The MEP and Friends of the Earth denounce, through the palm oil factory project in Port la Nouvelle, in Aude, the trickery of "sustainable" palm oil.
In 2011, it is no longer possible to say that we do not know. We have been denouncing the environmental and social consequences of growing oil palm for years. Reports are piling up.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, the tropical forests, with their exceptional biodiversity, have given way in a few years to immense monocultures of oil palms.
More than 600 conflicts oppose palm oil companies to local communities who see their forests disappearing or who are driven from their lands.
It is at the price of this sacrifice that these two countries have become the main world producers of palm oil. Worse, today, the cultivation of oil palm, one of the most profitable in the world, is exploding in South America and Africa.
Agri-food companies grab the land to convert it to this monoculture and cases of expulsion of peasants and indigenous communities are increasing in the four corners of the southern hemisphere.
It is however in this context that the Languedoc-Roussillon region, owner of the port of Port-la-Nouvelle, in Aude decided to welcome the Malaysian group, Sime Darby, the world's largest producer of palm oil , to build a factory that will open the doors of the European market to it.
“Sustainable” does not avoid deforestation
To silence the critics, the arguments are set in motion: Sime Darby is a responsible company and its production will soon be fully certified "sustainable" according to the criteria of the round table on sustainable oil palm. An extremely controversial certification.
It is, for example, possible to use in oil palm plantations a neurotoxic pesticide, paraquat, banned in Europe. Logique, the company that markets it, Syngenta, is a member of the Round Table on the Sustainable Oil Palm. Above all, this certification does not guarantee the absence of deforestation.
In a new report entitled “Sustainable palm oil scam”, Friends of the Earth thus showed how the companies PT Budidaya Agro Lestari and PT Sandika Nata Palma, two subsidiaries of Sime Darby in Indonesia, had razed protected forests on several thousand hectares to plant oil palm.
In Liberia, Sime Darby has just acquired more than 200 hectares in a country that has just emerged from the civil war and where land disputes are numerous. Already complaints are accumulating to denounce unworthy working conditions and derisory wages: 000 dollars a day, supplemented, for the lucky ones, by a bag of rice3. Is this sustainable palm oil?
In the food industry or as an agrofuel
Beyond the fight against the establishment of this factory, we call for a broader debate on the policies that have led, for ten years, to a significant increase in imports of palm oil in Europe.
Palm oil is a discreet ingredient found in many everyday products such as cookies, spreads, ready meals, detergents and lipstick.
But it is above all the emergence of the agrofuels market which explains the explosion in imports of this oil: between 1999 and 2009, European consumption of vegetable oil doubled, going from around 11 to 22 million tonnes.
Biofuels, which did not exist ten years ago, now absorb more than 9 million tonnes of vegetable oil and are therefore the main driver of this increase.
Palm oil can be used directly, in a mixture, to run cars or fly planes but the impact is above all indirect: by a communicating mud effect, the food industry which no longer finds oil rapeseed or sunflower, used as biofuels, import more palm oil.
Whether the Port la Nouvelle factory has a vocation to produce agrofuels or edible palm oil is therefore a false debate.
Competition with European farmers
The real challenge is to globally reduce our consumption of vegetable oil, and in priority our fuel needs. The fight against energy waste and relocation must become public policy priorities so that no palm oil factory is built, in Port la Nouvelle or elsewhere.
It is time to take a clear look at the excesses of agro-business: far from contributing to economic development, the increasing imports of palm oil constitute a monopolization of the ecological space of the countries of the South by Europe and prevent communities from meeting their basic needs such as cultivating the land for food or living in a preserved environment.
In turn, these cheap oil imports penalize European farmers who cannot make a decent living from their work. What if the future, in Aude, was to focus on local and organic production of olive oil for food rather than building palm oil factories?
Photo: Inside an oil palm nursery, Indonesia (Friends of the Earth).
Source: http://www.rue89.com/planete89/2011/05/ ... que-204416
The report: Sustainable palm oil scam