We trade palm oil. That is exactly why every number here is public.

Palm Oil Economics is the brainchild of Umesh Shankara Gowda, an entrepreneur working across two fields that rarely overlap: software, and the physical palm oil supply chain. He is also the owner of Bio Green Wax, a company trading palm oil and palm-derived products.

It was founded together with and backed by Hantash Najam, whose funding turned the idea into something that could actually be built. A public price record is not a quick project — it only becomes useful after months of collecting data nobody is paying you for, and that stretch is precisely where this kind of work usually dies.

That combination is the reason this site exists. Buyers and sellers of palm oil and its derivatives deal with the same frictions on every transaction — prices that are quoted but not published, specifications that mean different things to different refineries, and a market where the person with the information is usually the person on the other side of the trade. Someone who has only built software would not know which of those problems actually costs money. Someone who has only traded would not build a public price record to fix it.

The idea was always larger than a price feed. Palm oil is the most consumed vegetable oil on earth and sits in something close to half the products on a supermarket shelf, yet almost everything worth knowing about it lives somewhere private — in a trader's inbox, a refinery's specification sheet, a subscription terminal priced for institutions. What reaches the public is usually either a headline with no numbers or a number with no explanation.

So Palm Oil Economics is built as a knowledge hub, not a dashboard. How the crop is grown, milled and refined, and how it grew into the industry it is today. What each product and derivative actually is, and what changes commercially when one line on a specification moves. What happened in the market this morning, written up every day. And underneath all of it the numbers themselves — MPOB statistics back to 2000, stocks, exports, biodiesel mandates, rainfall across the palm belts, the competing oils that set the ceiling on price — published in full, free, in six languages, for anyone who needs them.

The forecast is one page of that, and deliberately not the front door. A number predicting next week is worth very little to someone who does not yet understand why this market moves; the reference material is what makes the number legible. Both are free, and neither asks for an email first.

The commercial relationship, stated plainly: the market data, forecasts and MPOB statistics on this site are free and open to anyone, and are published whether or not they suit a seller. When a buyer asks us to source a product, that inquiry is fulfilled through Bio Green Wax or through refineries and processors we work with, and the business earns from that. We would rather you knew that before you read a price than after.

It is also why the accuracy record below is published in full, including the runs that went badly. A site with a commercial interest asking to be trusted on numbers has exactly one honest option, which is to show you when its numbers were wrong.