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 [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, April 25, 2013
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 [...]
Continue reading...Monday, April 22, 2013
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 [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, April 17, 2013
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 [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Could it be true that palm oil is not only bad for orangutans, but for our health too? According to institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute, the answer is yes. Based on its saturated fat content and effects on blood cholesterol, several such organizations have [...]
Continue reading...Monday, February 4, 2013
The public controversy around “America’s Doctor” is heating up. You may have noticed, for instance, the feature article in the most recent issue of New Yorker magazine titled “The Operator: is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good?” As we recently reported, Dr. Oz, a TV personality who advocates healthy living [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, January 24, 2013
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. [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, December 13, 2012
In what has become quite a local buzz, RAN just released a shocking video of police arresting a mother orangutan and her baby from a public bench in downtown Wayzata, Minnesota. To be perfectly clear, this mother orangutan, just like the hitch-hiking male orangutan that was arrested outside of Cargill’s HQ last week by private [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, December 5, 2012
In what has become an increasingly common sight in this upscale suburb of Minneapolis, homeless orangutans have once again been spotted protesting the agribusiness giant Cargill in locations across the Wayzata, MN region. This startling orangutan invasion escalated significantly yesterday when a mother and her baby were arrested by police in downtown Wayzata. Bystanders captured [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, December 4, 2012
The European Commission’s recent decision to accept palm oil as a “sustainable” transport fuel for the European Union is a huge set back for the protection of Indonesia’s remaining forests. As our world’s forests are converted into barren commodity concessions, exacerbating the connection between dwindling rainforests & climate change, political decision makers should be doing [...]
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Thursday, May 16, 2013
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