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Is Palm Oil a soft target?
| What is it with palm oil that makes it such a convenient target for a small but vocal minority of voices and organizations today? Why do the world's media not do their due diligence on the issue but instead choose to give column inches to the unwarranted activism against probably the most benign of edible oilseed crops, environment-wise? Take Brazil and the Amazon for comparison. In Brazil 1,150 activists have been slain in the Amazon over the past 20 years leading Brazil's leaders to discuss how to stop the region's deadly disputes over logging. Yet over in South East Asia, another primary commodity, palm oil has been targeted by activists using the same questionable tactics as the activists in the Amazon. Except in South East Asia the response from the industry is not violence but rather measured and civil responses, including setting up a Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to promote sustainable planting practices and stepping up conservation efforts by establishing Orangutan and Wildlife Conservation Funds and sanctuaries. Rather than placating the critics, these measures appear to have emboldened the critics further who promptly turned up the heat with each campaign getting zanier and more vehement. Even the RSPO was not spared with the critics accusing it of being a green-washing exercise, despite the fact that the body was a multi-stakeholder body represented by planters, multinational food manufacturers and even environmental and civil society groups!. The palm oil industry could justifiably feel aggrieved for the ugly, loud and never-ending activism against it especially since palm oil cultivation occupies only a mere 0.23% of the world's agricultural area and yet the industry produces a staggering 30% of the world's supply of edible oil. Juxtapose that against the fact that the two primary producing countries, Indonesia and Malaysia (which together, produces 90% of the world palm oil output) accounts for 3.9% of the world's population. It is obvious that both countries have not even utilized one tenth of their proportionate and inalienable right to exploit their own lands for industrial or agricultural purposes! Yet the industry has been accused by a whole cabal of green loonies ranging from "environmental organizations" like Rainforest Action Network (RAN) to Climate Advisers to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE) and now supported by a strange coterie of anti-palm oil lobbyists ranging from "civil society" groups such as the oddly named Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), zoos such as Zoo Australia and the European Association of Zoos to even two young, impressionable and innocent girl scouts, of massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of the orang utan, allegations that are wild and unsubstantiated. RAN, for instance was forced to quietly remove from their website their wild allegation in Australia and that palm oil cultivation would lead to the extinction of the orang utan by 2011. Well 2011 is now upon us and the orang utan population in the wild has grown instead of going extinct when new tribes of more than 2000 wild apes were found in the East Kalimantan province of Indonesia, as reported by National Geographic. With roughly 50,000 orangutans thought to remain in the wild, the new find could add 5 percent to the world's known orangutan numbers, said Erik Meijaard, senior ecologist for the Nature Conservancy in Indonesia. Climate Advisers is even zanier, forecasting that "98 percent of the rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia will disappear" within 15 years due to palm oil cultivation, a bizarre claim that reduces Climate Advisers to the same level as those religious loons like Harold Camping and his Oakland based Family Radio who predicted that the world would end on May 21st 2011. Malaysia had been the world's largest producer of palm oil for more than a century. Yet, despite growing palm oil for more than a hundred years, Malaysia still retains more than 52% forest cover, an environmental achievement which dwarfs the forest cover of the UK, from where most of the environmental loons hail. This was possible due to palm oil's incredible inherent productivity. Indonesia too has set a target of retaining 25% forest cover, a figure that matches the forest cover prevailing in the EU. If 25% forest cover is acceptable for the EU, what right does it give EU MP's to condemn Indonesia, given that 43% of the palm oil output is due to smallholder operations? The injury is further compounded when we consider that the developing nation has a population in excess of 300 million with poverty eradication remaining a national priority for years to come? Lately, green politicians like independent Australian Senator Nick Xenophon and EU MEP Nessa Childers have also jumped on the palm oil bashing bandwagon, introducing mandatory labeling of palm oil usage in food products in Australia and the EU, a measure that is highly discriminatory against palm oil and a clear violation of WTO Rules. As an indication of the propensity of green groups to shoot first-think later and to bend facts, when Australian Senators in their select Community Affairs Legislative Committee convened a hearing to hear representations from stakeholders, it was obvious that they had been advised by green groups that palm oil is "fruit oil" and not a vegetable oil as it is often described as in product labels. The Senators were surprised when it was pointed out at the hearing that olive oil, produced as a fruit oil in the EU and Australia is also classified internationally as a vegetable oil because it comes from a plant or vegetable source as opposed to animal fats which come from animal sources. The Committee recommended to the Senate that Nick Xenophon's Food Standards Amendment (Truth in Labeling - Palm Oil) Bill not be passed. However, as a testimony of the proclivity of senators in the Australian senate to indulge in convenient political horse trading rather than undertake informed decision-making, Xenophon forged a convenient alliance with Green Party senators and the unprecedented hastily cobbled-together consortium rode roughshod over the Committee's recommendations! What is, perhaps, the most sinister aspect of green groups' agitation against palm oil is the recent revelation by researchers Caroline Boin and Andrea Marchesetti in a well researched report entitled "Friends of the EU" (see: http://www.policynetwork.net/accountability/publication/friends-eu). This damning report is a sad expose that the EU, through its environmental ministries and commissions is involved in funding up to 70% of the operating budgets of environmental NGOs such as FOE Europe is a dead giveaway that the real reasons for these baffling attacks is to protect oilseed crops like rapeseed and sunflower which are indigenous to the EU. It is inarguable that these EU oil-seeds would find it difficult to compete on a level playing field, with the hyper yielding palm oil, especially in the production of bio-fuel, the use of which the EU has committed itself to promoting! Now why would the EU fund green NGOs who proceeded to mount what was tantamount to a trade protectionist scheme in the guise of environmental activism? It does not take a genius to figure this one out. The EU has homegrown oilseed industries like rapeseed and sunflower that were unfortunately not quite as productive as palm oil. In fact, their typical yield is just 10% that of palm oil! In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, such clearly coordinated, vehement and unwarranted activism has its roots in anti-competition behavior, funded by the Environment Directorate of the EU Commission, a commission that is ironically often proclaimed to be the paragon of fair competition. The question then remains. Why is palm oil such a soft target for such subversive and covert operations? |
About the Author
Palm Oil Truth Foundation is an international non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation, without strings to the world of commerce and power. We are a people organisation, organised for the people and founded upon the principles of integrity and responsibility as a global citizen with the sole purpose of representing TRUTH to the global community about health, environmental and economic benefits of palm oil.
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