Palm Oil Critics Can’t See the Trees for the Forest
Written by Pam Anderton
Saturday, 16 May 2009
As I was shown to my seat by the window of Freemason’s Arms, a quaint pub located in Convent Garden, London, the strains of the Paul McCartney penned song drifted softly over from the speaker placed just off the bar:
The pound is sinking, the peso’s failing The lira’s reeling and feeling quite appalling…
Well I fear my dear that it’s eminently clear That you can’t see the trees for the forest Your father was an extraordinary man but you don’t seem To have inherited many of his mannerisms Oh, any of his mannerisms…
My mind wandered as I contemplated on the lyrics. This song was composed way before the Euro Zone and long before the common currency.
It struck me as an apt description of the state of the environmental movement. Once regarded as an honorable calling, the current crop of environmentalists, typified by the likes of Greenpeace, the Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) do not seem to have inherited any of the traits of their forebears - good honest environmentalists who were more concerned with promoting environmental conservation rather than aligning themselves with unjust and unsavoury causes, even if the causes resulted in a bulging bank account.
Recently, The Independent has taken up the cudgels and joined the lucrative palm oil bashing bandwagon for reasons best known to the paper. However, the timing of their series of articles from Mayday 2009 coincided with the publication of a Dow Jones Newswire report on the dire financial straits of The Independent’s parent company, The Independent News and Media who were facing imminent financial default, having failed to reach agreement with bondholders over a €200m (£179m) bond. The newspaper’s circulation had also been falling precipitously, marked by a sharp drop in circulation of 15.44% to 204,384 compared with 241,702 last year. Its Sunday edition fared even worse. It suffered an even bigger decline in circulation, down 21% to 169,777!
The thought crossed my mind that McCartney must have had the environmentalists such as the aforementioned Greenpeace, FOE and RAN in mind when he chose the phrase “you can’t see the trees for the forest”. This, to my mind, is a deliberate play by McCartney on the original popular saying: “you can’t see the forest (sometimes substituted by the word “woods”) for the trees”!
The latter original phrase meant that a person can't see the forest (overall picture) because he/she concentrates too much on the details (trees).
In the context of palm oil, the environmentalists are guilty of glossing over the truth, the details of the matter as they fail to see that each of the allegations that they have been feeding the public on palm oil are fallacious and have no grounding in fact.
Let’s take a look at the two main contentions made against palm oil by the likes of Greenpeace, FOE and RAN:
#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.
In the view of Deforestation Watch, it is clear that the doomsday scenarios on palm oil and deforestation painted by Greenpeace, FOE, RAN and now, The Independent have no basis in fact and reflects on their collective inability to see the trees for the forest! THE END.
