Your Supermarket is Selling Rainforest Destruction! Get the Facts On Palm Oil and the US Snack Food Industry.

Palm oil touches our lives every time we take a trip to the supermarket. Palm oil and its derivatives are used in a ubiquitous array of packaged foods, including ice cream, cookies, crackers, chocolate products, cereals, breakfast bars, cake mixes, doughnuts, potato chips, instant noodles, frozen sweets and meals, baby formula, margarine, and dry and [...]

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Why ‘RSPO Sustainable Palm Oil’ is not responsible

When you go to the grocery store and you buy a bag of chips, a chocolate bar, crackers, ice-cream, doughnuts, frozen snacks or other candy, you may see a label on the products saying ‘RSPO Certified Sustainable Palm Oil’ or ‘Green Palm Sustainability.’ Such labeling makes it is easy to think that the product you [...]

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Indonesian Forest Protections Under Attack

I wish I didn’t have to write this blog post on Earth Day. The rainforest where I saw my first wild orangutan is under threat. I can’t believe it! There are many reasons to protect the Leuser Protected Ecosystem, a forest area on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Thousands of Indigenous people rely on the [...]

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Cargill Dead Set On Plantation Expansion; Orphaned Orangutan Calls on CEO Gregory Page in Wayzata, MN.

Meet Uttuh. She’s an orphaned Sumatran Orangutan who lost her forest home when it was destroyed for palm oil. Today she reached out to Cargill CEO Gregory Page at his headquarters in Wayzata, Minnesota for help. She’s got nowhere to go and hardly a limb to stand on. Uttuh’s treetop protest is just the latest [...]

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The Last Stand of the Sumatran Orangutan

This is the first blog post I’ve written for RAN. I’m the new senior agribusiness campaigner and I was hired because RAN believes that it is more urgent than ever that we take our palm oil work to the next level. I’m writing this post to lay out the next phase of our campaign to [...]

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An Open Letter From RAN: What Do APP’s New Commitments on Forests, Peatlands and Community Rights Mean for Buyers and Investors?

RAN has been campaigning since 2009 to persuade Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) to reform its destructive business practices. To that end, we have worked with dozens of major companies to develop policies that eliminate paper associated with rainforest destruction from their supply chains, including, most recently, Disney and HarperCollins. With APP’s newly announced Forest [...]

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BREAKING: Paper Giant APP Moves to Stop Pulping Forests; Now It’s APRIL’s Turn

Today is a day many of us only dreamed would come. Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), the controversial paper giant once referred to by the UK Guardian as “one of the most destructive companies on the planet,” claims it has silenced its bulldozers and pulled them from the most endangered rainforests of Indonesia. After years [...]

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10 out of 10! RAN Brings Seismic Shift to US Publishing Industry; Next Stop: APP

Wow. You know your brand is in the gutter when even Rupert Murdoch won’t buy from you because of your company’s bad reputation. But few companies have done as much to earn their bad name as Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). Responding to RAN’s campaign, Murdoch’s HarperCollins has just announced they will no longer buy [...]

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Dr. Oz Responds to the Pressure, But Doesn’t Go Far Enough To Correct His Mistake

Thanks to the 14,430 (and counting) of you who signed the petition we created along with Orangutan Outreach, Dr. Oz has begun to tell his viewers the full story about palm oil—on his blog. But he hasn’t done enough. According to news reports, Dr. Oz’s enthusiastic support for red palm oil inspired a buying frenzy. [...]

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RAN and Allies Call on APP to Respect Human Rights

While Asia Pulp and Paper’s (APP) questionable financial dealings and destructive impact on rainforests and the climate have been widely reported, the human rights violations and social conflict associated with the company’s expropriation of community lands are less well known. Last week, RAN proudly joined with several Indonesian and international human rights and environmental organizations [...]

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