This is The Guardian.

Hi, this is Paul Tullis. I'm a freelance journalist based in Amsterdam,

and I wrote The Guardian Long Read How the World Got Hooked on Palm Oil.

I had been following the issue of palm oil for a while, mostly because I knew that it was linked

to a lot of deforestation and was interested in the consequences that that had for global warming.

The trouble that I was running into was, you know, this had been going on for a long time,

and the news is about what's new, so how do you find a way in to a topic that has been persisting

for quite a while? So I came across this new method of tracing palm oil to its source, which

is very hard to do for reasons that the article goes into. And this was a combination of incentives

for farmers with technology where they would be able to determine whether a bunch of palm fruit,

which is squeezed to make palm oil, comes from and whether that place had been recently

deforested. So I talked to my editor, David Wolff, about that, and he suggested that we instead

of trying to chase the latest development, go back to the beginning, and try and explain how

palm oil became so ubiquitous. You know, it's in so many cosmetics, and virtually every soap,

shampoo, and detergent, more and more foods, especially processed foods. So that sounded

interesting to me, and that's the angle we decided to pursue. Since I wrote the article,

there have been a few developments of interest having to do with the rate of deforestation,

and also legislation, both in palm oil producing countries, and in the European Union,

which uses a lot of palm oil for biofuels. There are a couple of different sustainability protocols,

some more robust than others. There has been a moratorium on new plantations in Malaysia,

and the rate of deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia, which are the two biggest palm oil

producing countries, has slowed but not stopped. I think it's important for people to understand

...