After four years of savvy campaigning by Girl Scout activists Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen, Girl Scouts USA (GSUSA) has finally acknowledged its role in rainforest destruction by releasing a commitment regarding its use of palm oil in its iconic cookies. Unfortunately, the statement on palm oil just released is a small step in the [...]
Continue reading...Monday, August 22, 2011
This post was written by Andrew Ng, a RAN ally and committed activist who has spent more than a decade working on forest issues. What is the future of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)? Clearly the Malaysian palm oil sector — including both industry and government — wants to challenge it with the [...]
Continue reading...Friday, August 12, 2011
Malaysia Sustainable Palm Oil. Photo: astromediashop As I reported on Monday, the Malaysian government—hand in hand with the country’s largest palm oil companies—is attempting to undermine the RSPO’s “sustainable palm oil” certification standard by creating its own certification. Problem is—the Malaysian palm oil industry’s version of “sustainable palm oil” is pure greenwash which is extremely [...]
Continue reading...Monday, August 8, 2011
If a massive palm oil company decides that getting its plantations certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is, well, just too hard, what do you think happens? The Malaysian government comes to the rescue, of course, and comes up with a solution that will allow IOI — the largest palm oil plantation [...]
Continue reading...Friday, August 5, 2011
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 [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, July 14, 2011
“Whether we like it or not it is very largely our industry which is providing the economic incentives for individuals and companies to chop down trees… Between us, we spend billions of dollars buying these commodities. We can make a difference if we buy them differently and better.” – A senior Unilever executive in a [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Today, Cargill updated its palm oil commitments. While it’s significant that Cargill has committed to a global baseline of RSPO certification, the RSPO in its current form does not guarantee that certified palm oil entering U.S. consumer brands is free of ties to deforestation, climate change, species extinction, human or Indigenous rights violations, and/or slave [...]
Continue reading...Friday, July 1, 2011
The first blog post in this series explored the environmental, social, transparency and enforcement weaknesses of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the dominant certification standard for palm oil companies. This post examines the colorful spectrum of positions on “sustainable” palm oil, from environmental advocacy and conservation groups to scientists and industry groups. Organizations [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, June 22, 2011
What is Sustainable Palm Oil? Part one of a three-part series. Palm oil has become an increasingly hot topic over the last year. This thick, long-lasting oil is found in almost half of all consumer goods sold in grocery stores and it is also a main driver of rainforest destruction in Indonesia and Malaysia. As [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Last Monday, IOI Group received an unexpected visit from a group of activists who delivered a large photo of the community of Long Teran Kanan, a community whose traditional lands have been converted to plantations by IOI Group. Along with this powerful photo, the group also delivered the following statement from Rainforest Action Network to [...]
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Thursday, September 29, 2011
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