“Few things are more important than a company’s reputation with stakeholders.  It represents the sum of all that we do – and reflects the value and trust that consumers, customers, employees, investors and communities place in our company, our brands and our people. We constantly strive to remain worthy of that trust…” says CEO Ken Powell. You’re right about that, Mr. Powell – your company’s reputation is everything, and it’s massively at risk.

Unfortunately for General Mills, over three hundred concerned cereal eaters across the U.S. and Canada took to the streets last week for a National Palm Oil Week of Action and distributed 20,000 spoof Cheerios postcards.

Concerned citizens are raising awareness about General Mills’ role in rainforest destruction from California to Minnesota to Alberta, Canada: General Mills is definitely on the spot.

In the world of Corporate Social Responsibility, the past two weeks have been an exciting time for companies like General Mills, receiving awards such as ‘Top Corporate Citizen,’ ranking 47^th in the world’s  50 ‘Most Admired Companies’ and 29^th on the ‘Diversity List.’ These awards recognize the company’s strong global reputation – at least according to Fortune Magazine and global business leaders.

But what this small group of decision makers doesn’t know is that millions of Indigenous peoples, endangered species and forests are at risk from palm oil expansion in Indonesia – thanks to General Mills. More »

My alarm went off at 6:15am this morning and the excitement of butterflies in my stomach reminded me that the launch date had finally arrived! After four hours of sleep and months of preparations, I met up with 41 local Twin Cities community members concerned about palm oil’s contribution to tropical deforestation, global climate change, the rights of indigenous communities, and the survival of threatened species like the orangutan. Specifically in question: the corporate ethics of one of the most trusted American food giants based right here in Minneapolis, MN – General Mills.

Why is the maker of such powerful brands as Cheerios, Haagen Dazs, Progresso soups, Betty Crocker and Pillsbury – that cater mostly to parents and kids across the U.S. – stalling on taking action to protect our world’s forests increasingly threatened by big Agribusiness’ industrial palm oil plantations?  What will it take to get them to listen?

I know of one thing that got their attention- a massive, bright yellow 30 x 70 ft. banner getting unfurled in the snowy, wintery morning light at their Headquarters in Golden Valley, MN! At 11:11am 42 people inspired by the prospect of getting General Mills to wake up and be a leader in the food industry held the huge message: “Warning: General Mills Destroys Rainforests” up high in the air for General Mills executives watching from their desks above to see. And that they did!

General Mills: Take Action!

Our campaign launch was an effective way to inform General Mills that we don’t have any time to waste – we need them to take action now as a company with a unique ability to affect the palm oil marketplace, both by changing its own consumption habits and by publicly taking a stand against rainforest destruction from palm oil.

So why General Mills, you may be asking?

General Mills has a very close relationship with Wayzata based Cargill, Inc. and purchases all of their palm oil from them, among other commodities. Cargill is the most powerful agribusiness and commodity trading group in the world, and as the largest privately owned corporation in the U.S., it’s also among the most secretive companies on earth. It owns plantations in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where it grows oil palm on freshly cleared rainforest land. It is also a major global trader of palm oil and the biggest importer of palm oil into the United States.

Over 100 of General Mills’ products in total contain palm oil. By purchasing from Cargill, General Mills is directly contributing to the destruction of Indonesian rainforests. We’re asking General Mills to stop buying palm oil from Cargill and we need your help – please take action by sending an email to General Mills CEO Ken Powell!

General Mills at a Crossroads

Be part of the solution: Join RAN in pressuring General Mills to become an advocate for change in the palm oil industry!

Check out Mongabay’s article highlighting our action!

For more information, visit theproblemwithpalmoil.org.

On the first day of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) Pak Jamaluddin was quiet. He said the air conditioning of Kuala Lumpor gave him the flu. He seemed lost among the groups of palm producers, with their Blackberries and dark suits.

Exhausted from the canoe rides, bad roads, the concrete maze of Jakarta, and the foreign environment of a Kuala Lumpor convention hall, I found Pak Jamaluddin on the second day of the RSPO outside, sitting cross legged on the sidewalk. He waved me over, and I sat with him. He leaned over to me as he whispered: “It is over. Our forest is gone. Duta Palma has flattened the last of it. We are finished.”

A few months before, I visited with Pak Jamaluddin in his village of Semunying Jaya. Deep in the interior of Borneo, his village had become a hotspot of rainforest destruction and human rights abuse at the hands of the palm oil producer Duta Palma.

More »

Four RAN activists, two dressed in orangutan costumes,  spoke to hundreds of neighbors at a fourth of July celebration in Wayzata, Minnesota to call attention to Cargill’s role in rainforest destruction.  Cargill, one of the world’s largest privately-held companies, is also the largest importer of palm oil in the U.S.  Palm oil is the leading driver of rainforest destruction in Southeast Asia.

Wayzata, home to the Cargill headquarters, is a small suburb outside of Minneapolis. Neighbors there were receptive to the leafletters and requested more information.  The orangutans handed out over 200 postcards and captive families gathered around to learn about palm oil’s destruction of rainforests.  Some signed the postcards, which will be gathered and brought to Cargill executives at a later date.

Said one of the orangutans from Minneapolis:  “The U.S. leader of rainforest destruction is right in our backyard.  We’re here to let Cargill’s neighbors know about it.  We look forward to continuing our awareness-raising efforts in Wayzata.”

To learn more about Cargill’s role in rainforest destruction, please visit www.ran.org/Cargill.

While watching the presidential debates last night, the first thing I noticed was that Stephen Colbert is right: John McCain sticks out his tongue more often than a lizard on a hot Arizona day.

The second thing I noticed was that McCain said some interesting things about biofuels (or, as we call them, agrofuels):

“Government spending has gone completely out of control… I know how to eliminate programs. I have fought against – well, one of them would be… a number of subsidies for ethanol. I oppose subsidies for ethanol because I thought it distorted the market and created inflation. Senator Obama supported those subsidies. I would eliminate the tariff on sugarcane-based ethanol from Brazil.”

Now, I’m fairly used to routinely disagreeing with McCain on just about every issue. (After all, this is the guy who voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday and consistently opposes increases in the Federal minimum wage.) But on this one, I have to admit that I agree with the guy. Kinda.

In the 2006 State of the Union Address, President Bush said that the U.S. should replace 75% of imported oil with alternative fuels – including corn-based ethanol – by 2025. Many environmentalists thought that supporting this was a no-brainer – after all, burning agrofuels is less polluting, and agrofuels don’t require any nasty wars for us to get them out of the ground and into our gas tanks.

The problem was that lots of people were only really thinking about the environmental cost of burning agrofuels, and weren’t thinking about the cost of producing them.

One of the big problems with corn-based ethanol is that U.S. agriculture is incredibly mechanized – and, thus, that producing corn for ethanol in the U.S. actually costs more in terms of carbon emissions than it saves. According to a research study by two top ecologists, a liter of corn-based ethanol contains 5,100 kilocalories of energy – but it takes 6,600 kilocalories worth of fossil fuels (diesel for the farm machinery, petroleum to make fertilizers and pesticides, etc.) to produce enough corn for that liter of ethanol. The idea that corn-based ethanol saves fossil fuels is a complete boondoggle: you’re actually using less fossil fuels if you just put gas straight into your gas tank, rather than using it even more petroleum to make the same amount corn-based ethanol.

In fact – as Old Man Grumpus pointed out in last night’s debates – corn-based ethanol production in the U.S. would be totally financially impossible if it weren’t for massive government subsidies. Already in 2006, the U.S. government handed out $5.1 billion in ethanol subsidies; rather than going to small family farmers throughout the Midwest, however, these subsidies are going to a handful of massive U.S. agribusinesses. Archer Daniels Midland alone made up 28% of the U.S. ethanol market in 2006. And as ethanol subsidies skyrocket, a handful of corporations are reaping the profits: ADM’s profits increased a whopping 107% between 2005 and 2007, while agribusiness giant Cargill’s profits increased 156% between 2006 and 2008.

So, as McCain suggested, why not just shift agrofuels production to countries in the Global South – where agriculture doesn’t use as much fossil fuels, and where you can grow crops (like sugarcane) that are more fuel-efficient?

Well, it’s not quite that simple.

The biggest problem with agrofuels isn’t that they cost a lot, or that they suck up more fossil fuels than they save. It’s that producing enough agrofuels to power our planet’s gas-guzzlers takes a heck of a lot of farmland – which results both in massive deforestation, and in displacing subsistence crops that people need in order to feed their families.

And we’ve seen this happening a lot in the last few years. Much like the U.S., the EU has decided that 10% of transport fuel needs to be made up of “renewable fuels” by 2020. But in order to produce this much agrofuels, Europe would have to convert more than half of its existing farmland to agrofuels production – which is, needless to say, impossible. So, instead, the Europeans are buying palm oil from Southeast Asia – which is fueling massive deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia. (Thus, the Indonesian palm oil industry plans on expanding palm oil plantations by 40,000 square miles by 2020 – an amount of rainforest the size of Kentucky.)

And if the land being used to grow agrofuels doesn’t come from burning forests, it usually comes from displacing crops that people need in order to eat. Rising global food prices have been sparking riots and protests by poor people across the world – and yet, while the Bush Administration blames food prices on rising oil costs and China, a leaked World Bank report in July 2008 found that increased agrofuels consumption in the U.S. and Europe has caused global food prices to rise 75%. As the UK’s former chief government science adviser put it, “all we are doing by supporting [agrofuels] is subsidizing higher food prices, while doing nothing to tackle climate change.” 

The fuel to fill our SUVs with agrofuels is coming out of the bellies of poor people in the Global South (figuratively, not literally).

And that points to the part of McCain’s argument that I disagree with. It’s not a matter of switching corn-based ethanol for sugarcane-based ethanol, or palm oil-based ethanol. It’s a matter of recognizing, once and for all, that agrofuels are a false solution.