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Palm Oil and FIFA
| The logo says FIFA with a saintly signature line: "For the Good of the Game," which fools no one. The scandal ridden football governing body has plumbed new depths in recent months. Assailed with toxic bribery and corruption charges that'd make crooked despots running dodgy banana republics blush, FIFA in a move that'd invite more ridicule and mirth announced recently that Spanish tenor Placido Domingo had been invited to join Henry Kissinger and former FBI chief Louis Freeh in rooting out Fifa corruption. Confirming perhaps that Fifa's crisis had reached operatic proportions, its President Sepp Blatter announced that Domingo, 70, had been invited to join a "council of wisdom" intended to restore the organisation's credibility. Domingo's most notable previous link with football came alongside Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras, who, as the Three Tenors, provided the soundtrack to the 1990 World Cup and performed in Rome on the eve of the final. Nessun Dorma remains synonymous with the game, but Domingo's credentials for restoring Fifa's reputation are less clear. Speaking in an interview with CNN on Monday, Blatter initially forgot Domingo's name, but, when pressed, confirmed that a man who has filled the world's great opera houses would be turning his attention to stemming the tide of corruption engulfing Fifa. Domingo is a considerable figure, a national hero in Spain and Mexico with a towering reputation on the stage, but his experience of auditing corporate governance procedures has been necessarily limited by a lifetime devoted to bringing the great operatic roles to life. That in a nutshell sums up the comedic parallels between FIFA, an organization which appears devoid of scruples appearing to exist solely for the purpose of perpetuating the gravy train for its office bearers, extracting billions from eager sponsors and certain environmental organizations whose scruples are also increasingly called into question by a discerning public. Although these groups think that they can surreptitiously accept funding from governments /governmental agencies and commodity lobbies to carry out anti-palm oil campaigns on their behalf their actions speak louder than words and evidence has begun emerging that their incomprehensible actions against palm oil are really prepaid campaigns funded by these governments and lobbies eager to protect their indigenous edible oil industries against the world's cheapest cooking oil! In the mid-eighties, activist NGOs such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) loudly campaigned for the banning of palm oil as it is supposedly filled with saturated fat and therefore, hazardous to heart health. The media went to town on this issue and it was only when tons of medical and scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals was brought to bear that palm oil was, in fact, heart friendly and healthful, that CSPI and others beat a hasty retreat. Today these NGOs have more or less conceded on the health issue. (see: The Truth About Palm Oil http://www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=329&Itemid=811) However, CSPI was not done. After lying low for some 2 decades, CSPI published a "report" called "Cruel Oil: How palm oil harms health, rainforest and wildlife" in which they made wild and unsubstantiated claims that palm oil cultivation was causing massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of biodiversity such as the orang utan. The report was prepared with the assistance of Aid Environment listed as partners with Hivos — a Netherlands based civil society group with direct links to campaigns in Indonesia. Hivos, in turn, is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for up to two-thirds of its annual 100m Euro budget. Before long, Greenpeace and FOE together with other green groups took up the cudgels. Dressed in silly orang utan suits, they campaigned long and hard for palm oil to be reined in to stop the alleged deforestation and orang utan extinction. What is, perhaps, the most sinister aspect of Greenpeace and FOE's 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 sickening 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 cheapest oilseed crop in the world" especially in the production of biofuel, 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! And so a renewable energy directive (EU RED) was issued in 2008 by the European Union parliament on biofuel content which imposed strict regulations on carbon emission. The EU RED has also put many palm oil-based biodiesel producers in a limbo as the directive distorts the commodity price and its trade. Many trade observers see the directive as a tactical unfair business ploy and a non-tariff trade move by the EU to single out palm oil for not able to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and preserving biodiversity. According to the EU scientific and technical research, palm oil biodiesel - which has only about 19% GHG - failed to meet with the EU RED requirement. The directive states that biofuel must result in GHG savings of at least 35% versus fossil fuel in 2009 and also increase over time to 50% by 2017. This claim, however, is contrary to many research views, indicating that palm oil biodiesel actually has an estimated GHG savings of 55%! While many palm oil biodiesel producers were doubling their efforts to convince the EU on the sustainability of palm oil, there have been a continuous slew of anti-palm oil campaigns launched by Western environmental NGOs. A close examination of the facts will show that the actions of these environmental NGOs were misconceived. It is an undisputed fact that the oil palm share of world agricultural land is only 0.22 per cent. The total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission of global agriculture is 17 per cent which is considered small compared with the burning of fossil fuel, which contributes 57 per cent of GHG emission. The carbon footprint of oil palm cultivation globally is, therefore, 0.22 per cent times 17 per cent of the total or 0.0374 per cent of global GHG emissions. Recently, the green groups have taken to accusing palm oil of planting oil palm on and thus destroying peat swamp forests, ignoring the fact that planters prefer not to plant on peaty soil for cost reasons. More the palm tree itself is widely known as a species that grows best in sandy porous soil of the type typically found near/in deserts. In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, the time is approaching when it will all blow up in the faces of these environmental groups and they'd have to start damage limitation exercises much as FIFA is scurrying around doing, all to no avail! THE END. |
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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