The Generation That Must Grow

By: Arum Shahzadi, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM)

Why the future of sustainable palm oil depends not on governments or corporations alone  — but on the restless, connected, idealistic generation coming of age right now. 

My grandmother kept a small tin of cooking oil on her kitchen shelf for as long as I can  remember. She never read the label. She did not need to. The oil was cheap, reliable,  and abundant — a quiet miracle of modern agriculture that fed her family and a billion  others like it. She did not know that the golden liquid inside had a complicated story,  one that stretched across equatorial forests, smallholder plots, shipping lanes, and  now, at last, university lecture halls where young people are asking whether it can be  told differently. 

I am one of those young people. And this is the question that defines my generation’s  relationship with palm oil: not whether to use it, but how to transform it. 

A Crop the World Cannot Simply Walk Away From 

Palm oil is in roughly half of all packaged goods sold globally — in biscuits, lipstick,  biodiesel, instant noodles, shampoo. It is the world’s most produced vegetable oil, and  for good reason: the oil palm yields up to ten times more oil per hectare than soy or  sunflower. Walking away from it is not a realistic option for the 4.5 million smallholder  farmers in Malaysia and Indonesia alone who depend on it for their livelihoods. It is  not an option for the rural communities where it is the primary engine of economic  mobility. 

This context matters to youth, because the easy rhetorical move — to condemn the  industry — is not the same as actually solving the problem. Sustainability demands  more intellectual honesty than that. It demands that we hold two truths at once: that  the expansion of palm cultivation has caused serious environmental harm, and that a  transformed version of this industry can be part of the solution to global food security,  rural poverty, and the just energy transition. 

My generation has grown up with both the diagnosis and the tools. We have satellite  imagery that maps deforestation in near real-time. We have certification schemes like  the RSPO that define what responsible production looks like. We have blockchain  pilots tracing palm oil from mill to supermarket shelf. What we have lacked, until now,  is a critical mass of young voices willing to translate that knowledge into action — inside the industry, not just outside it. 

“Every certified hectare of sustainable palm oil is, at its root, a  decision made by a human being who chose the harder, better  path.”

The Smallholder Is the Story

If you want to understand why youth leadership matters in sustainable agriculture,  visit a smallholder community. A third-generation farmer I met during a field visit put  it simply: “My father cleared the land. I planted the palms. My children — I want them  to certify it.” That sentence contains the entire arc of the transition we need. The first  generation built; the second scaled; the third must verify, improve, and steward. 

Young people from farming communities are uniquely positioned to carry this  forward. They understand the language of the land and the language of the city. They  can mediate between the certification officer with a checklist and the elderly farmer  who has never been asked to produce documentation in his life. They can use a  smartphone to photograph a ripeness indicator and upload it to a cooperative’s  traceability app. These are not glamorous roles. But they are the load-bearing work of  the transition. 

Sustainability Is a Practice, Not a Poster

One of the more damaging ideas in the sustainability discourse is the notion that caring  about the environment is a lifestyle — something you signal through consumer  choices. For youth in the palm oil sector, this is an unaffordable luxury. Sustainability,  here, is not a poster on a hostel wall. It is a daily practice embedded in soil  management, water table monitoring, pest control without aerial spraying, and the  painfully unglamorous work of keeping accurate records for an audit that may come  in three years. 

What youth bring to this practice is not naivety. It is a refusal to accept the false choice  between prosperity and ecology that previous generations were handed as if it were  inevitable. We have seen enough evidence — in agroforestry pilot programmes, in  RSPO-certified cooperatives, in reforestation partnerships between palm companies  and local universities — to know that the false choice is, in fact, false. 

The Next Chapter Is Ours to Write

The Young Roots competition is premised on a belief I share entirely: that the next  generation of thinkers, farmers, activists, researchers, and communicators will shape  what sustainable palm oil means in practice. Not in a metaphorical sense. In the literal  sense that the decisions made in the next decade — about land use, about certification  uptake, about how the industry responds to climate risk — will be made by people who  are, right now, students. 

My grandmother did not read the label on her oil tin. I read mine. My children, I hope,  will live in a world where the label is honest, the forest behind the label is standing,  and the farmer who planted the tree was paid fairly for every bunch of fruit she  harvested. 

That future is not given. It is grown by the generation that chooses,  deliberately and with open eyes, to grow it.