Destruction of these forests rapidly adds to climate change too, says their leader, John Sauven, Executive Director of Greenpeace, “because preparation of land for new palm oil plantations releases large amounts of carbon dioxide as it is drained and burnt.”

Sauven adds: "Greenpeace is demanding Unilever publicly calls for an end to the expansion of palm oil into forest and peatland areas and stops trading with suppliers that continue to destroy rainforests."

Unilever owns many of the world's consumer product brands in foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products.

Providing a suitable backdrop and starkly demonstrating the irony and sheer imbecility behind this action of Greenpeace is the fact that in recent weeks, protests and riots have broken out in some countries over the rising cost of many basic foods, such as rice, wheat and corn.

The head of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) called for urgent action to tackle the “silent tsunami” of rising food prices which threatens to push more than 100 million people worldwide into hunger, a quiet recognition of the dire consequences confronting the world’s poor today.

“This is the new face of hunger – the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago now are,” said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran, after addressing a British parliamentary hearing in London.

She said that like the 2004 tsunami, which hit the Indian Ocean leaving a quarter of a million dead and about 10 million more destitute, the food price crisis – the biggest challenge WFP has faced in its 45-year history – requires a global response.

“The response calls for large-scale, high-level action by the global community, focused on emergency and longer-term solutions,” she added.

Recalling the record $12 billion provided by the donor community for the tsunami recovery effort, Ms. Sheeran said “we need that same kind of action and generosity.”

Stressing the role of partnerships in fighting the food “emergency,” she said WFP has been working with donor governments, other UN agencies, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and other humanitarian actors, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to ensure a coordinated response.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced in the Swiss capital Bern that the United Nations (UN) will establish a task force to tackle the global food crisis.

Ban, who will head the task force himself, announced the decision after meeting with 27 key international agencies. The UN will take a series of emergent and long-term measures to deal with the crisis, he told reporters.  The UN chief said the first priority of the high-level task force would be to meet a shortfall of 755 million U.S. dollars in funding for the World Food Program.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick, who also attended the meeting, urged the international community to focus on the long-term measures on the food crisis. "This crisis isn't over once the emergency needs are met," he said.

 "I believe that today's call for action under the auspices of the UN secretary-general can help WTO members gather the necessary political energy in order to help developing countries to increase their food production capacity," says Pascal Lamy, director-general of World Trade Organization (WTO) after the meeting.

If we examine the reasons behind this rapid rise in global food prices, we cannot ignore the dramatic and concomitant rise in crude oil and petroleum prices from about US$20 per barrel just after the turn of the new millennium to the current heady heights of US$117 per barrel, due in all likelihood, to speculative activity.  Any responsible environmental organization would have foreseen that such severe dislocation in the price of petroleum would eventually lead to a concomitant increase in other commodity prices.

The obvious solution would have been to encourage increased productivity in food commodity production, both to feed the worlds population as well as to provide feedstock for alternative fuel sources such as bio-fuel and, ultimately to ensure that prices remained reasonable.   That was precisely what the palm oil industry sought to do.

Ironically, instead of supporting this agenda, “environmental organizations” such as Greenpeace launched a series of inexplicable and indefensible campaigns against palm oil claiming that palm oil cultivation would lead to deforestation.

The Deforestation Watch had, for some time now, warned about the danger of irresponsible posturing by opportunistic “environmental organizations”.  We were particularly concerned about the activities of organizations such asGreenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Wetlands.

In the view of Deforestation Watch, much as we support efforts to curb deforestation, we cannot condone actions that are irresponsible and based on faulty premises.  Actions that will ultimately lead to the kind of global food crisis that is confronting the world and looming large all over the world today!

For one, it is entirely fallacious that palm oil is responsible for deforestation, at least in Malaysia, the world’s largest producer of palm oil.  Much of Malaysia’s palm oil plantations are planted on legitimate agricultural land and logged over areas.  Malaysia too have for decades now, vigorously pursues policies of environmental protection with the promulgation and enforcement of various environmental laws such as the Environmental Quality Act, the Land Conservation Act and the National Forestry Act, “to minimize the impact of human activities relating to, inter alia, deforestation, agriculture and development of other resources on the environment.” The orang utan, as the Malaysian national mascot is totally protected. The commitment of the Malaysian Palm Oil Council to their conservation is clearly evidenced by the Council’s recent inking of a US$7 Million joint effort with the Borneo Conservation Trust and Bursa Malaysia to protect the animal.  

For another, green cover in Malaysia for the past five decades or so that the nation has been independent, continues to stand at an enviable sixty something percent.  If we add rubber and palm oil plantations to the equation, green cover over Malaysia grows to over 80%, far higher than the 20 percent or so green cover that is prevailing in much of the industrial West. So, it is patently untrue that palm oil in Malaysia has resulted in massive deforestation.

The Deforestation Watch has to ask, just what drives organizations such as Greenpeace, FOE and Wetlands to such irresponsible activism.  The gross incongruity of such action against palm oil by “environmental organizations” is eminently obvious to anyone with an inquiring mind.  Could “big oil” be providing the funds to these “environmental organizations’ given palm oil’s growing threat to “big oil” as a viable source for the production of “bio-fuels”?  Could competing oil seeds such as soy, rapeseed or sunflower be the unseen hand behind these irrational attacks against palm oil, given food manufacturers’ preference for palm oil as healthy edible oil and as an economical ingredient in the manufacture of foodstuffs such as chocolates, beverages and cookies etc.   The Deforestation Watch finds it difficult to even contemplate the possibility that these organizations are driven to pursue these unjust and unjustifiable activism against palm oil by their need for funds, eagerly provided by lobbies that have a vested interest to rein in palm oil, or at least, to slow demand for the oil and its growth.  

Whatever it is, these “environmental organizations” such as Greenpeace, FOE, Wetlands and others of their ilk will have the blood of the poor of this world on their hands, as their actions will have contributed to production scarcities leading to the sky rocketing price spirals in basic commodities that the world is now facing!  Apart from eventually losing their credibility, Greenpeace, the FOE and Wetlands, et al will ultimately, have to answer to the world community for their irresponsible and irrational role in contributing to the global food crisis!  THE END.