Popular palm oil comes under attack
What do instant noodles, baby formula, some biofuels, French fries, lipstick and ice cream have in common?
Palm oil.
It’s often the “vegetable/oil fat” listed in the ingredients of about half of the products you encounter in the supermarket. The oil's use is dramatically increasing in the U.S. as manufacturers steer away from other oil that contains trans fats. Worldwide, use increasing around 8-10 percent a year according to industry statistics.
 Land being cleared for an oil palm plantation next to a forest(Greenpeace) |
But long-simmering concerns over the environmental harm from oil palm tree plantations are elevating.
A 2009 United Nations report notes that some forms of palm oil production is done on low-lying, carbon-rich peat land, which can result in the release of enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, the key culprit in global warming. Old tropical forests are often cut down to make room for massive palm oil plantations, but the new trees do not sequester the same amount of carbon as the original forest.
“If you are cutting down tropical forests and replacing them with trees that don’t (capture) the same amount of carbon, you are exacerbating climate change,’’ said Margaret Swink of the Rainforest Action Network. “(It’s) an emissions burst.”
In addition, orangutans which live in the lowlands of Borneo and Sumatra where plantations are often built are losing their living space as land is cleared to make room to capitalize on oil demand. Some estimates place the loss of orangutans at 30-50 a week because of palm oil plantations.
A spokesman was unavailable at the American Palm Oil Council, which represents Malaysian palm oil producers, one of the world’s biggest players in the industry. Yet the group's website defends the oil palm industry's environmental record.
In 2004, The World Wildlife Fund, palm oil producers (including the American Palm Oil Council) environmental groups and consumers joined to start the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to develop environmental standards for growing sustainable oil palm trees. Yet, the more expensive sustainable palm oil has not sold well and the World Wildlife Fund recently began grading many companies on the greenness of their palm oil purchases
Two weeks ago, the RSPO annual meeting decided not to include greenhouse gas emissions in its criteria for sustainability – a move that disappointed some environmental groups.
Meanwhile, some companies are moving ahead on their own. Seventh Generation, the Burlington, Vt.-based green household product company recently pledged to only buy sustainable palm oil, even though its at a higher cost.
For more information go to: http://ran.org/the_problem_with_palm_oil/learn_more/
http://www.seventhgeneration.com/learn/news/what-s-problem-palm-oil
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Around 90% of the global supply of palm oil now comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, and this has come at a tremendous cost. The forests of Borneo and Sumatra are being razed to the ground-- releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere that Indonesia now ranks only behind China and US in carbon emissions-- and it is barely industrialized. The UNEP estimates that the forests of Indonesia are being cleared at a rate of 6 football fields per minute every minute of every day.
The palm oil industry is guilty of the most heinous ecological atrocities imaginable, including the systematic genocide of orangutans. The forests of Borneo and Sumatra are the only place where these gentle, intelligent creatures live, and the cultivation of palm oil has directly led to the brutal deaths of thousands of individuals as the industry has expanded into previously undisturbed areas of rainforest.
When the forest is cleared, adult orangutans are typically shot on sight. These peaceful, sentient beings are beaten, burned, mutilated, tortured and often eaten. Babies are torn off their dying mothers so they can be sold on the black market as illegal pets to wealthy families who see them as status symbols of their own power and prestige. This has been documented time and again.
Visit the Orangutan Outreach website to learn more: www.redapes.org
Reach out and save the orangutans!
Adopt an orangutan today!
As a journalist who's covered this quite a bit recently, I think you're vastly understating the scope of the problem. It's not simply that "new trees do not sequester the same amount of carbon as the original forest." That makes this sound like a minor problem. For starters, deforestation accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions--that's more than all the world's transportation combined. So the carbon stored in those rainforest trees that are being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations is incredibly important. Scientists now believe that if deforestation rates aren't severely slowed, we will never meet internationally agreed-upon global warming targets (temperature rise of no more than 2 degrees C), no matter now much renewable energy we use.
But the other problem that this article entirely glosses over is the biodiversity issue. It's not just orangutans--though palm oil is directly causing their deaths and we share 99% of our DNA with them, so that should resonate with people. It's all the biodiversity in those forests. Palm oil plantations are not forests. They're no different than a cornfield except that the crop is palm trees. All the plants, animals, birds, insects, everything that lives in a rainforest is left homeless--which often means dead--when the forests are cleared.
The public needs to be aware of these issues so that they can make informed decisions about what to buy.
Deforestation Watch deplores the dearth of intellectual rigor and common sense in this debate on palm oil. This cannot be good for the environmental movement for the facts do not support the assertions that palm oil harms the environment.
The reality is this. Palm oil is the highest yielding of all oilseeds with a yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is close to ten times that of its nearest competitors such as soy, rapeseed and sunflower. For this reason, palm oil cultivation is efficient in land use as it covers less than 1% of the total world agricultural area and yet supplies more than 30% of the world's supply of edible oil.
It should be noted that Malaysia is a small country. Yet it had been the world's largest producer of palm oil for more than a century. This suggests that palm oil does not require quite as much land as its critics would want us to believe.How else can it be explained when the country had been cultivating palm oil for so long and yet can still retain 56% forest cover?
In the view of Deforestation Watch, if Orangutan Outreach is truly concerned with environmental conservation, rather than accusing palm oil of “the most heinous ecological atrocities imaginable, including the systematic genocide of orangutans", they should consider calling for palm oil to be planted in place of its competing crops (weather permitting) on account of its extreme efficiency in land use, since palm oil requires ten times less land to produce the same unit of edible oil!
If palm oil cultivation were curtailed or taken away altogether from the trade equation, the world would be scrambling for more oil which , in turn, would see ten times more land being opened up for other oilseed cultivation to fill the gap left by palm oil. The specter of real "environmental harm" would then be really imminent.
The degree of hyperbole employed by Orangutan Outreach in alleging that the orangutan are "beaten, burned, mutilated, tortured and often eaten," is reflective of the spin and hype often used in this issue and this certainly does not help the orangutans.
In fairness, the efforts made by the palm oil industry to support and even set up orangutan outreach programs including a US$5 million Orangutan Wildlife Conservation Fund should be acknowledged and supported. Has Redapes.org even tried to avail itself of this fund?
Visit the Deforestation watch website to learn more: www.deforestationwatch.org
Yeah right! palm oil is the demon that drives the world's climate hotter (read: sarcasm). what about the wealthy glutton westerners who consumes, wastes food then 'carbonate' the atmosphere with their gas-guzzling vehicles?
deforestation??? how many acres of forest left in the so called developed countries? if not many left, what have the westerners did to afforest your land? the rich westerners are a bunch of plunderers! you 'came', you 'saw' & you 'conquered' our land in the last century after you ran out of your own resources. then you left us with your scraps and us hungry folks are left to mend our land with whatever you left us. now you preach to everyone to take care of the environment. the same environment that the westerners have been polluting for the last century!
you are done with your deforestation! and are now filthy rich! and you just realised that while fattening your pockets, you are harming the environment. so, now you preach to the easterners to keep the forest to pay for your past sins! yeah. that's right! you guys can keep on living in your huge mansions, drive your humvees, drink your wines and eat your pork chops while the easterners should continue living in the dark forest with our mosquitos, leeaches and orang utans while eating tree bark and drinking from the puddle! all in the good name of the 'environment'. ohhh... you westerners are a bunch of caring lots! (again read: sarcasm)
i got 2 words for you - BL**DY B*ST*RDS!!!
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