Palm Oil's Trojan Horse

Virgil's Latin epic poem The Aeneid. tells of the devious, guileful and cunning use of the Trojan Horse by the Greeks to gain entry into Troy in the Trojan War.

The events in this story from the Bronze Age took place after Homer's Iliad, and before Homer's Odyssey. It was the stratagem that allowed the Greeks finally to enter the city of Troy and end the conflict.

In the best-known version, after a fruitless 10-year siege of Troy the Greeks built a huge figure of a horse inside which a select force of men hid. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the Horse into their city as a victory trophy. That night the Greek force crept out of the Horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greek army entered and destroyed the city of Troy, decisively ending the war.

The priest Laocoön guessed the plot and warned the Trojans, in Virgil's famous line "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" (Do not trust Greeks bearing gifts), but the god Poseidon sent two sea serpents to strangle him, and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus, before he could be believed. King Priam's daughter Cassandra, the soothsayer of Troy, insisted that the horse would be the downfall of the city and its royal family but she too was ignored, hence their doom and loss of the war.

A "Trojan Horse" has come to mean any trick that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected bastion or place, now often associated with "malware" computer programs presented as useful or harmless in order to induce the user to install and run them.

In many ways, the story of palm oil and the Trojan Horse saga bears many similarities. A 10 year fruitless siege followed by a devious change of tactics in an attempt to gain entry "through the city gates" can be seen in the still unfolding saga. Certainly, an analogy can be drawn from the stratagem employed by anti-palm oil lobbies to wage their trade war against palm oil.

Using proxies such as the infamous Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and diverse organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth (FOE) and, in recent times, even zoos such as the Melbourne Zoo and the Auckland Zoo ( who, of all people conducted a campaign to protect one of their exhibits, the orang utan from the "relentless expansion of palm oil plantations"), the lobbies have invested in various ploys to stop the growth of palm oil in its tracks.

First CSPI launched a campaign in the mid eighties alleging that palm oil was largely saturated fat and thus unhealthy. When tons of scientific studies were conducted and the results published in peer reviewed journals showing that a palm oil rich diet was, in fact heart friendly as it lowered serum cholesterol and increased HDL (good) cholesterol (see: "The Truth About Palm Oil" http://www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=329&Itemid=811), CSPI beat a hasty retreat and bided their time whilst planning a new mode of attack against palm oil.

Almost 2 decades later, CSPI thought out a Trojan Horse stratagem. This time, in a report called "Cruel Oil: How Palm Oil Harms Health, Rainforest and Wildlife", CSPI sought to paint a picture of utter devastation of pristine rainforest by the palm oil industry and hence causing massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of the orang utan.

Before long, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth joined the bandwagon issuing "reports" with such emotive tiles as "Cooking the Climate", "The Oil for Ape Scandal" and "Rainforest in your Shopping".

Both outfits organized loud and theatrical demonstrations often dressed in orang utan suits.

They were quickly joined by a disparate group of "environmental" organizations with the inevitable alphabet soup abbreviations such as RAN (The Rainforest Action Group) and the POA (Palm Oil Action Group) together with others carrying such exotic names as "Treehugger", Mongabay, etc.

The trouble with the anti-palm oil campaigns, and this is their Achilles heel, is that they totally ignore the fact (or they're ignorant of the fact) that palm oil is an inherently sustainable crop with the highest productivity and thus most efficient land use factor amongst all edible oilseeds. With a yield of close to ten times the yield of other oilseed crops, palm oil requires ten times less land to produce the same unit of edible oil as its nearest competitor.

This explains why, Malaysia, which had been the world's largest producer of palm oil for over a century still has an enviable forest cover of more than 55%, which is one of the highest forest cover prevailing in the world today.

Further, palm oil cultivation takes up less than 1% of the total world agricultural area, with Malaysian palm oil plantations occupying less than 0.5% of it. How can it then be credible to claim that palm oil is causing "massive deforestation" and is responsible for 20% of global carbon emission?

If conservation is truly a concern, these green NGOs should propose that palm oil be cultivated in place of the current 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 CSPI, Greenpeace and FOE's claims of massive deforestation may then have a modicum of credibility and become a stark reality!

The Palm Oil Truth Foundation is compelled to ask: Could the extreme productivity of palm oil be the real reason for the irrational and concerted attacks launched against the commodity by the likes of CSPI, Greenpeace and FOE? Could Greenpeace and FOE be paid agents for competing oilseed lobbies to launch their senseless anti-palm oil campaigns to ensure that palm does not continue to make inroads into the traditional oilseed markets in the Northern Hemisphere?

The palm oil industry had sought to engage with its critics by joining the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which some observers have likened to bringing the "Trojan Horse into the city" as the Trojans had done.

In fact, Don D'Cruz, an expert on non-governmental organisation (NGO) campaigns against industries who has spent a decade fighting NGO campaigns on a whole range of issues, have urged palm oil growers, buyers and food companies to walk away from the sustainable palm oil roundtable process.

Says D'Cruz,: "Although the roundtable process was "well-meaning" and "good-intentioned", it was probably going to cause a great deal of damage to the palm oil industry in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia."

"The roundtable process has provided western NGOs with an invaluable opportunity to conduct indepth research into the industry in countries like Malaysia," D'Cruz said.

"Basically they have a better idea as to how to go about destroying the industry in Malaysia because of the intelligence they have obtained," he said.

Says D'Cruz: "Another problem with this is 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.

He said that he thought that the Malaysian government needed to come in and talk to all parties and shut this down before it ended in tears.

"The subtext of the campaign by western environmental NGOs against the palm oil industry was racism," D'Cruz said.

Is it plausible that D'Cruz has uncovered the devious use of a Trojan Horse stratagem against palm oil? Could the palm oil industry, by participating in the RSPO process be unwittingly giving the "green NGOs " a better idea as to how to go about destroying the industry in Malaysia because of the intelligence they have obtained," as D'Cruz postulates?

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, given the lessons that history has taught us and the uncanny analogies with the Trojan Horse ploy, the industry would do well to carefully weigh the implications of D'Cruz's warnings or at least, conduct a hard nosed examination of the issues and slice through the layers of stratagem employed by the anti-palm oil lobbies.THE END
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Palm Oil Truth Foundation (TRUTH Foundation) is an international non-governmental and not-for-profit organisation, without strings to the world of commerce and power. We are a people organisation, organised for the people and founded upon the principles of integrity and responsibility as a global citizen with the sole purpose of representing TRUTH to the global community about health, environmental and economic benefits of palm oil.