Netpardon,Palm Oil: Greenpeace and FOE eats, shoots and leaves
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Edited by: Greg Crowley MO, Marc Brandon, San Diego, Matt Tortoso, Rick Lee Cycling Coach for: Palm Hugger
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Word Count Netpardon: Greg Crowley MO, 1416
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 Time: 10:28 PM
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Sponsors: Spy Software, Stem Cell Skin Care Bruce Allen Scheller,Israel Grossman, Rick Lee Cycling Coach. Netpardon. Scott T Hornung Wilmington Family Dental. Greg Crowley MO.
Lynne Truss' lighthearted book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" was a huge commercial success. In 2004, the U.S. edition became a New York Times bestseller. The title was derived from a joke on bad punctuation:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots, and leaves.'
Having a comma after the word "eats" is a fatal error that changes the entire meaning of the last sentence. The words "shoots" and "leaves" becomes actions, instead of plants to eat.
When we think of it, the actions of Greenpeace, The Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the curiously named and now discredited Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) on palm oil resemble the actions of the panda in this story!
The sheer incongruity that a commodity which is so inherently heart friendly could come under such feral attack in the mid eighties by CSPI led by the inscrutable Michael Jacobson, who accused palm oil of being saturated fat, and therefore deleterious to heart health, surely takes some beating.
Unfortunately, for CSPI its allegations were based on such flimsy "scientific" grounds - so simplistic it will be observed, that it'd be hard put to pass muster for a high school science project, many scientific studies on the health effects of a palm oil rich diet had been conducted AND published in peer reviewed journals! When the weight of scientific evidence was brought to bear on CSPI's claims, the organization now largely discredited, retreated to their lair in Washington DC to plan their next move against palm oil.
It took some 2 decades but CSPI worked out a new stratagem, something with stickability that was so simple and devious that it could be described as diabolical. This time CSPI published a "report" called "Cruel Oil: How palm oil harms health, rainforest and wildlife", accusing palm oil of causing massive deforestation and global warming. Using the lovable orang utan as a visible icon for their report, CSPI alleged that palm oil cultivation was threatening their existence. Of course, the report was silent on the many conservation efforts taken by both Malaysia and Indonesia to protect the orang utans and made no mention of the many orang utan conservation centers set up in both countries.
The allegations of climate change also, was not something that could be easily disproved with scientific studies published in peer reviewed journals, as the science on global warming and climate change was still largely in its infancy. A favorite and commonly used ploy of green groups with an anti-palm oil agenda is take satellite imagery of a small part of a palm oil producing country like Indonesia showing large areas of logged over areas and then try to create the impression that the entire rainforest system of Indonesia has been decimated. This was a tactic used by Greenpeace and others of their ilk to stunning effect!
Sure enough, the mass media and other green NGOs fell for it and they were soon drumming up reports on the massive deforestation caused by palm oil and the imminent demise of the orang utan.
The sheer volume of these baseless attacks against palm oil by supercilious and opaque "Environmental NGOs" such as Greenpeace and the Friends of the Earth, appears to be moving the political process in the countries in which palm oil is proving to be a serious threat or making inroads against oil seed producers in those countries towards some type of policy restricting palm oil imports - but insidiously and cleverly disguised as policies to prevent deforestation and climate change.
However, the fact that palm oil cultivation occupies less than 1% of the world's agricultural area and yet the crop accounts for more than 30% of total world edible oil production proves that palm oil does not require quite as much land as its critics would want the world to believe. In fact, the crop is so productive that it has a typical yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is close to ten times that of its nearest competitor, such as soy, sunflower and rapeseed. That explains why Malaysia which is such a small country relatively speaking, could be the world's biggest producer of palm oil for more than a century.
Yet after cultivating the crop intensively for more than a hundred years, Malaysia still retains forest cover of 56%. That dwarfs the forest cover of 25% in Europe and 11% in the United Kingdom from where Greenpeace and FOE hail.
If these green groups really care about the environment, why do they remain silent on the 33 millions tons of carbon emitted during the annual process of coal mining in the UK. Yet the cultivation of palm oil which has been hailed recently by researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands as "the most efficient energy crop," is systematically demonized as destructive of rainforest and contributing to global warming.
The university's finding is a rejection of environmental NGOs and the anti-palm oil lobbyists who consistently claim that palm oil is unsustainable.
Its research found that palm oil, sugar cane and sweet sorghum are currently the most sustainable energy crops. These commodities also produce "far smaller quantities of greenhouse gases than fossil fuels".
The university's analysis considered nine different energy crops against nine different sustainability criteria with palm oil coming out on top while biofuel from maize from the United States and wheat from Europe scored far lower.
The report's author, Sander de Vries, concluded that sustainable sugar canes and oil palms get the most energy per hectare and cause the least environmental damage.
Another researcher, Dr Gernot Pehnelt, founder and director of GlobEcon, an independent research and consulting institute based in Germany, released a new study that revealed the biased and prejudicial nature of the EU's Renewable Energy Directive towards foreign biofuels.
The report, entitled "European Policies Towards Palm Oil: Sorting Out Some Facts," demonstrated that the assumptions contained in the directive about the ecological impact of foreign biofuels reflected political and not scientific or economic reality.
Dr Pehnelt came to the defence of the rich biodiversity in oil palm plantations, their excellent crown cover that oil palms provide and the yield per hectare advantages of this low-energy and low-fertilizer crop.
"Sadly, many of the claims that foreign biofuels, specifically palm oil, are a threat to the environment are seriously flawed, some even completely unfounded," he said, adding that the side effects of the flawed policies could give rise to political friction and trade disputes to severe economic handicaps for developing countries.
"This new study makes a strong case that RED discriminates against non-EU producers of biofuels, such as Asian palm oil.
"Perhaps most importantly, palm oil acts as a substantial driver of economic growth in the developing world, drastically reducing hunger and poverty in regions that actively cultivate this valuable crop.
"It's time for Europe to not only recognise the energy and environment benefits of palm oil, but also the suffering in low-income, tropical countries that palm oil critics continue to perpetuate," said Dr Pehnelt.
Given the above there is no doubt that green groups like Greenpeace and FOE have a selective inclination to gloss over ecological events of greater, even catastrophic proportions in their haste to condemn palm oil.
Finally, their ominous manipulation and cherry picking of facts to get consumers and multinational food manufacturers like Unilever and Nestle to ostracize palm oil should have alerted the media to the probability that Greenpeace and FOE have a propensity, like the literary panda, to just eat, shoot and leave and ignore the economic and social consequences of their actions that will inevitably be wrought on the hungry millions in the developing world! THE END.
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About the Author
Rick Lee Cycling Coach. Scott T Hornung Wilmington Family Dental. Bruce Allen Scheller,Israel Grossman. Netpardon. Greg Crowley MO. Edited for:Palmhugger is a palm oil advocacy site that makes no apologies for exposing the lies, untruths and equivocations on palm oil spewed by a coterie of environmental morons against the world's most sustainable edible oil and biofuel feedstock. We are part of a collective group of palm oil sympathizers that have grown tired of the blatant untruths, spin, lies and unfair trade bloc promoting activities of green NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE) against palm oil.
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