The Oil Palm

The Minister of Plantation Industries and Commodities, YB Datuk Seri Mah Siew Keong expressed concern on the recent voting of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety of the European Parliament (ENVI Committee) on Motion 2016/2222(INI) which includes opinions of the  Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI), the Committee on International Trade (INTA), and the Committee on Development (DEVE) for a European Parliament Resolution on Palm … Read More

The European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety is set to vote on a deeply-flawed draft report that contains a number of falsehoods about Palm Oil.

Let’s set the record straight.

Myth #1: The draft report claims that “Cultivation of palm oil over the last 20 years has been the cause of 20% of all deforestation.”

Fact: This is completely false and has disproved by the EU’s … Read More

NGOs and campaign groups rarely admit that they are wrong. They almost never admit that an industry that they have been campaigning against is right.

But that is effectively what the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) – a US-based campaign group – has done in relation to palm oil.

UCS has pointed out that palm oil is not the environmental bogeyman that NGOs have made it out to be. Why? … Read More

The campaign against palm oil is ever-evolving. In the 1980s and 1990s, the US soybean lobby campaigned on health grounds. Since 2000, the campaign shifted to environmental concerns, largely supported by the rapeseed and sunflower industries in Europe and led by radical Green NGOs.

In recent years this has taken on a new and more comprehensive approach. Its clear objective is to make palm oil ‘socially unacceptable’. This new approach … Read More