Deforestation, Palm Oil and the Frankenfish

In 2002, the United States discovered the existence of the Giant Snakehead in a lake in Maryland. Instead of rejoicing at the presence of a new species and one of the most awesome freshwater sport and table fish in Asia, they kicked up a hullabaloo, citing environmental danger and spawning claims like, "can walk" on its fins and "live on land for days".

They claimed that the voracious Snakehead would devour everything in its path and will be a big threat to the ecosystem. There may be some truth to this claim as the snakehead's a voracious and savage predator that could render some indigenous species extinct.

However, North and South America have their own equally predatory species, some even more so than the feared Giant Snakehead. They even drained the whole lake just to make sure these Giant Snakeheads didn't stand a chance to survive, and the term, "Frankenfish" was coined for it.

It even spawned a couple of ridiculous movies like Snakehead Terror and Swarm of the Snakehead which portrays the snakehead as a man-eating fish. These movies make the Great White look like a poodle!

In truth, the snakehead which is called the toman in Malaysia and Indonesia is one of the most popular freshwater gamefishes in Asia, is one of the most majestic sights to behold in fresh water. Often, you see them gliding gracefully to the surface to "breathe", their striped dark shiny green and black armour camouflaged against the green weedy water.

Tomans build nests by burrowing in the mud, and are the top predators in many freshwater lakes in the region. They feed on almost anything — smaller fish, frogs, baby tortoises and even baby ducks. The giant snakehead's tolerant of low oxygen conditions because they're endowed with the ability to gulp air from the surface, which they often do in murky water.

It must be this ability to survive in anaerobic conditions that gives them their reputation of "walking on land" and surviving for days without water. Juvenile snakeheads swim in schools, but adults are solitary predator although they sometimes swim in pairs, especially when protecting their young.

When you find their babies, they're almost always nearby, to protect their young ones. These juvenile Tomans, with nary a care in their young life, create ripples on the water surface as they swim and frolic on the surface.

Tomans are very territorial, especially near their nest or young and casting a popper or lure to a school of frys will almost always result in a ferocious strike by one of the parents.

However, how anyone put these lovely creatures in such a diabolical light is indeed baffling.

That unfortunately is the current state of western NGOs and western news media in their treatment of palm oil.

Palm oil is basically a good vegetable oil, as good as olive oil. Rich in anti-oxidants such as Co-Q10, tocotrienols and beta-carotenes, many studies in peer reviewed journals have shown that a palm oil diet reduces plasma cholesterol levels and boost HDL (good) cholesterol levels.

And it takes less land - much less land - to produce the same quantity of palm oil as compared to any other edible oil. Palm oil has a yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is ten times greater than its nearest competitors. This innate efficiency in land use makes palm oil the most inherently sustainable of all edible oilseeds. Its production is thus far less damaging to the environment than any other oil.

However, the green NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth together with the international media have painted an erroneous picture of palm oil as an unhealthy oil that is bad for the environment.

The anti-palm oil lobby group has found a very effective icon in the orang utan - it basically propagates the myth that those cute, cuddly creatures are being deprived of their habitat by rapacious oil palm cultivation resulting in massive deforestation and threatening their very existence.

That stopped being true in Malaysia decades ago and even then not all of the orang utan suffered. For the palm oil industry has been supporting orang utan conservation efforts. Some months ago, The Malaysian Palm Oil Council launched a US$6 Million Wildlife Conservation Farm and the industry supports orang utan conservation centers in Sabah and Sarawak. Contrary to the perception painted by NGOs and the international media of their imminent extinction, the orang utan is not found in peninsular Malaysia, only in the western states of Sabah and Sarawak. Even in Sabah and Sarawak, the orang utan is found only in pockets of rainforests in the interior and not throughout the state as the green NGOs and the media attempt to allude.

Further, the recent discovery of previously undiscovered new nests and thousands of orang utan in the wild in Borneo suggests that their numbers could in fact, be growing rather than dwindling!

In the view of Deforestation Watch, like the unfortunate gamefish Toman, palm oil has been dealt an unfair hand by the green NGOs and international media. It is pertinent to ask whether the deliberate misperceptions are painted out of ignorance of the facts or is the negative press part of a wider trade war conducted against palm oil by an anti-palm oil lobby determined to stop the continued growth of the world's cheapest, fastest growing and most popular edible oil? THE END
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