Palm Oil: Truth and Lies as Dr Oz Becomes latest Target in RAN’s Campaigns

YouTube has a mixed bag of talent to say the least. But more and more frequently some talented individuals are using it as a platform to share their gifts with the world. At times you could end up losing many hours trawling through hundreds of entertaining, educational, and downright funny videos. Sometimes you see a video that just seem to resonate instantly with certain issues at hand.

Take the song entitled “The Truth and Lies”, written and performed by a great budding musician on YouTube. This song clearly has nothing to do with palm oil or the green NGOs and their continuous attempts to make people believe that oil palm production is damaging the planet. Indeed this is a love song, and a good one at that, but one particular line from the song did seem to somehow resonate with the current situation with the NGO campaign.

The singer on YouTube sang “sometimes we search for the truth, but the lies are easier to find”, words that can quite easily be applied to pretty much every aspect of the unsubstantiated campaign against palm oil. Groups such as the Rainforest Action Network use every opportunity to try a further their cause such as those that oil palm cultivation is destroying the world’s rainforests and threatening to drive orangutans to extinction.

These are the grounds for attacking the palm oil industry and of course Dr. Oz, which would be very reasonable enough, if the claims were true!

The truth is hard to find when it is buried deep within layers of hype and misguided claims, so will palm oil be responsible for the deforestation of the world, the extinction of the orangutan and the eventual collapse of our environment? Certainly not!

Oil palm is cultivated in tropical climates such as Africa, South America and Asia. Indonesia and Malaysia are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s production of palm oil, accounting for around 85% of production. Approximately 50 million tonnes of palm oil is consumed worldwide in one form or another each year. It is by far one of the most popular and efficient oilseeds in the world.

Despite this the land area occupied for cultivation of oil palm is just over a miniscule 0.23% of the world’s agricultural lands. In addition to that it is the only vegetable oil to have a crop-specific sustainable certification standard, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). It has a higher yield per hectare of up to ten times over other edible oils such a sunflower, soya and rapeseed, is competitively priced against these other oils, and has better nutritional values than most.

Why would these NGOs want to bury these truths in amongst their over-hyped claims? Well for the very reasons described above. These NGOs are nothing more than hired muscle in the shameless protectionism racket set up to protect the edible oilseed industries in places like Europe where the hyper yield and competitive price of palm oil is just too much to handle.

The truth is certainly out there and civil libertarian groups such as Libertiamo are doing a great deal of work to bring it to light. They are the ones who brought attention to the fact that several European NGOs have been receiving increasing amounts of funding from the European Commission in line with their sustained campaign against palm oil. Over the last five years alone the EC have handed over upwards of €11 million to various NGOs, with RAN receiving €2 million in the last two years alone.

One thing seems to be clear in all this, and that is these NGO will not make it very easy to find the truth. There claims are built on hype, underhand tactics and a blatant disregard for the facts.