 Much as FIFA had the world of football collectively shaking their heads with disbelief and incredulity at the sheer scale of fraud, corruption and wrong doing going on within the supposed guardian of the game of soccer, the UNEP’s credibility is slowly going down the same slippery slope, except that in the UNEP’s case it is a case of an organization that recklessly publishes without fact checking the wild and unsubstantiated allegations of green groups on palm causing massive deforestation and thus threatening the extinction of orangutans.
One may stop to wonder why and organization like the UNEP, set up in 1972, with a mission to promote processes of development that are in harmony with the imperatives of nature could lend its name to something so grossly wrong and untrue. Its original declared objective was to get other United Nations agencies, governments and actors in civil society to internalize the environment into their decision-making processes. Its primary mode of operation was catalytic - to reorient their thinking and activities through small and temporary, but critical and highly-levered, inputs of knowledge and money.
Partly in recognition of the close connection between poverty and environmental degradation - and as a commitment to give the highest priority to these issues - it was the first major United Nations body to have its headquarters in a developing world capital, Nairobi.
Somewhere along the way, the UNEP lost sight of its original objectives and published in 2007 the infamous report where it alleged “that 98% of natural rainforest in Malaysia and Indonesia could disappear by 2022, with palm oil production seen as a key driver of the destruction that sees the equivalent of 300 football pitches of forest wiped out each hour."
This report formed the basis of the Melbourne Zoo’s ill advised “Don’t Palm Us Off” campaign. In a radio interview with the ABC’s “The World Today” program circa June 22nd 2011, the zoo’s Director of Conservation quoted the UNEP’s report to justify the zoo’s campaign against palm oil.
As things stand, the UNEP’s credibility has sunk as low as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who’d embarrassed the UNEP with their rampant reliance on unreliable sources to justify their claims.
Clearly no one had advised Ms Lowry that although the UNEP sounds officious enough, they are not renowned for fact checking. For instance, the chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.
(see: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999975.ece).
Obviously, no one has yet advised the UNEP that their claims on palm oil deforestation makes the erstwhile august UN body look silly and renders the body’s credentials unreliable and doubtful as their claims, if true, would mean that Malaysia would have forest cover of just 2% in 11 years time.
If we examine the facts, it is indisputable that Malaysia had been the world's largest producer for more than a century. Yet after planting palm oil for more than a hundred years, the country can still boast forest cover of 52%! Remember that Malaysia is a small country with a land mass that’s roughly the same as Vietnam.
That such forest cover can be retained after planting palm oil intensively for more than a century is due in large part to the hyper yielding nature of palm oil which has an inherent yield that is up to ten times higher than its competitors. In fact palm oil is planted on only 0.23% of the world’s agricultural land and yet it produces a staggering 30% of the world’s supply of edible oil, which makes it currently the world’s market leader in edible oil.
Such hyper yields only mean one thing - palm oil prices would be lower than its competitors. Deforestation Watch aka Melbourne Zoo Watch is compelled to wonder whether the current anti-palm oil hype would still exist if the crop was not that hyper yielding and thus ultra-competitive?
In the final analysis, consider what would happen if Malaysian and Indonesian plantations were to stop palm oil production for a year? It would be interesting to see the panic as over 52% of the total world oils and fats exports will disappear (2006 figures and probably higher% now).
The average palm oil yield per year is nearly 6 times that of its nearest competitor, rape seed which is Australia's third most important crop, 8 times that of sunflower and 10 times that of soyabean.
In the final analysis, just why the UNEP would wager its credibility with such a flawed and factually wild and incorrect report is beyond comprehension. THE END
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