The Fate of Orangutans Is in Cargill’s Hands

Would you expect to get shot over 100 times in your own neighborhood? Probably not, but that’s what recently happened to a female orangutan when an agribusiness giant decided to set up shop by her house. Aan, a 15 year old orangutan, was shot by a plantation worker after wandering into a palm plantation, a [...]

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RAN Issues Statement in Response to False Palm Oil Claims by Cargill

Last week, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) contacted Cargill employees in over 20 countries to alert them to the company’s ties to rainforest destruction and orangutan extinction. The email urged employees to watch a recent eye-opening prime time NBC news story profiling the imminent extinction of orangutans due to unchecked palm oil expansion in Indonesia and [...]

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Big Questions Remain after Palm Oil Summit

After two days at the tenth annual meeting of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), I had just about given up on hearing anything controversial. The RSPO is a multi-stakeholder group and process that aims to, in its own words, “transform the palm oil sector” by establishing a certification for palm oil that is [...]

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Alert! Desperate Orangutans Spotted Panhandling in Minnesota

A small population of homeless Sumatran orangutans has reportedly been panhandling near the headquarters of agribusiness giant Cargill on the outskirts of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It seems these distraught red apes have descended on the small, affluent town of Wayzata to protest what they say is the destruction of their rainforest habitat for palm oil by [...]

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At What Cost?

Late last week, NBC’s primetime program “Rock Center with Brian Williams” aired an episode about the destruction of the last remaining orangutan habitat, the Tripa forest of Indonesia, for palm oil plantations. Rainforest Action Network helped with the behind the scenes legwork to get this important program on the air. Now we need to maximize [...]

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Tigers to Wall Street: Don’t Finance Rainforest Destruction

The President of Indonesia and top leaders of major Indonesian corporations were greeted by a colorful group of rainforest activists this week as they visited Wall Street to secure billions of dollars in US investment in some of the most environmentally and socially destructive industries in Indonesia. Supporters of Rainforest Action Network joined with members [...]

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Tell Cargill: Keep Corporate Influence Out of Science

Two weeks ago, the mainstream media caught fire with a Stanford study questioning the benefits of organic foods. It turns out the anti-organics study may have the fingerprints of agribusiness giants Cargill and Monsanto. That’s right, Big Ag has been bankrolling Stanford’s Food Security and the Environment (FSE) program. In fact, Cargill donated $5 million [...]

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Good News for Species on the Brink of Extinction in Tripa

UPDATE, 9.26.12:  BREAKING: Within the next 24 hours, Kallista Alam, 1 of the 5 major palm oil companies operating in Tripa, will have their operating permit WITHDRAWN. This is a highly important precedent-setting case, as this is the first in Aceh’s (Sumatra, Indonesia) entire governmental history. RAN members like you have helped to keep the [...]

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Meet the TPP: A Worldwide Corporate Power Grab of Enormous Proportions

As international trade negotiators gathered this week at a posh golf resort in rural Virginia to hammer out details of the proposed Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), they sought to project an image of inclusion and receptivity to public input. In reality, this high-stakes global corporate pact, now in its 14th round of discussions, is heavily [...]

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Stop ‘NAFTA on steroids’!

We just got word that a round of closed door negotiations will begin this week for the largest free trade agreement in history. We are talking about NAFTA on steroids—an 11-country free trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Right now, negotiations for the TPP are being conducted in secret. The corporate lobbyists pushing for this [...]

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