Prevarications, Equivocations, Half-Truths and Palm Oil
Written by Ross Spencer
Monday, 25 August 2008
It has often been said that prevarications and equivocations using statistics are like the bikini. “What they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital!”
It was as a young kid that I first heard the word “prevaricator” used and the meaning and implications of the word has stuck with me ever since. I had pushed my elder brother and he had crumpled in a heap on the living room floor. His wailing had brought my mum running in from the kitchen. “What happened?” she asked. “He fell!” I answered, not too convincingly, knowing that my mum disapproved of lying. Taking one look at my brother, lying on the living room floor in a heap, she exclaimed with a hint of amusement: “You prevaricator!” I had never heard of the word before, but the meaning has stuck with me through this day. I knew that I had not lied but I had told only half a truth.
Environmental organizations are probably masters in this black art of prevarication, exploiting statistics to bend the truth, sometimes by using an ambiguity, an equivocation or omission of something material.
Take the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), for instance which recently made some wild allegations that Malaysia plans to increase palm plantations by one million acres and that the orang utan may go extinct by 2011. How Malaysia may increase such plantations by one million acres, RAN does not say. With a land mass of only 328,000 square km., Malaysia is a small country. Yet, despite being the world’s largest producer of sustainable palm oil and despite having developed palm oil plantations for over a hundred years, Malaysia can still boast forest cover of more than 65%. This is far higher than the 20% forest cover typically found in the countries of the industrialized West, from which lobbies such as RAN has emerged to take this unconscionable stance against palm oil! Take the Malaysian state of Sarawak which is the most active in developing palm plantations. Its agricultural to forest ratio is 8:76. Compare this to the United Kingdom for instance. The UK has the typical Western nation agricultural to forest ratio profile of 70:12.
Again alleging that palm oil plantations are threatening the extinction of orang utans, RAN claims that orang utans are “predicted to become extinct as early as 2011.” What RAN cleverly conceals is that the most recent estimate for population in the wild for the Sumatran Orangutan is around 7,300 individuals in the wild, while the Bornean Orangutan population is estimated at between 45,000 and 69,000. That’s prevarication of the highest order as any reasonably perceptive reader will be able to ask just how it can be possible, by any leap of logic, for orang utans to become extinct “as early as 2011”!
In the view of Deforestation Watch, a self-regulating mechanism must be found to regulate the campaign issues that environmental organizations should pursue. It is this pattern of constantly dishing out half truths by environmental organizations like RAN that will lead inevitably to the erosion or even destruction of the credibility of the environmental movement. Needless to say, this will eventuate in the demise of the environmental movement itself. THE END.
It has often been said that prevarications and equivocations using statistics are like the bikini. “What they reveal is suggestive but what they conceal is vital!”
