously that, I don’t want to even say story that topic of palm oil plantations is one that has produced so much writing and attention.

[00:16:16] But is there perhaps another topic or story that you find you keep coming back to or thinking about or has stood the test of time in your memory?

[00:16:26] Jocelyn Zuckerman: It’s interesting. I haven’t come back to this story, but when I went to journalism school, which was more than 20 years ago, I wrote my thesis on female genital cutting. And that was as it was happening in the U. S. sort of in Ethiopian and other populations inside the states. And here we are more than 20 years later, and apparently, there was an article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago, the number of girls being subjected to this practice is actually higher now and there was recently, just a couple weeks ago, a vote in Gambia, for example, [00:17:00] they had banned female genital cutting, and this vote was to overturn the ban.

[00:17:04] So this is an issue that is so stubborn and certainly that sadly stands the test of time. Another story I did, which was among the most terrifying things I’ve reported was on sexual violence in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. And again, there are stories now out of Sudan and Gaza and Ukraine about sexual violence being continued to happen in all these places.

[00:17:30] Again, sadly stands the test of time and could use continued spotlight on it, I think.

[00:17:36] Dr Miranda Melcher: Very much as evidenced by that answer as well as some of the things you’ve discussed already you have quite often been in a position to be reporting on something that is relevant at the time and kind of continues to be relevant. And it becomes a big deal and comes into the headlines in ways that maybe it wasn’t initially when you were reporting on it.

[00:17:55] What’s the next thing or what’s, what are some of the next things that [00:18:00] maybe we are less aware of now or less in the headlines now, but maybe they should be getting more attention. Maybe they should be having more headline or media space. What might those sorts of issues be?

[00:18:13] Jocelyn Zuckerman: About a year ago, I interviewed a guy called Siddharth Khara, who had written a book called Cobalt Red which is all about the cobalt industry, you might be familiar with it he’s someone you should have on your show, it’s anyway, that is a devastating situation in part because we need this cobalt for our green economies, we need it for our lithium ion batteries that are in our smartphones, our laptops, our electric vehicles But the majority of the cobalt in the world is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he tells these stories, he reported there, and he tells these stories that are just the most terrific scenes you’ve ever heard.

[00:18:47] Children going down into these tunnels, 30, 40 meters deep and they just they’re digging them themselves, they’ll collapse on these kids, five year old girls are there washing the cobalt in the polluted rivers [00:19:00] and everyone in the region, even if they’re not involved in this cobalt economy, which most of them are from the youngest kids to the oldest people, they’re being exposed to this toxic air, this toxic water and it’s so complicated because, as I said we need this, on the one hand, we’re talking about climate change and keeping carbon in the ground and so we need these, we need electric vehicles. We know we need all these different things to green our economy, but so much of it is dependent on this cobalt and it’s being harvested in a way that is just devastating to the environment and to the people living in that region.

[00:19:34] So I don’t think that can get enough attention, frankly.

[00:19:38] Dr Miranda Melcher: Is that your next project? What might you be currently working on or looking to work on as we speak?

[00:19:44] Jocelyn Zuckerman: I am I’m not going to write that book because he did such an amazing job. And I, when I spoke with him, he said, it’s being turned into a movie. I can’t remember if it’s a feature or a documentary. It might be both like along the lines of blood diamond to, to really get a wider audience.

[00:19:58] So what I’m working on right now [00:20:00] is bit of a pivot. It’s a triple biography. I’ve never written a biography, so I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’m trying to figure it out as I go. Anyway, it’s, it is three women who were one was involved in African independence movement, another in anti apartheid movement, and another in the civil rights movement in the States.

[00:20:20] So it does touch on these issues global south, justice, women’s voices and all these women overlapped at a certain place in time. And so I’m telling their life stories through this braiding of them together because of where they overlapped.

[00:20:37] Dr Miranda Melcher: That sounds like a very interesting project that is in some ways clearly pushing yourself.

[00:20:41] Jocelyn Zuckerman: When I wrote Planet Palm there were a couple of historical figures that I wrote about, and that was something I’d never done before, gone into archives and trolled for letters and read everything about a place as it existed 150 years ago. And I thought it was, I had so much fun.

[00:20:57] I just, I loved being in the archives. I love piecing [00:21:00] together the story from the past. So I thought maybe I should try to do that and that’s what I’m doing. It’s taking a long time, but I hope I’ll get there. 

[00:21:09] Dr Miranda Melcher: Well, best of luck with that project and thank you so much for sharing your insights with us about your previous book and of course, all the work you’ve done related to it as well.

[00:21:18] Jocelyn Zuckerman: Thanks so much. Great to talk to you.

Outro

[00:21:19] Dr Miranda Melcher: Jocelyn, thank you so much for speaking with us. Listeners, thank you as well for being with us today. If you’re enjoying the Just Access podcast, please tell your friends, like us, and share us on social media. Please do also rate us and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. We love to hear what you think.

[00:21:39] We really do read every single review and it helps us get the word out about what we’re doing. You can also get in touch with us directly with your comments, reflections, or suggestions for people or topics we should cover by contacting us at podcast at just-access.de that’s podcast at just-access.de.

[00:22:00] Until next time.