This Nursery Rhyme tries to teach the reality of consequences through its lyrics. What an inspired and simple set of lyrics to encourage a child to apply logic to the consequences of their actions. Often used to gently chastise a child and explain the possible events that might follow a thoughtless act, the references to horses, horseshoe, riders, kingdoms and battles indicate the origins of this nursery rhyme were probably set in England.

It is indeed sad that something so elementary and basic is lost on the officials of environmental organizations such as the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Greenpeace, the Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the infamous alphabet soupy Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). For reasons best known to them, they have elected to attack palm oil, accusing the commodity of a litany of ills ranging from the suspect to the ludicrous!

First, CSPI launched a smear campaign alleging falsely that palm oil was a saturated oil and therefore unhealthy and dangerous for heart health.  When dozens of scientific studies conclusively disproved this and set the record straight that palm oil was, in fact, cholesterol-free, rich in antioxidants and terrific for heart health (i), CSPI abandoned the campaign and retreated to their lair in Washington DC to look for a new stratagem to attack palm oil.

Half a decade later, CSPI re-emerged with a new stratagem.  Releasing a “report” called “Cruel Oil: How Palm Oil Harms Health, Rainforests and Wildlife”(ii), CSPI have deviously shifted their campaign to pushing the lie that palm oil is responsible for massive deforestation thus harming and threatening the extinction of, inter alia, the orang utan.

The media picked up on the unsubstantiated charge and then something strange happened.  One environmental NGO after the other jumped on the bandwagon. The strange thing was the manner in which a new NGO would pick up the cudgels as soon as the other wrapped up their campaign, leading to the irresistible conclusion that the actions of CSPI, followed by Wetlands, followed by FOE followed by Greenpeace and then RAN were hardly coincidental.

In the view of Deforestation Watch, the actions of these environmental NGO’s were part of a planned program of dishonest militant activism against a defenseless third world commodity.  What is most reprehensible is that the plotting and scheming of this cabal of “environmental organizations” against palm oil is obviously coordinated and funded by a sinister lobby of some substance.

The evidence flies in the face of the bald-faced lies spun by these “environmental organizations”!  

For one, Malaysia still has more than 65% forest cover, despite being the largest producer of palm oil for the past 100 years!  65% is certainly far more than the 20% forest cover prevailing in the industrial west, from which these paragons of “environmental conservation” like CSPI, FOE, Greenpeace and RAN hails.

For another, RAN has gone so far as to allege in their official website that the orang utan could become extinct by 2011, a short three years hence.  At the risk of sounding facetious, Deforestation Watch has to ask, in the interest of fairplay, how this could conceivably be even remotely possible when at last count the Bornean Orangutan population alone is estimated at between 45,000 and 69,000. How can it even be possible for the 45,000 orang utans to disappear from the face of this earth within any reasonable time frame, let alone three years?

Thirdly, palm oil is a highly productive tree crop, so productive that one hectare of palm oil plantation yields 4.5 metric tons of palm oil, far higher than the typical 0.5 metric tons yield of the competing oil seeds, such as soy, rapeseed or sunflower.  This high productivity explains why palm oil is principally grown on legitimate agricultural land in Malaysia.  There is really no necessity to decimate the forest to plant palm oil, and this is borne out by the high forest cover prevailing in Malaysia despite more than a century of palm oil cultivation.

Deforestation Watch observes that the elementary lessons of the nursery rhyme above appears to be lost on the officials of these incendiary “environmental organizations” such as RAN, FOE and Greenpeace.  In attempting to destroy a crop that is, by its very nature, a highly sustainable and highly productive feedstock for biofuel and biodiesel and a source of cheap and healthful edible oil, these environmental miscreants like RAN, FOE and Greenpeace has triggered off the mother of all unintended consequences – a global fuel and food crisis with food riots breaking out in the impoverished parts of the world.  In so doing, RAN, FOE and Greenpeace stands indicted for having the blood of the poor of this world on their hands!  THE END.

References:
(i)  See “The Truth About Palm Oil”,
http://www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=329&Itemid=811(ii

(ii) See “Cruel Oil:  How Palm Oil Harms Health, Rainforests and Wildlife”,
http://www.cspinet.org/new/pdf/palm_oil_final_5-27-05.pdf