Palm Oil and The BBC: To see and Not to see

An Anthropologist on Mars is a collection of seven essays by neurologist Oliver Sacks about individuals with several brain disorders. In "To See and Not to See," Dr. Sacks tells the story of Virgil, a man blind from early childhood who, in his fifties, regains partial sight after a surgery. But Virgil finds sight disorienting, disturbing, and even frightening. He was able to make out colors and movements, but arranging them into a coherent picture was difficult.

Says Dr. Sacks: "Further problems became apparent as we spent the day with Virgil. He would pick up details incessantly -- an angle, an edge, a color, a movement -- but would not be able to synthesize them, to form a complex perception at a glance. This was one reason the cat, visually, was so puzzling: he would see a paw, the nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together, see the cat as a whole."

Dr Sacks explains, "The rest of us, born sighted, can scarcely imagine such confusion. For we, born with a full complement of senses, and correlating these, one with the other, create a sight world from the start, a world of visual objects and concepts and meanings."

In many ways, this story reminds me of The BBC and especially its reporter Raphael Rowe, an ex-convict who'd served 12 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit, when they put together the documentary "Dying for a Biscuit". The title, plagiarized from the infamous "report" on palm oil called "Dying for a Cookie" put out in 2005 by the now discredited Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) in 2005, is as intellectually dishonest as its forerunner! Rowe describes himself in "The making of Dying for a Biscuit" as an "average person", which, for an investigative reporter, a highly paid police informer and a self-confessed petty criminal (his girlfriend later confessed to refusing to back up his alibi during the trial as she felt he was two timing her with another girl), is clearly stretching the bounds of any definition of "average".

In fact, one could be forgiven for believing that someone like Rowe, who in his own words said in an interview, "We can't communicate in ways we once did because I've learnt different things and I see things differently…", would at least have acquired a heightened sense of empathy, having developed, during his incarceration, "sympathy for the relatives of the murder victim" and endured feelings of wild "anger" at the "injustice when first jailed".

However, as The BBC Panorama program showed, empathy was in short supply both from The BBC and Mr. Rowe. The Palm Oil Truth Foundation is moved to ask whether Mr Rowe or The BBC has any empathy for the smallholders who plant palm oil for a living?
After all, contrary to popular opinion, a large proportion of palm oil (43%) is cultivated by smallholders in Indonesia whilst smallholders in Malaysia account for 40% of palm oil production.

These smallholders, especially in Malaysia have been engaged in the activity for some 40 years now and are primarily settlers in government sponsored poverty alleviation schemes called FELDA schemes.(i) Their smallholdings are located in areas that are far removed from the habitat of orang utans.

Are they aware that especially for Indonesia, palm oil is helping to alleviate poverty for millions of inhabitants.(ii)

If The BBC and Mr. Rowe had cared to take a holistic and macro view of the palm oil industry, instead of subscribing to and adding to the hype and falsehoods perpetuated by people who have a vested interest to stop the growth of the world's cheapest cooking oil, they'd have seen the sheer incongruity behind the accusations.

By any measure, it is certainly incongruous for a crop like palm oil which occupies LESS THAN 1% of the world agricultural area and yet yields close to 30% of the world's supply of edible oil to be accused of deforestation? Such extreme efficiencies of land use (palm oil has a yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare which is close to 10 times higher than its nearest competitors such as soy, canola and sunflower) is the reason why Malaysia which had been the world's largest producer of palm oil for more than a century, can still boast forest cover of more than 56%, a figure which dwarfs the 11% forest cover of the UK from which The BBC and Rowe hail. Yes, read that again. After more than 100 years of being the world's largest producer of palm oil, Malaysia has still managed to retain more than 56% forest cover. It is therefore obvious, even to the uninitiated, that palm oil cultivation does not require quite as much land as its critics would want the world to believe.

Indonesia has set aside 25% of its lands for forest conservation to match the 25% forest cover prevailing in Europe. If 25% forest conservation is acceptable for Europe, why is it so objectionable to The BBC for a developing country like Indonesia, which is one of the world's most densely populated, with hundreds of millions of mouths to feed, to adopt the same standard?

It is almost facetious for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature to allege that the orang utan population had declined by 50% in recent decades and for Rowe to allege that "the Indonesian government admits that 50,000 orang utans have died as a result of deforestation." Instead of subscribing to and contributing to the hype by quoting the anecdotal evidence of environmental campaigners, one would have expected The BBC to look to peer reviewed sources that would offer a more balanced, authoritative and scientifically tested view of the issue.

A scientific paper published in July 2007 in Current Biology by Erik Meijaard and Serge Wich called "Putting orang utan population trends into perspective"(iii) does just that. In their research, Meijaard a senior ecologist with The Nature Conservancy and Wich, report that "some 40,000-50,000 Bornean orangutans remain" together with some "7,000-7,500 Sumatran orang utans".

They pointed out: "Our forest cover monitoring indicates that by 2005, the rate of loss of orangutan habitat in East Kalimantan Province had declined to less than 0.6% per year, from 2% per year between 1996 and 2002. The main reason for this decline was the development of forest management programs, including protected areas, co-managed by local communities and local government, and the improvement of timber concession management."

"In addition, field surveys of illegal logging, another major threat to orangutan habitat, indicate that the Indonesian Government has since 2005 managed to reduce this in East and West Kalimantan."

"In most Sumatran orangutan habitat, forest loss was around 1-1.5% per year between 1985 and 2001 (adapted from total forest loss data in), but in recent years this has slowed down to about 0.4%/year (based on SPOT imagery analysis: M. Griffiths, pers. comm.) in the Leuser Ecosystem where 76% of the Sumatran orangutans occur," they continued.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, Rowe's and The BBC's use of satellite imagery and focus on a small part of Indonesia, in an effort to give the impression that the entire Indonesian rain-forests system is being decimated is mischievous, to say the least!
Rowe and The BBC also appear incapable of acknowledging that the palm oil industry has made credible efforts to contribute to orang utan conservancy. Rather than mere empty sloganeering, as environmental campaigners are wont to offer, the Malaysian Palm Oil Council had recently launched a RM 20 Million (US$6 Million) Orang Utan and Wildlife Conservation Fund. Orang utan conservation centers have also been established in Indonesia including those at Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan, Kutai in East Kalimantan, Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, and Bukit Lawang in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the border of Aceh and North Sumatra. In Malaysia, conservation areas have been set up and they include the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre in Sarawak and Matang Wildlife Centre also in Sarawak, and the Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary near Sandakan in Sabah as well as at the Bukit Merah Orang Utan Island. What about the new population of orangutans discovered recently in a remote, mountainous corner of Indonesia — perhaps as many as 2,000 — which destroys the contention that the apes are near extinction.

For Rowe and The BBC to further label the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil as "greenwash" is perhaps the unkindest cut of all. This is the reason why some quarters have urged palm oil growers, buyers and food companies to walk away from the sustainable palm oil roundtable process. Don D'Cruz, an expert on non-governmental organisation's (NGO) campaigns against industries, said processes like the roundtable were built on flawed premises and was a strategy of appeasement because "the more you give western NGOs, the more they want". "Western environmental NGOs are like schoolyard bullies, in that until someone stands up to them they will just keep bullying," he said. "Another problem with this is that when you hand out a big load of cash to such a process, you are going to attract NGOs looking for cash. In a sense, you are not making the problem go away, you are actually institutionalizing your critics," he added. D'Cruz said the money associated with the roundtable was turning the palm oil industry into a target.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, D'Cruz's views are certainly food for thought, especially when juxtaposed against the unreasonable and often baffling and incomprehensible actions of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and now The BBC towards palm oil.

If conservation is truly a concern, The BBC and green NGOs should propose that palm oil be cultivated in place of the other oilseed crops such as soy, corn, sunflower and rapeseed (weather permitting) in view of its superior efficient land use!

It is obvious that if palm oil cultivation is curtailed or taken away altogether from the trade equation, the world would be scrambling for more oil which , in turn, would see ten times more land being opened up for other oilseed cultivation to fill the gap left by palm oil.

In those circumstances, perhaps The BBC's and green NGOs' claims of massive deforestation may then have a modicum of credibility and become a stark reality!

Finally, it is indisputable that the giant palm oil plantations in Malaysia were almost all set up and owned by British planters and in Indonesia's case, by Dutch planters. It was only in the 70s that Malaysians gradually gained control of these giant plantations like Sime Darby, Guthrie, Harrisons and Crossfields, etc. The BBC was conspicuously silent and strangely muted in their criticism of palm cultivation then. Is it because these plantations were British owned or is it that The BBC then chose not to see what they claim to see today? Or perhaps, like Virgil, Rowe and The BBC find what they see so disorienting that they could see the little details but fail to see the whole picture. Perhaps,The BBC deliberately chose not to see! THE END
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i. 2008, Malaysia's Oil Palm - Hallmark of Sustainable Development, Global Oils & Fats Business Magazine, Vol. 5, Issue No. 4; Kui, D. P. C. F 2008, Malaysian Efforts in Developing Responsible Practises in the Palm Oil Industry, edited version of the keynote address by the Malaysian Minister of Plantation Industries and Commodities at the World Sustainable Palm Oil Conference, London, 15 September, 2008, published in the Global Oils & Fats Business Magazine, Vol. 5, Issue No. 4.

ii. United States Department of Agriculture, 2007, Indonesia: Palm Oil Production Prospects Continue to Grow, Foreign Agriculture Service Commodity Intelligence Report, 31 December, Washington DC.

iii. Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 14, 17 July 2007, Page R540
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