Greenpeace and FOE’s Palm Oil Agenda: Agents for Change or Agents of Soy?

By Jon Tomczyk

Dramatically portrayed as the greatest crisis in the history of civilization, global warming has had some bad press. Stories on it occupy the front pages of prominent newsmagazines such as Time and Newsweek and are featured prominently in countless media around the world.

The question that the Palm Oil Truth Foundation would like asked is whether such hysteria and headlong spending on extravagant CO2 cutting programs at exorbitant prices is the correct response. This is definitely debatable in a world where billions live in abject poverty and millions die each year of diseases that could have been cured if the billions that have been poured into CO2 mitigation programs had been diverted towards more sensible poverty eradication and disease prevention programs. Just think of the lives that could have been saved, societies strengthened and clean water supply improved at a fraction of the cost.

In the view of the Palm Oil truth Foundation, it is important to keep the numbers of malnourished and hungry in this world in context. How many hungry the world ends up with depends much less on climate than on demographics and income. In this scenario, it is obvious that social policy decisions are far more important than climate choices. These are decisions that would have an impact on the scale and distribution of global and regional resources.

Thus using climate policy to obtain a small reduction in hunger is simply not the best strategy. If we implement Kyoto, this would reduce malnutrition by 2 million people in 2080 for about a whopping $180 billion ANNUALLY. However, if we really care about helping the hungry, we can do much better. We could focus on simple measures like investing in palm oil agriculture such as improved soil health, water management, and palm oil agricultural technological research – and direct policies such as school meals and nutrient fortification (such as adding iodine to salt). The UN estimates that we could reduce hunger by 229 million people by 2015 for about just $10 billion annually!

That should be a no-brainer. Yet we have so-called environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and the FOE calling for restrictions on palm oil agriculture alleging that the crop was causing massive deforestation and thus contributing to global warming and threatening the extinction of exotic animals in the wild such as the orang utan.

The problem with Greenpeace and the FOE’s allegations is that palm oil happens to be the most productive of all the oilseed crops such as soy, rapeseed and sunflower, often yielding 4.5 metric tons per hectare, a good ten times the productivity of the competing oil seeds. What this effectively translates to in real terms is that palm oil requires ten times LESS land to produce the same unit of edible oil as its competitors, which exposes the lies spread by the likes of Greenpeace and FOE.
It is also well known that palm oil is inherently healthful packed chockfull with heart friendly nutrients like Co-Enzyme Q10, beta-carotenes and toco-trienols ( a superior form of Vitamin E). Its high productivity and consequent price competitiveness also ensure its popularity with multinational food manufacturers and processors.

In fact, it is precisely these virtues and the high productivity of palm oil that could be attracting these attacks from “environmental organizations” like Greenpeace and FOE. A pertinent question to ask is this: “Could Greenpeace and FOE be hired guns by some competing oilseed lobby, to keep palm oil cultivation from further expansion?”

The Palm Oil Truth Foundation is of the view that such blatant misrepresentation of the facts and gross misuse and abuse of the environmental movement by Greenpeace and FOE will not help resolve any issues. It is time that the main stream media dismisses the hysterical catastrophism that is so all pervasive with environmental extremeists such as Greenpeace and FOE and brings to the debate intellectual rigor to consider the sober economic options and ethical considerations that really matter!

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