I love the sight of cows lying in the field, chewing their cud. But what is cud? And why do they spend so much time chewing it?

Cows first fill their stomachs with grass and other food. Then they settle down for a good long chew. They bring the food back up from their stomachs and rework what they’ve already eaten, assimilating its goodness and transforming it into rich creamy milk. Time-consuming? Yes. A waste of time? Not if they want to give good milk.

In the same way,isn't it about time that the international media spend some time “chewing the cud” on the issue of the spurious palm oil campaigns launched by an entire cabal of “green” and “civil society” groups like such as the oddly named Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE), the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), the WWF and even zoos such as, wait for this… the Melbourne Zoo, the Auckland Zoo and the Philly Zoo?

Instead of taking the press releases and “reports” released by these rabble rousers hook line and sinker, it would be prudent for the media to examine the background and facts surrounding their agitation against palm oil.

If the media do chew the cud and considered the facts, they’d find the anti-palm oil campaigns to be highly incongruous!

For contrary to the phony and specious “reports” issued by these agitators alleging that palm oil is responsible for massive deforestation on a scale that threatens the extinction of exotic wildlife such as the orangutan, the media would find that palm oil is probably one of the most benign of all oilseed crops, environmentally speaking!

After all, palm oil is cultivated on just 0.23% of the world’s agricultural lands and yet produces a whopping 30% of global palm oil supply! If we were to juxtapose the total area under palm oil cultivation against the entire available global land, the percentage planted with palm oil drops to insignificant numbers.

Yet the rabble rousers such as the Melbourne Zoo would have the world believe that palm oil’s role in deforestation are so great that “"98 percent of the rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia will disappear" within a mere 8 years due to palm oil cultivation.” Sadly this bizarre claim came from a UN body (UNEP), a claim that reduces this august body to the same level as religious loons like Harold Camping and his Oakland based Family Radio who predicted that the world would end on May 21st 2011.

Malaysia was erstwhile the world’s largest producer of palm oil for over a century. Yet after planting palm oil for more than a hundred years, Malaysia can still boast forest cover of 56% (FAO 2007) which dwarfs the forest cover of 14-20 per cent prevalent in the developed west from which these agitators hail! If their claims were true, Malaysia would have just 2% forest cover by 2020 (a mere 8 years from now), a claim that is laughable considering the historical performance of the industry!

On the issue of orangutan extinction, the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), one of the worst agitators on this issue, was forced to quietly remove from their website their wild allegation that palm oil cultivation would lead to the extinction of the orang utan by 2011. Well 2011 is now over and the orang utan population in the wild has grown instead of going extinct when new tribes of more than 2000 wild apes were found in the East Kalimantan province of Indonesia, as reported by National Geographic. With roughly 50,000 orangutans thought to remain in the wild, the new find could add 5 percent to the world's known orangutan numbers, said Erik Meijaard, senior ecologist for the Nature Conservancy in Indonesia.

In the final analysis, Palmhugger.org wonders whether the true reason for all the flak that palm oil attracts is the incredible yield that the commodity is blessed with, a yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare that is close to 10 times that of its competitors! This is something for the world’s media to chew the cud on.THE END