THE palm oil plantations of Malaysia and Indonesia are worked by “child labour and outright slavery,” a new investigation has found.

The two countries supply 85 per cent of the world’s palm oil, which is used in most cosmetic brands and around half of all supermarket products. Campaigns to raise awareness of its devastating ecological impact — as the plantations have eaten away at rainforest habitats, threatening to extirpate endangered animals such as the orang-utan — have been limited by the ingredient’s disguise under over 200 names on labels.

But a probe by Associated Press that interviewed almost 130 current and former workers found “almost all” complained of being “cheated, threatened, held against their will or forced to work off unsurmountable debts.”