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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EU Commission Gives Increasingly Controversial Palm Oil Green Stamp

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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Warning to Banks: Don’t Finance Rainforest Destruction

Last week, RAN joined sixty environmental and social organizations, including a dozen Indonesian groups, in signing an open letter to banks and other financial institutions across the globe warning them to avoid investments in pulp and paper industry projects associated with deforestation and human right abuses in Indonesia. The letter highlights concern with companies associated [...]

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The Human Cost Of Palm Oil Expansion

“Before we had a happy life,” Ms. Gaong said she tells her grandchildren. “Now it’s a difficult life. There’s nothing left for them.” The recent story in the New York Times titled “Clashes Between Tribes and Agribusiness Increase in Malaysia” tells an all-too common story. It’s not a happy story. It’s the story of farming [...]

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ADM vs. Responsible Palm Oil & Human Rights

Unlike 2008′s showdown, nobody from RAN attended this year’s Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) shareholder meeting to hold CEO Patricia Woertz’ ass to the fire. Nonetheless, ADM did not get away without responding to tough questions about the company’s irresponsible palm oil supply chain. ADM, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors with operations in more [...]

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What is Sustainable Palm Oil? Part Three

This is the third and final installment in a series of posts that endeavors to answer a simple question: What is sustainable palm oil? The answer, of course, is anything but simple. The first blog post in this series explored the weaknesses of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the dominant certification standard for [...]

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Is the “Happiest Place on Earth” Driving Tigers and Orangutans into Extinction?

UPDATE: On October 11, 2012, Disney announced a comprehensive paper policy that maximizes its use of environmentally superior papers like recycled and eliminates controversial sources like those connected to Indonesian rainforest destruction. For more info, visit www.ran.org/disney. Young or old, when one thinks of the Walt Disney Company, the first images that come to mind are almost certainly [...]

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Roaring at Barnes & Noble with Tiki the Tiger

Leave it to the folks at Rainforest Action Network to make anything fun. As an intern with RAN, my job is basically to do whatever task I’m presented, so when Hillary Lehr asked the interns, Lindsay, Lola, and I, to do our own Roar at the Store at the local Barnes & Noble, I thought, [...]

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Will Cargill Fall for the Great Sinar Mas Greenwash?

After months of waiting for the results of the Sinar Mas “audit,” the controversial findings are finally public and it’s now up to Cargill executives to decide how they will proceed, i. e. whether or not to sever ties with the company known for its rainforest destruction and unsustainable palm oil practices. Read our open [...]

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