Palm Oil Truth Foundation
April 7, 2009
Source: Amazines.com

It was drama befitting a grand production on a global scale, albeit for 1 hour! From the remote Chatham Islands in the southern Pacific Ocean to Sydney's Opera House to the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building to Seattle's Space Needle, lights dimmed for 1 hour in a symbolic call to change the Kyoto Protocol.
In all, nearly 1,000 global landmarks went dark for an hour, including New York's Empire State Building, Paris' Eiffel Tower, the dome of St. Peters in the Vatican and the Christ the Redeemer statue on Mount Corcovado overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Yvo de Boer, the United Nations' top climate change official, said Earth Hour marked a global momentum to seek climate change mandates in the Kyoto Protocol, including controlling heat emissions. World leaders are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December to hammer out more climate change controls.

City after city in the United States dimmed their lights as Earth Hour moved across the continent. Joining the Empire State Building in New York was the iconic Chrysler Building. Even some neon signs in New York's Times Square and Broadway's theater dimmed their lights. Across the river in New Jersey, the lights went down for an hour at Thomas Edison's laboratory in West Orange.

In Washington, where climate change advocates have high hopes for the Obama administration's position on climate change, the Capitol Dome darkened as organizers held a candle-light procession.

On and on it went, with Chicago; Dallas; Houston; Las Vegas; Miami, Fla.; Nashville, Tenn.; Salt Lake City, St. Louis; and Tucson, Ariz., all marking Earth Hour. On the West Coast, the Space Needle in Seattle and the Santa Monica Pier & Ferris Wheel and Nokia Plaza in Los Angeles dimmed their lights.

Celebrities, media organizations and corporations lined up to support the event. In the view of Deforestation Watch, it is the empty posturing and deference to events such as these that does long term damage to the cause of environmentalism. Surely, turning off our lights for one hour on one designated day of the year to save our planet surely is a PR event at best.

But this is de-rigueur and quite typical of some environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (with the rather appropriate acronym “FOE”) who often resort to empty publicity stunts to promote their “causes”.

The FOE is not exactly reticent in employing such stunts to advance their campaigns. Take the actions of FOE in a recent but infamous anti-palm oil campaign. Encouraging its members to dress in orange colored orang utan suits to picket supermarkets such as Tesco that had the temerity to stock cookies, confectioneries and other products containing palm oil, FOE plumbed the depths of fair-play and succeeded only in alienating many who were, up till then, sympathetic to their cause.

Not to be outdone, activists from Greenpeace “donned furry orange orangutan suits last April and protested — making screeching jungle sounds and scaling Unilever office buildings in several European cities. The group singled out Unilever, one of the founding members of the palm oil roundtable, because it is a major palm oil consumer.” Prior to this, activists in Greenpeace had blockaded palm oil shipments from Indonesia to prevent the cargo from making its way to Rotterdam.

The Rainforest Action Network (with the equally odd acronym “RAN”) organized a sticker campaign encouraging its members to deface supermarket products on supermarket shelves containing palm oil with RAN produced stickers.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, when we slice through the gimmicks and the layers of cheap publicity stunts and hype employed by these recalcitrant “environmental NGO’s”, not a single thread of these anti-palm oil campaigns can stand the scrutiny of harsh scientific realities and hard facts.

For instance, the sheer productivity of palm oil exposes the anti-palm oil prejudice for what it really is – the commodity would be hard to stop except through the dissemination of the most radical and vile untruths on palm oil that these “environmental NGO’s could dredge up.

However, what the likes of Greenpeace, FOE and RAN failed to appreciate is that palm oil is the most productive of all the oilseed crops with an enviable yield of more than 4.5 metric tons per hectare. This dwarfs the miniscule 0.5 metric tons yield typical of its competitors such as soy, rapeseed and sunflower. This extremely high productivity means several things. For one, the enviable yield makes palm oil relative cheap and therefore popular with consumers, restaurateurs and food manufacturers alike. The healthful profile of the oil makes palm oil a formidable competitor in the edible oil stakes. The popularity and suitability of palm oil as a feedstock for palm based biofuel and biodiesel also triggered panic attacks with its competitors.

For another, the high productivity also means that less land is required for palm oil plantations to produce the same amount of oil as the competing oil seeds. Add the perennial nature of the palm oil tree (the tree is productive for 20-30 years and can be harvested annually without replanting) and it becomes patently obvious that it is one mean oilseed crop. Its high productivity meant that palm plantations can be and have been for the past decade or so been established on legitimate agricultural land, at least in Malaysia. There was really no necessity to clear forest indiscriminately to plant palm oil.

This explains why Malaysia, which was hitherto the world’s largest palm oil producer can still boast forest cover of 65% despite planting palm oil for more than a century! Ironically, the countries of the industrial west from which these paragons of conservation like CSPI, FOE, Greenpeace and RAN hail, can hardly claim 20% forest cover. THE END.