Unilever's participation in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil Essay

Unilever's participation in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil - Essay Example For the past years usage of palm oil has significantly increased and continues to grow. Today consumption of palm oil became 10 times more than it was in 1980. The World Wide Fund for Nature predicts that in 5 years the consumption of palm oil will double, thus making this industry very profitable and beneficial (What is palm oil? n.d.). Palm oil industry, being a profitable business and contributing to the economy of the producers' countries, makes negative impact on environment. The main results of such impact are deforestation (the forests are cut to increase the number of palm oil plantations), climate change (as a result of deforestation), air and water pollution, soil erosion (as fire is usually a mean of deforestation, and palm oil mills produce significant amounts of effluents), species extinction (as a result of climate change and environmental pollution), human health worsening (as a result of climate change and pollution) (What is palm oil? n.d., Sustainable and responsibl e palm oil n.d., Palm oil n.d., Basiron 2014). Because of the negative impact of palm oil industry, the world community started to talk about the necessity to attract attention of this business to the problems, make it sustainable and encourage the corporations, which deal with palm oil industry, to be responsible for their actions. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be viewed as a concept, according to which enterprises take into account interests of society, where they operate, and take responsibility for the influence of their activity on environment, society, workers and other stakeholders.