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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RAN Staff Finds Deforestation And Violence For Palm Oil Unchecked By The RSPO

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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Victory for Indigenous Rights in Indonesia

In a huge win for Indigenous and forest dwelling peoples throughout Indonesia who are struggling to assert their customary land rights in the face of massive palm oil expansion, Chief Justice Mahfud M.D. has ruled that two Articles of Indonesian law used to imprison community members are unconstitutional, unlawful and invalid. Articles 21 and 47 [...]

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Slave Labor For Palm Oil Production

Despite the 7.2 magnitude earthquake, tsunami and successive volcanic eruptions from Mt. Merapi this November, I made my way to Indonesia to attend the 2010 Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil conference, meet with allied organizations, and visit highly disputed palm oil plantations. The rapid proliferation of palm oil plantations has had grave effects on Indonesian [...]

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Palm Oil’s Effects On Communities Around The World

Did you see The New York Times Op-Ed on Saturday titled “The World Bank’s Palm Oil Mistake“? I sure did. The author, Thompson Ayodele, provided a narrow perspective on the World Bank’s recent decision to continue it’s freeze on new lending to palm oil projects around the world until it’s framework and strategy is clarified. [...]

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Questions Raised on Billion Dollar Indonesia-Norway Deal

Last week, Norman Jiwan of Sawit Watch, an Indonesian NGO ally concerned with the ongoing adverse social and environmental impacts of palm oil plantations, wrote an op-ed in the Jakarta Post. The op-ed entitled, Deforestation moratorium is not panacea?, stated his view on the recently signed $1 billion dollar Indonesia-Norway Letter of Intent (LoI) which [...]

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World Bank and IFC: The Big Bucks Behind Indonesia’s Rainforest Destruction

With oil gushing in the gulf, activists locking down in boardrooms, the ball of financial reform being thrown from Wall Street to Washington and back again, and Indonesia announcing a two year freeze on the parceling out of its forests to international corporations, the world’s focus seems to be on corporations. But in the struggle [...]

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