- Posted September 24, 2012 by
New York City, New York
- The Rainforest Action Network sells out again…on palm oil!
- The Nobel Peace Prize to the EU made trite by the EC!
- RAN joins the ranks of doomsayers and cranks on palm oil: Disproven and Debunked
- RAN starts to limbo lower now in their attacks on Palm Oil
- Palm oil for poverty eradication in the Philippines
Palm Oil and the European Commission’s lack of moral fiber!
Listening is an important part of any relationship. Similarly, there appears to be a severe deficit of listening and empathy with the officials in the Environmental Directorate of the European Commission (EC) when it comes to palm oil.
The world’s main stream media too appears to have bought hook line and sinker into the fiction of palm oil causing massive deforestation and threatening the existence of the orangutan, storylines that have been seeded and planted with the main stream media by green groups. The trouble with this particular story is that it is based on almost entirely on manufactured and false evidence concocted by green groups with the full knowledge and financial backing of the EC!
If not for Italian civil libertarian group, Libertiamo, the EC might have pulled off this grossly morally porous scheme to protect the EU’s own indigenous edible oilseed industries at the expense of palm oil.
According to Libertiamo, the shocking part is that the EC is aware that the palm oil campaigns funded by them are based almost entirely on cooked up and manufactured evidence! Says Libertiamo: “NGOs have become "peddlers of half truths to drive donations and attract government largesse. And donor governments support them, in the interest of uncompetitive domestic industries and neo colonial ambitions!
In their report called “Taxpayer Funding, NGO Collusion and Manufactured Crises: A Case Study of Malaysia and Palm Oil,” Libertiamo points out that the real reason behind the EU Commission’s bizarre funding of environmental NGOs to carry out vicious anti-palm oil campaigns that they are aware are based on false and manufactured evidence is to erect artificial trade barriers against palm oil to prevent competition against the EU’s own edible oil industries such as rapeseed and sunflower oil!
The fact that their actions threatens the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of smallholders do not appear to trouble the conscience of the crooks ensconced in the offices of the Environment Directorate of the EC and their crass pandering to the indigenous EU oilseed crops like sunflower and rapeseed, which are hapless in facing the market onslaught of the rampantly hyper yielding palm oil will inevitably come back to bite them! Perhaps, it is already poetic justice that the EU should be facing the economic turmoil that it currently faces. Rather than promoting policies designed to increase productivity and encourage growth, the EC is paying the price for taking their eye off the ball, choosing to prop up its indigenous uncompetitive industries!
Noting the predilection of these NGOs to make spectacular claims, Libertiamo observed that one of the most commonly used is a statistic that in SE Asia alone, the equivalent of 300 football fields are deforested every hour for palm oil plantations, a claim that has been exposed as a significant distortion of facts by the FAO’s recent "State of the Forests 2011" report which observes that whilst rates of deforestation between 1990-2000 were high at a time of significant development in SE Asia, the trend had reversed dramatically between 2000-2010. Deforestation rates during this latter period "more than halved, making the NGO claims of rampant expansion entirely false!"
The gravamen of the charge against the EC is not so much in the funding of the green groups per se but it is in getting bollixed up in a scheme that the EC is aware are based on manufactured and false evidence! Not only does the EC hazard losing their moral fiber but the EC does risk looking like they are rooting for the poor smallholders to lose their livelihood!
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