Palm oil is the world’s most popular vegetable oil, found in half of all supermarket goods and seven out of every 10 personal care products. It’s what gives tortilla chips their crunch, detergents their cleaning power, and toothpaste its smoothness. It’s also used as a biofuel. Since 2016, global palm oil consumption has risen 73 percent.

Yet palm oil, and the unabating appetite for it, is problematic. The clearing of forests to make way for oil palm plantations is a major driver of deforestation in the tropics: Between 1972 and 2015, the world’s two largest palm oil producing nations, Indonesia and Malaysia, lost 16 percent and 47 percent of their forests, respectively, to the crop. Deforestation