Indian palm oil firms make Indonesian eco-disaster: Greenpeace

India should be wary of this Greenpeace "report" and other reports from green NGOs on this issue.
Palm oil has been buffeted for years by the ill winds of green NGOs with the support of major news media organizations despite the solid science showing that palm oil is healthy and sustainable. It is certainly intriguing why the environmental movement should get their knickers in a twist over palm oil despite the solid environmental record of the crop?

Now an Italian think tank, Libertiamo thinks they have uncovered the real reason for this baffling activism against what is probably the most sustainable of all oilseed crops, and the reason is raising a stink all around!

What is now clear about the green NGOs? anti-palm oil campaigns is that they are just part of an elaborate extortion scheme dreamt up and proposed by them, which has won the support of EU governments keen to support their indigenous uncompetitive commodities. They get generous grants from such governments. They also solicit money from the gullible public by harping of orangutan or deforestation issues that are based, at best on flimsy manufactured evidence, says Libertiamo.

To put it bluntly, these EU governments did not so much as flirt with the extortionists schemes of these green NGOs but have grasped their funding proposals with a full embrace as it helps erect artificial trade barriers against palm oil conveniently packaged as altruistic environmental campaigns!

In a paper entitled Taxpayer Funding, NGO Collusion and Manufactured Crises: A Case Study of Malaysia and Palm Oil, Libertiamo points out that since 2005, the European Commission has provided nearly ?5million (MYR 19,7 million) to the World Wildlife Fund and ?4 million (MYR 15,8 million) to Friends of the Earth. Climate Action Network (CAN) also received nearly ?1 million (MYR 3.9 million) in the past two years alone.

Says Libertiamo: ?European governments are spending significant sums ostensibly to engage in environmental advocacy in the developing world.? It also noted that ?the degree of conservation in many of these countries regularly exceeds those efforts in Europe, as well as other developed countries!?

These EU funded NGOs ?portray Malaysia and other developing countries as purveyors of environmental destruction, distorting facts and figures to suit themselves? and ?the promotion of these myths serves the interests of those organizations who hold their fundraising cup out to governments and the public, with ever more alarming claims fuelling their fundraising!?

Libertiamo concludes that ?NGOs have become peddlers of half truths to drive donations and attract government largesse. And donor governments support them, in the interest of uncompetitive domestic industries and neo colonial ambitions. They should both be held to account!?

Libertiamo notes that ?the criticisms against the industry are regularly based on claims MANUFACTURED BY NGOs that are not backed up by hard evidence!?

Noting the predilection of these NGOs to make ?spectacular claims?, Libertiamo observed that ?one of the most commonly used is a statistic that in SE Asia alone, the equivalent of 300 football fields are deforested every hour for palm oil plantations,? a claim that has been exposed as a ?significant distortion of facts? by the FAO?s recent ?State of the Forests ? 2011 report which observes that whilst rates of deforestation between 1990-2000 were high at a time of significant development in SE Asia, the trend had reversed dramatically between 2000-2010. Deforestation rates during this latter period ?more than halved, making the NGO claims of rampant expansion entirely false.?