Typical of the greenies to push through something without thinking it through.

It is well known that palm oil is grown on only 0.22% of the world’s agricultural land and yet is the world’s leading supplier of edible oil, supplying an incredible 30% of the world’s edible oil. This fact alone should alert any objective observer that something does not jive with all the palm oil and deforestation hype.

Green groups regularly trundle out wild and unsubstantiated claims against palm oil, but we all know that these kinds of covert operations against palm oil are well documented.

For instance, In 2005, the oddly named Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) published a “report” called “Cruel Oil: How palm oil harms health, rainforest and wildlife” in which they made wild and unsubstantiated claims that palm oil cultivation was causing massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of biodiversity such as the orang utan.

The report was prepared with the assistance of Aid Environment listed as partners with Hivos — a Netherlands based civil society group with direct links to campaigns in Indonesia. Hivos, in turn, is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for up to two-thirds of its annual 100m Euro budget.

A recent report by researchers Caroline Boin and Andrea Marchesetti entitled “Friends of the EU.”
(Vide: http://www.policynetwork.net/accountability/publication/friends-eu)showed that the EU, through its environmental ministries and commissions is involved in funding up to 70% of the operating budgets of FOE EU.

The main drivers for these covert anti-palm oil campaigns are governments desperate to protect their indigenous edible oil producers who cannot compete on a level ground with the hyper yielding palm oil.