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...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 [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Last week, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) contacted Cargill employees in over 20 countries to alert them to the company’s ties to rainforest destruction and orangutan extinction. The email urged employees to watch a recent eye-opening prime time NBC news story profiling the imminent extinction of orangutans due to unchecked palm oil expansion in Indonesia and [...]
Continue reading...Friday, November 2, 2012
After two days at the tenth annual meeting of the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), I had just about given up on hearing anything controversial. The RSPO is a multi-stakeholder group and process that aims to, in its own words, “transform the palm oil sector” by establishing a certification for palm oil that is [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, August 30, 2012
If you made $5 billion clearing a community’s forest and community food garden, polluted and drained their rivers, but gave them a tree and a bucket of clean water in return, would you feel justified saying you’re building healthy communities, preserving rivers and reducing deforestation? Would you pat yourself on the back? Maybe not, but [...]
Continue reading...Monday, July 9, 2012
With palm oil in half of all products for sale in US grocery stores, we have the right to know the true cost of its production. Cargill is the #1 importer of palm oil into the US, but the company refuses to be transparent about who it does business with. For instance: Is Cargill still [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, March 7, 2012
The latest development within the RSPO could be debilitating to its mission. This past November, a delegation from Rainforest Action Network (RAN) attended the ninth annual Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) meeting in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. Unfortunately, not enough RSPO members attended the last RSPO meeting to meet quorum so its annual General Assembly [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Since joining RAN’s forest program over two years ago, I have read and written about the many dire consequences of industrial scale palm oil plantations in Indonesia: one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, critical habitat for endangered species like orangutans destroyed, gross human rights abuses and labor conditions, and social conflict between [...]
Continue reading...Friday, December 2, 2011
As the 9thAnnual Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) meeting wrapped up on the island of Borneo, the crisis stemming from the uncontrolled expansion of palm oil plantations into rainforests and communities reached a fever pitch. Consider this: In the few days that RAN’s four staff-member delegation attended the RSPO meeting in SE Asia, the [...]
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Thursday, May 16, 2013
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