One of the UK’s youngest national dailies, The Independent was launched in 1986 to much fanfare.  Originally a respectable broadsheet, the paper switched to the cheesy tabloid format in 2003, ostensibly to boost circulation and stay in business.

Faced with a dwindling readership, The Independent suffered the steepest decline in its short history when it registered a sharp drop in circulation of 15.44% to 204,384 compared with 241,702 last year.  Its Sunday edition, affectionately called the Sindy fared even worse. It suffered an even bigger decline in circulation, down 21% to 169,777!

There were also ominous signs on the horizon, when it was widely reported that the media group ontrolling The Independent, that is The Independent News and Media (INM) had failed to reach agreement with bondholders over a €200m (£179m) bond, and was in danger of defaulting!

Desperate times calls for desperate measures, so it’s perhaps no surprise that The Independent has joined the lucrative palm oil-bashing bandwagon.

On Mayday 2009, the Independent published a “report” alleging that palm oil “is to be blamed for a tree-felling rampage in Southeast Asia, driving the destruction of the rainforests, displacing native people and threatening the survival of the orangutan!”

Pointing out that palm oil is present or suspected in more than 43 of the top 100 best selling brands in the UK including Hovis and Kingsmill bread, the country's best-selling margarine Flora, KitKat and Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars, as well as Dove soap, Comfort fabric conditioner and Persil washing powder, the paper made the inevitable Freudian slip as to the real reason for it’s investigative report, “that all this comes amid a surge in demand for the world's cheapest cooking oil!”

Let there be no illusions.  The climate change industry is a lucrative one with many integrity-challenged organizations happy to compromise their ethical beliefs for the greenback that governments, corporations and even lottery boards  are quite happy to throw their way.  This explains why this industry (yes, climate change IS an industry) has drawn a disparate cohort of organizations and individuals ranging from pandering politicians, celebrities, demagogues and dishonest scientists to forge a self interested movement whose proposed policy initiatives could ultimately devastate the economies of the developing 
countries they purport to help!

Chief amongst these who have not displayed any reluctance to join the current frenzy over global warming has been Greenpeace, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).  Jumping on the climate change platform to demonize palm oil, Greenpeace, FOE and RAN have not shown any reticence to spew forth a bunch of mistruths and half-truths against palm oil. Now that The Independence has joined this secret cabal of climate change mercenaries, the time has come for the untruths to be called out and exposed:

#1:  Palm Oil driving rainforest destruction

Palm oil is the most productive of all the oilseed crops, for the simple reason that it has 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 that palm oil is 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 as it threatened the monopoly of established oilseed crops such as rapeseed, sunflower and soy.

Secondly, it is well established that palm oil is a perennial tree crop - one that does not require replanting for some 20 to 30 years.  Palm oil is therefore inherently superior in terms of sustainability to other oilseed competitors such as soy, rapeseed and sunflower, all of which are known for their inefficient land use as they require annual replanting, fertilization, etc.  Thus in terms of sequestration of CO2, it can be said that palm oil plantations, which are virtually “planted-forests” is hard to beat!

Finally, the extreme yield and productivity of palm means that less land is required for palm oil plantations to produce the same amount of oil as the competing oil seeds. This is borne out by the fact 65% of Malaysia remains forest land after more than a century of cultivating palm oil plus other crops like rubber, cocoa, etc.  Moreover, the oil palm planted area of 4.3 million hectares represents a mere 0.09% of the global planted area (read that again, 0.09%) which obliterates the wild allegations of the likes of CSPI,
Greenpeace, FOE, RAN and now the Independent that palm oil is adding substantially to deforestation and global warming!

#2:  Palm Oil is threatening the extinction of the orang utan

A recent study showed that the orang utan population in the wild in Sabah (Malaysia Borneo) has not shown any decline but has, in fact, grown as the permanent forest area has not changed over the last 5 years.  With orangutan in the wild population in Borneo alone currently estimated at between 45,000 and 69,000, it behooves one to ask just how is it even remotely possible for the orang utan, by any leap of logic or stretch of imagination, to have their survival threatened?  

This does not even take into account the many conservation programs and orang utan enclaves
established by Malaysia and Indonesia. Orang utan conservation centres had been established in Indonesia including those at Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan, Kutai in East Kalimantan, Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, and Bukit Lawang in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the border of Aceh and North Sumatra. In Malaysia, conservation areas have been set up and they include the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre in Sarawak and Matang Wildlife Centre also in Sarawak, and the Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary near Sandakan in Sabah.
 
Further, the recent discovery of more than 2,000 wild orang utans by scientists in Indonesian Borneo  has left many environmentalists red faced, especially RAN which had predicted that the orang utan would go extinct by 2011 (in 2 year’s time). The new find could well add 5 percent to the world's known orangutan numbers, said Erik Meijaard, senior ecologist for the Nature Conservancy in Indonesia.

Finally, in the view of Deforestation watch, the time has come for the fear mongers, including The Independent to realize that, in the absence of incontrovertible evidence that the most sustainable of oilseed crops, that is palm oil, is in fact unsustainable, their fear mongering and hysteria will eventually be exposed for what it is – a moral pretense which actually disguises immoral motives and agendas!THE END