Meanings of sustainability: The invention of sustainable palm oil

Palm oil production started in the early twentieth century and expanded tremendously from the 1970s, with the area of palm oil plantations in Malaysia alone increasing by a factor of 74 between 1975 and 2010, causing significant tropical deforestation, carbon emissions and loss of biodiversity. This article examines meanings of sustainability in the history of palm oil production and in the recent efforts of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Based on sustainability and postcolonial scholarship, and drawing on the examples of the Danish plantation company United Plantations in Malaysia and the Danish Swedish palm oil processing company AAK, the article shows that RSPO efforts improved palm oil production standards. At the same time, it reveals co-lonial roots and legacies in palm oil sustainability thinking and practice. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .