Palm Oil and Joseph's Technicolor Dreamcoat

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, the first collaboration between Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, tells the story of a young man named Joseph living in the land of Canaan. His father's favorite son, Joseph is physically well endowned in the looks department. While the rest of his brothers are forced to wear sheepskin, he struts around in a fabulous rainbow-colored coat, a gift from his adoring father. The rest of Joseph's brothers aren't too pleased with the situation, and when Joseph goes so far as to tell them of a dream he has had in which their stacks of wheat bow down to his stack of wheat, they decide they have finally had enough.

Joseph's brothers abduct him, destroy his cherished coat, and toss him into a pit to perish. But when a group of slave traders came trotting by on their donkeys at the last minute, the brothers have a change of heart and decide not to murder Joseph, but rather to sell him into slavery. Either way, he's out of their hair, and this way, they make a little extra cash. So they slaughter a goat, bloody up Joseph's coat of many colors, and return to their father, feigning great sorrow at the unfortunate death of their poor brother Joseph.

Joseph, however, will not be put down so easily. After being sold to an Egyptian property owner and serving a brief stint in prison, he uses his dream-reading abilities to secure an interview with the Pharoah who is so impressed with the young man that he immediately appoints him Minister of Agriculture. Years later, when a severe famine hits the land, Joseph's brothers come begging for employment. Realizing that they don't recognize him, Joseph decides to stage a little surprise for his would-be murderers before he allows everyone to live happily ever after.

In many ways, an analogy can be drawn between the lot of palm oil and the tale of Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat. Just like Joseph, palm oil is similarly endowed and widely acknowledged to have many positive qualities such as the kind of ultra productivity and yield that is the envy of the edible oil producing world. Like Joseph who has an adoring dad, palm oil is hugely popular with food manufacturers and consumers on account of it healthful profile, possibly drawing the ire of its competitors. Green with envy and probably overflowing with the base emotions of Joseph's lowly brothers who plot murder and eventually sold him to slave traders, palm oil competitors' dirty fingerprints can be found all over the casus belli of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE) - palm oil and deforestation.The warning signs have been around for some time. In the mid-eighties, activist NGOs such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) loudly campaigned for the banning of palm oil as it is supposedly filled with saturated fat and therefore, hazardous to heart health.

The media went to town on this issue and it was only when tons of medical and scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals were brought to bear that palm oil was, in fact, heart friendly and healthful, that CSPI and others beat a hasty retreat. Today these NGOs have more or less conceded on the health issue.
(see: The Truth About Palm Oil http://www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=329&Itemid=811)

Of course, the Palm Oil Truth Foundation had always suspected that one or more of palm oil's competitors were funding these scurrilous attacks, but as is usually the case and as it is the nature of the beast in campaigns such as this, it was always difficult to catch the crooks red handed.

However, CSPI was not done. After lying low for some 2 decades, CSPI published a "report" called "Cruel Oil: How palm oil harms health, rainforest and wildlife" in which they made wild and unsubstantiated claims that palm oil cultivation was causing massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of biodiversity such as the orang utan.

The report was prepared with the assistance of Aid Environment listed as partners with Hivos — a Netherlands based civil society group with direct links to campaigns in Indonesia. Hivos, in turn, is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for up to two-thirds of its annual 100m Euro budget.

Before long, Greenpeace and FOE together with other green groups took up the cudgels. Dressed in silly orang utan suits, they campaigned long and hard for palm oil to be reined in to stop the alleged deforestation and orang utan extinction.

What is, perhaps, the most sinister aspect of Greenpeace and FOE's agitation against palm oil is the recent revelation by researchers Caroline Boin and Andrea Marchesetti in a well researched report entitled "Friends of the EU" (see: http://www.policynetwork.net/accountability/publication/friends-eu). This searing report amounted to an expose that the EU, through its environmental ministries and commissions is involved in funding up to 70% of the operating budgets of environmental NGOs such as FOE Europe is a dead giveaway that the real reasons for these baffling attacks is to protect oilseed crops like rapeseed and sunflower which are indigenous to the EU. It is inarguable that these EU oilseeds would find it difficult to compete on a level playing field, with "the cheapest oilseed crop in the world" especially in the production of biofuel, the use of which the EU has committed itself to promoting!

Says James M. Roberts, Research Fellow for Economic Freedom and Growth in The Heritage Foundation's Center for International Trade and Economics: "Greenpeace willfully ignores some inconvenient, yet vitally important facts. For starters, palm oil is environmentally friendly. On a per-liter basis, palm oil production requires less energy and land-and fewer fertilizers or pesticides-than other vegetable oils."

"What's more, Indonesia and Malaysia--both major palm oil and paper producers--have put 25 percent and 50 percent of their forest cover, respectively, off limits to development and established extensive wildlife protection efforts. In other words, both nations are being socially responsible."

"So what's the real driver behind the anti-development campaigns led by European green groups? First, let's consider Europe's vegetable oil producers, timber producers and paper manufacturers. They don't much like competition from the Asian market."

"European policymakers know protectionism is illegal, so they are trying to block imports on environmental and public relations grounds. EU member states support radical green groups which then demonize trade in foreign goods. What European policymakers and companies can't do legally in global trade courts they are trying to accomplish instead via the court of public opinion."

"Western multinationals shouldn't go along with what amounts to illegal protectionism that threatens to undo the decades-long drive to open markets led by Western nations."
It is pertinent to ask too why other oilseed crops like soy, rapeseed and sunflower should escape the scrutiny that palm oil is subjected to? After all, the oil palm share of world agricultural land is only 0.22 per cent.

The total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission of global agriculture is 17 per cent which is considered small compared with the burning of fossil fuel, which contributes 57 per cent of GHG emission.

The carbon footprint of oil palm cultivation globally is, therefore, 0.22 per cent times 17 per cent of the total or 0.0374 per cent of global GHG emissions.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, even if all palm oil cultivation takes place on converted peat-lands and rain-forest (which it definitely does not), it still occupies only 0.22% of the world's agricultural land, making it morally wrong and pure hyperbole to blame oil palm as a significant contributor to global warming.

Such gross hyperbole and factual embellishment does not help in the palm oil debate for, as the World Resources Institute (WRI) has demonstrated, there is a solution - plant new palm oil on degraded land which is already widely practiced in Malaysia, a key palm oil producer. Other than that, as WRI has taken pains to point out, close to one billion degraded hectares globally are available for forest rehabilitation.

This makes all this palm oil bashing all the more baffling, unless the crop itself poses a threat to entrenched edible oil and bio-fuel market competitors for its intrinsic ultra productivity and competitiveness!

In many ways, the inherent environmental properties of palm oil are plain for all to see but like Joseph, these intrinsic qualities are written in chalk on a board with a wet sponge nearby, eagerly provided by "sell-out environmentalists" like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth! THE END.

About the Author

Palm Oil Truth Foundation is an international non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation, without strings to the world of commerce and power. We are a people organisation, organised for the people and founded upon the principles of integrity and responsibility as a global citizen with the sole purpose of representing TRUTH to the global community about health, environmental and economic benefits of palm oil.

Author (palmoiltruthfoundation). Submitted on Tue, 1 Feb 2011 Time: 8:29 AM

Rating: Not yet rated

Comments

No comments posted.