Environment News 11.10.14 Part IV: Are Cracks FINALLY Appearing in Palm Oil Deforestation Plague - Orang-utans Hope So Things are looking up – a bit – for orang-utans and though they ARE still extremely endangered a quiet revolution taking place on grocery shop shelves is showing some cause for celebration. One company after another are making pledges to switch to palm oil from deforestation-free sources and in just the last 11 months more than a dozen major producers, traders and consumers of the oil have made this pledge meaning that something like 60% of the global palm oil trade is now covered by new forest-friendly oil policies. Were seeing the beginning of a bunch of dominos that are going to fall, and its going to put a lot of pressure on companies that dont have zero deforestation commitments.” Says highly esteemed Mongabay founder and journalist, Rhett Butler. Palm oil – which is versatile and has a longer shelf life than other vegetable oils - is in thousands of household items, from personal care products to processed foods and, about 85% of this oil comes from plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, where huge tracts of rain forest are cleared and given over to its production. An assessment by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO)—an organization of producers, traders, consumer goods manufacturers, investors, and non-governmental organizations formed to develop global standards for sustainable palm oil—showed that from 1990 to 2010, Indonesia, Malaysia, and PNG converted 8.7m acres of forest to oil palm plantations. “Because of these clearances, orang-utans simply starve to death.” Said the Orang-utan Land Trust (OLT)’s Michelle Desilets. Many end up venturing into newly planted areas of the oil-palm concessions and, in desperation, destroy young oil palm trees to get at the soft, inner shoots. Because of this, they become considered agricultural pests, to be eradicated. Of the more than 1,200 orang-utans now being cared for in rescue centres, most were displaced by conversion of habitat for oil palms and, the OLT estimates that some 3 000 orang-utans are lost each year to habitat conversion and hunting. “Thats a huge loss, considering that the total number of orang-utans remaining in the wild in Borneo may be no more than 45,000, and in Sumatra, 6,500.” Said Desilets. For more than a decade, environmental and consumer groups such as the WWF, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace have focused on moving the market toward sustainable palm oil and in December 2013, the worlds largest palm oil company, Wilmar International, which controls more than 45% of the global trade, committed to a policy of zero deforestation across all the palm oil it produces, sources, and trades. Then, in March, another palm oil giant, Golden Agri-Resources, matched this commitment and soon pledges from consumer companies like Hershey, L’Oreal, Kelloggs, Mars, Cargill, Nestle, Ferraro and Krispy Crème, began to roll in. Many of these commitments need more specifics, including the definition of forests to be preserved, tighter implementation deadlines, and provisions for independent verification, and, many will take a while to come into force but people-in-the-know like Butler ARE optimistic. If these commitments are to truly take hold, NGOs and consumers must ask more companies to join in and progress must be monitored. Said Butler. Desilets agrees. “We can now break the link between palm oil and the extinction of orang-utans and, I cant understate the enormity of what no deforestation means, not just for orang-utans but biodiversity and ecosystems at large. news.nationalgeographic/news/2014/10/141009-orangutans-palm-oil-malaysia-indonesia-tigers-rhinos/
Posted on: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 22:10:20 +0000