This week, Lush Cosmetics announced that it is launching a new palm oil-free soap. The soap manufacturer has launched a two-pronged campaign to “make consumers aware of the impacts of palm cultivation on tropical forests and encourage other consumer-products companies, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Nestle, to reformulate their products using alternatives to palm oil.”

Says Brandi Hall, communications manager of Lush: "We believe that until global levels of palm use are cut dramatically, there is little hope of a workable sustainable palm oil industry, and the future of the forests, animals and people of Indonesia and Malaysia is bleak."

Ms Hall should explain just how “the future of the people of Indonesia and Malaysia” can be bleak if “global levels of palm oil use” are not “cut dramatically”.

Environmentalism, especially token environmentalism has earned the rare distinction of making people roll their eyes at the mere mention of the word.

In the view of Deforestation Watch, it is precisely such demonstrable ignorance of the issues that is discrediting and damaging the environmental movement.

Lush has exhibited in one stroke the absence of sense on the one hand and the hypocrisy and ignorance that deprives the local population of a livelihood on the other.

It also points to the stark reality that corporations are today unable to respond to righteous needs and needs the fig leaf of environmental tokenism to take cover before taking action for fear of displeasing one or the other lobby.

Now that “environmental” organizations like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) have shouted themselves hoarse claiming that palm oil plantations are destroying rainforests and consequently threatening the existence of the orang utan, it might make the independent observer laugh that the same scrutiny is not applied to palm oil’s competitors such as soy, rapeseed (Canola) and sunflower, all of which have wiped out more forests than palm oil ever will.

If we take the sequestration of CO2 as the holy grail, none of the competitors will come close to palm oil in view of palm oil’s innate quality as a perennial tree crop and extreme productivity. According to Mongabay.com “A single hectare of oil palm may yield nearly 6,000 liters of crude palm oil, outperforming soy, canola/rapeseed, and corn by ten- to twenty-fold. Further, the recent drop in palm oil prices have made it more attractive as a feedstock for biofuel production, opening an entire new market for the oilseed.”

Lush should ask themselves whether palm oil’s extreme productivity and ultra competitiveness are the real reason for all the hubris against palm oil? The knee jerk and head-in-the-sand response from Lush is at its mildest, tokenism at its worst.  However, in the greater context of economic development, actions such as this taken by Lush can only result in the deprivation of a legitimate pursuit of a national aspiration to improve the livelihood and lives of the local populations where palm oil is planted.THE END