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by Godwin Bowden

In the past few years, the palm oil industry has had to put up with a series of emotive and grossly unfair militant campaigns carried out against it by mostly self serving environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, FOE, Wetlands, Treehugger and Mongabay.com.  Finally, a voice of reason has emerged amidst all the hype and hoopla.

Addressing the first International Palm Oil Sustainability Conference in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, Princeton biologist Dr. David S. Wilcove said that the palm oil industry is too important to the economies of Indonesia and Malaysia to justify blanket import bans on the edible oil used in food, cosmetics, industrial products, and biodiesel. The palm oil industry contributes to health, education, and infrastructure in rural areas.

Says Dr. Wilcove: “Boycotting palm oil produced in Southeast Asia is an “unrealistic” and “ineffective” approach to conserving the region’s fast-disappearing rainforests”.  Instead, asserts Dr. Wilcove “NGOs should focus on engaging and working with the palm oil industry to reduce its impact on the environment.”

“In the context of its tremendous economic importance, it must be recognized that the notion of boycotting palm oil is impractical and unrealistic. It is simply not an approach that will work.”

On the issue of biodiversity loss, Dr. Wilcove was hopeful that increasing awareness of environmental issues among oil palm producers and innovative partnerships could reduce the worst outcomes for biodiversity in the region. He said that small measures to increase species richness could have unintended benefits for palm planters. Dr Wilcove also proposed that concerned NGO’s could run palm-oil plantations in a model sustainable manner, and use the revenues to protect more primary forest.

However, the Rainforest Action Network appears not to have any intention to engage with the industry adopting from the get-go a blatantly confrontational and militant stance towards the issue.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal-sponsored ECO:nomics conference in Santa Barbara recently, Rainforest Action Network (Rainforest Agribusiness) campaigner Brihannala Morgan sought to refute comments made by Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) CEO Patricia Woertz in which she portrayed biofuels as a solution to the climate crisis.  Says Ms Morgan:  “We’ve witnessed forests and peatswamps in Indonesia being cleared and burned so an ADM subsidiary can expand its palm oil plantations.” She continues: “We want ADM to move beyond cheap talk about the benefits of biofuels and stop promoting false solutions that are worse than fossil fuels.”

As demand for industrial biofuels, also called agrofuels, has grown in recent years, large-scale production, alleges the Rainforest Action Network, has led to deforestation of the world’s rainforests, higher food prices, and widespread human rights abuses. Producing palm oil, one of the most popular sources of biodiesel, entails so much deforestation and land conversion that, over its lifecycle, palm-based biodiesel can emit up to 10 times more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, it is laughable for the Rainforest Action Network to allege that palm based biodiesel “can emit up to 10 times more carbon dioxide per gallon than gasoline”.  Let’s examine the facts.

First, it is patently untrue that forests and peatswamps have been cleared to expand palm oil plantations, at least in Malaysia.  This is evidenced by the fact that even after a 100 year history of establishing palm oil plantations in the country Malaysia can still boast of a forest cover of more than 65%, far higher forest cover than the 20% or so forest cover in the Western industrialized nations from which these hypocritical guardians of environmental probity hail!

Moreover, any fair-minded agriculturalist would agree that converting peat areas for agricultural purposes is a difficult task and in the case of planting oil palm in peat areas, invites a host of problems that need to be overcome such as efficient water management and flooding of the fields. In the case of Sarawak (a key palm oil planting Malaysian state), the peat is shallower near the coastline and increases as it moves inland and can exceed more than 20m deep making cultivation of crops such as oil palm very difficult. Given a choice, the reality is that it is highly unlikely that any planter would want to invest in planting oil palm in peat areas as the returns are not guaranteed due to various factors. Apart from that, the cost of establishing plantations in peat soil is very expensive and may not be sustainable in the long run.

Another important consideration is that, by removing the secondary forests and planting them with oil palm, planters have actually replaced a tree with another tree. Thus it could be said that planting oil palm is establishing a planted forest in a different form. Planted forests become an essential component of acting as a reservoir for storing carbon.  Moreover, when compared to other oilseed crops such as soy, corn, rapeseed or sunflower, oil palm trees have an extremely high leaf area index for the absorption and dissemination of the gases into the atmosphere.  It typically takes in carbon dioxide and returns oxygen to the atmosphere in the process of photosynthesis. It is estimated that the crop emits 8 to 10 times more oxygen and absorbs up to ten times more carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

In a statement issued following the ECO:nomics Conference in Santa Barbara, the Rainforest Action Network contends that an ADM subsidiary, the Wilmar Group, is the world’s largest producer of palm-based biodiesel and that it is clearing tropical rainforests in Indonesia that are among the last remaining habitats of the critically endangered orangutan. U.S. agribusiness giants ADM, Bunge and Cargill account for 60 percent of the funding for Brazil’s booming soy crop. Soy has become a leading cause of deforestation in the Amazon as Brazil has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest exporter of soy, largely due to American farmers planting more corn for ethanol.

The Palm Oil Truth Foundation notes, with a twinge of regret that the real reason for the Rainforest Action Network’s hubris towards palm oil can be found in the last sentence of that statement: “Brazil has overtaken the United States as the world’s largest producer of soy, largely due to American farmers planting more corn for ethanol.”  It behooves one to ask, why is it alright for American farmers, who’ve cleared probably the largest swathe of land in the world to plant more corn for ethanol whilst third world nations are roundly condemned for pursuing their legitimate agricultural objectives.

So until Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace and the rest spend 95% of their time working on those issues with the demographic that causes the biggest impact (their members? and other Americans/Europeans?), their “campaigns” to stop economic activity in developing countries will continue to look like so much neo-colonialism.

In the View of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation conservationists that can’t seem to do anything but run “campaigns” and call for boycotts and be confrontational would do well to think of something new, something that works, something that might help all the parties involved.  In our view, Dr. Wilcove’s proposal would do that.

In fact, the Rainforest Action Network does not even need to think creatively. They could just follow Dr. Wilcove’s proposal and run palm-oil plantations in a model sustainable manner, and use the revenues to protect more primary forest.

Until NGOs in rich countries, like the Rainforest Actionetwork, Greenpeace, FOE, Wetlands and Mongabay, put up the funds to both help developing countries economically and protect the lands that they consider worth protecting, the Palm Oil Truth Foundation views their words and actions as patently hollow!  THE END.

Godwin Bowden is an independent columnist

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under Food for Thought. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.