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Are you unwittingly contributing to the devastation of the rain forests?

sandra — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:49:25 +0000

The guilty secrets of palm oil: Are you unwittingly contributing to the devastation of the rain forests?
Does your shopping basket contain KitKat, Hovis, Persil or Flora? If so, you may be contributing to the devastation of the wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, where orangutans and other species face extinction as their habitat disappears.
Report by Martin Hickman
Greenpeace
A fisherman surveys the scene as he steers his boat alongside a recently cleared area of forest
It’s an invisible ingredient, really, palm oil. You won’t find it listed on your margarine, your bread, your biscuits or your KitKat. It’s there though, under “vegetable oil”. And its impact, 7,000 miles away, is very visible indeed.
The wildlife-rich forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are being chain-sawed to make way for palm-oil plantations. Thirty square miles are felled daily in a burst of habitat destruction that is taking place on a scale and speed almost unimaginable in the West.
When the rainforests disappear almost all of the wildlife – including the orangutans, tigers, sun bears, bearded pigs and other endangered species – and indigenous people go. In their place come palm-oil plantations stretching for mile after mile, producing cheap oil – the cheapest cooking oil in the world – for everyday food.
It’s not that people haven’t noticed what is going on. The United Nations has documented this rampage. Environmental groups have warned that what we buy affects what is happening in these jungles. Three years ago, Britain’s biggest supermarket, Tesco, was persuaded to join the only organisation that just might halt the chopping, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.
In his globe-trotting Tribe series two years ago, the TV explorer Bruce Parry was visibly moved by the sad fate of the Penan, a forest-dwelling tribe in Borneo. Most recently, the BBC’s prime-time Orangutan Diary showed the battle to create fresh habitats for “red apes” orphaned by deforestation, principally for palm oil.
But if there’s plenty of evidence of the devastating environmental effects of palm-oil, little of it can be seen on the products in Britain’s biggest supermarkets.
Until now, the best estimate of the number of leading supermarket products containing palm oil (Elaeis guineensis) has been one in 10, the figure quoted by Friends of the Earth in its 2005 report, “The Oil for Apes Scandal”. After a two-month investigation, The Independent has established that palm oil is used in far greater quantities. We can reveal for the first time that it is confirmed or suspected in 43 of Britain’s 100 bestselling grocery brands (see box, right), representing £6bn of the UK’s £16bn annual shopping basket for top brands. If you strip out drinks, pet food and household goods, the picture is starker still: 32 out of 62 of Britain’s top foods contain this tree-felling, wildlife-wrecking ingredient.
It’s in the top three loaves – Warburtons, Hovis, and Kingsmill – and the bestselling margarines Flora and Clover. It’s in Special K, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, Mr Kipling Cakes, McVitie’s Digestives and Goodfella’s pizza. It’s in KitKat, Galaxy, Dairy Milk and Wrigley’s chewing gum. It’s in Persil washing powder, Comfort fabric softener and Dove soap. It’s also in plenty of famous brands that aren’t in the top 100, such as Milkybar, Jordan’s Country Crisp and Utterly Butterly. And it’s almost certainly in thousands of supermarket own brands. Yet none of these manufacturers can prove their supply is “sustainable”.
What, then, is “unsustainable” palm oil? Step one: log a forest and remove the most valuable species for furniture. Step two: chainsaw or burn the remaining wood releasing huge quantities of greenhouse gas. Step three: plant a palm-oil plantation. Step four: make oil from the fruit and kernels. Step five: add it to biscuits, chocolate, margarine, soaps, moisturisers and washing powder. At breakfast, when millions of us are munching toast, we’re eating a small slice of the rainforest.
From outer space, borneo and sumatra resemble giant emerald stepping stones between Thailand and Australia. Reaching the heart of their still-massive jungles takes days of boat trips and trekking. Gibbons hoot and long-tailed macaques squawk. Mongooses and pangolins scamper through the undergrowth. Large-beaked rhinoceros hornbills soar above the forest. The huge green and black Rajah Brooke’s butterfly flutters by.
These rainforests are honeypots for flora and fauna, among the most biodiverse places on Earth. Consider the figures. Sumatra – the size of Spain, owned by Indonesia – has 465 species of bird, 194 species of mammal, 217 species of reptile, 272 species of freshwater fish, and an estimated 10,000 species of plant. Borneo – the size of Turkey and shared between Indonesia and Malaysia – is even richer: 420 birds, 210 mammals, 254 reptiles, 368 freshwater fish and around 15,000 plants.
All these species evolved to live in this unique forest environment. The Sumatran rhino is the smallest, hairiest and most endangered in the world; the Sumatran tiger is the smallest tiger. The black sun bear, with its U-shaped patch of white fur under its chin, is the smallest bear. Some of them are curious in the extreme: the bug-eyed western tarsier; the striped rabbit; the marled cat; and the tree-jumping clouded leopard, which feasts on pygmy squirrels and long-tailed porcupines.
Of all the animals, though, the most famous by far is the orangutan (or “man of the jungle”). With its orange hair and long arms, the orangutan is one of our planet’s most unusual creatures. And one of the smartest, too. The Dutch anthropologist Carel van Schaik found that orangutans could perform tasks which were well beyond chimpanzees, such as making rain hats and leakproof roofs for their nests.
The primatologist Dr Willie Smits estimates that orangutans can distinguish between 1,000 different plants, knowing which ones are edible, which are poisonous, and which cure headaches. In her book Thinkers of the Jungle, the psychology professor Anne Russon recalled that one orangutan keeper took three days to solve the mystery of who’d been stealing from the fridge. It turned out that an orangutan had been using a paperclip to pick the lock of its cage, then hiding the paperclip under its tongue.
Along with chimpanzees, gorillas and bonobos, orangutans are great apes, sharing 97 per cent of their DNA with humans, having split from us a mere 13 million years ago. They exist only in these forests of Borneo and Sumatra, and it is their arboreal nature that leaves them so vulnerable to deforestation. Between 2004 and 2008, according to the US Great Ape Trust, the orangutan population fell by 10 per cent (to 49,600) on Borneo and by 14 per cent (to 6,600) on Sumatra. As the author Serge Wich warned: “Unless extraordinary efforts are made soon, it could become the first great-ape species to go extinct.”
Native people too, known in Borneo as Dayaks, are under threat. About 10,000 members of the semi-nomadic Penan tribe survive but their traditional lifestyle – which includes harvesting the starchy sago tree – is being felled.
A researcher with Survival International, the London-based human-rights organisation, returned to the UK last month with transcripts of interviews with the Penan conducted deep in the jungle. According to one headman, called Matu, hunters were increasingly returning empty-handed. “When the logging started in the Nineties, we thought we had a big problem,” he complained. “But when oil palm arrived [in 2005], logging was relegated to problem No 2. Our land and our forests have been taken by force.
“Our fruit trees are gone, our hunting grounds are very limited, and the rivers are polluted, so the fish are dying. Before, there were lots of wild boar around here. Now, we only find one every two or three months. In the documents, all of our land has been given to the company.”
“There were no discussions,” said another Penan. “The company just put up signs saying the government had given them permission to plant oil palm on our land.”
Indonesia is trying to crack down on illegal foresting, but corruption is rife hundreds of miles from Jakarta. Satellite pictures show logging has encroached on 90 per cent of Borneo’s national parks – and according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP): “New estimates suggest 98 per cent of [Indonesia's] forest may be destroyed by 2022, the lowland forest much sooner.”
In its 2007 report, “The Last Stand of the Orangutan”, UNEP warned that forest rangers were outnumbered and outgunned by logging guards with military training and automatic weapons – and faced “high and sometimes lethal risks” in confronting them. The programme’s executive director Achim Steiner wrote: “The driving forces are not impoverished farmers, but what appears to be well-organised companies with heavy machinery and strong international links to the global markets.”
In its own way, palm oil is a wonder plant. Astonishingly productive, its annual yield is 3.6 tonnes a hectare compared with half a tonne for soy or rapeseed. Originally found in West Africa, palm oil is uniquely “fractionable” when cooked, meaning its properties can be easily separated for different products. Although high in artery-clogging saturated fat, it is healthier than hydrogenated fats. For manufacturers, there is another significant benefit. At £400 a tonne, it is cheaper than soy, rapeseed or sunflower.
Some 38m tonnes of palm oil are produced globally, about 75 per cent in Malaysia and Indonesia. Borneo’s 11,000 square miles of plantations produce 10m tonnes a year while Sumatra’s 14,000 square miles yield 13m tonnes.
Since 1990, the amount of land used for palm-oil production has increased by 43 per cent. Demand is rising at between six and 10 per cent a year. China’s billion-plus population is the biggest consumer, importing 18 per cent of global supply. About 16 per cent arrives in the EU.
In the UK, almost every major food manufacturer uses palm oil, among them Kellogg’s, Cadbury, Mars, Kraft, Unilever, Premier Foods, Northern Foods and Associated British Foods (ABF). Companies typically say they are working to source sustainable supplies – and insist their use is “small”, “very small” or “minute”.
The US household giant Procter & Gamble, which uses palm oil in detergents, shampoos and soaps, says: “P&G uses very little palm oil – about 1 per cent of a worldwide production of palm and its derivatives.” One per cent of global production is 380,000 tonnes a year. P&G says it hopes to source a sustainable supply by 2015 – six years’ time.
Right now no multinational can vouch that its supply is sustainable. The Anglo-Dutch household giant Unilever, the world’s biggest user of palm oil, is swallowing up 1.6m tonnes a year, 4 per cent of global supply. It admits the product causes huge damage, but believes it has a solution. Together with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Unilever set up the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2004. For its first four years – to the frustration of green groups – the RSPO talked, devising eight principles and 39 practical criteria designed to protect native peoples, plantation workers, small farmers and wildlife.
Forty per cent of palm-oil suppliers are now members of the RSPO and it hopes all of them will eventually join. Members promise not to chainsaw any virgin forest; but they are still allowed to chop down “degraded forest” – where some trees have been felled – preventing other trees from re-growing and animals from returning.
Palm-oil plantations are barren places. When vast blocks of palms are planted in straight lines, stretching for mile after mile, 90 per cent of the wildlife disappears. In the words of Junaida Payne, of WWF Malaysia’s Sabah office, they are “biological deserts”.
Jan Kees Vis, Unilever’s director of sustainable agriculture and chairman of the RSPO, says it is “not realistic” to halt palm-oil expansion, but believes much growth can be achieved by raising yields. The best plantations currently yield 10 tonnes per hectare, but in the future this could hit 18 or even 50 tonnes, he says.
The best plantations can obtain RSPO certification for sustainability – but only 4 per cent of global supply (1.5m tonnes) is currently certified sustainable. The first shipment arrived in Rotterdam last November and costs about 35 per cent more than normal supplies. Another scheme, Green Palm, is already bringing prices for RSPO supplies down further, adding just 5 per cent to the cost.
Unilever has publicly committed to sourcing only certified palm oil by 2015. Premier Foods has a date of 2011, United Biscuits 2012. Most companies, however, including Cadbury, Kellogg’s, Nestle, Mars and Heinz, have given no commitment to switch to an RSPO-certified supply. They merely say that their suppliers are members.
As Vis puts it bluntly: “The volume of certified palm oil traded is disappointingly low so far; the reason for this being that many companies are not prepared to pay a premium for certified oil.”
Environmentalists fear that the RSPO is itself greenwash, cover for a programme of vicious and unrelenting deforestation. Even the RSPO concedes that its members have subsidiaries who plant palm oil, and who are not bound by – and do not abide by – its rules.
As if this were not enough, in the rush to replace diminishing fossil fuel, palm oil is being mixed into petrol. The EU Biofuels Directive aims to put biofuels in 5 per cent of all fuel pumps. Destroying peat forests for palm oil is especially bad for the climate, as these semi-saturated soils are dense “carbon stores” which release colossal quantities of C02 when they are burnt to make way for palm oil.
In its “Cooking the Climate” report, Greenpeace calculated that the burning of South-east Asia’s peat forests – largely for palm-oil plantations – spewed 1.8bn tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere: 4 per cent of global climate-change emissions from 0.1 per cent of Earth’s land. According to Greenpeace forest campaigner James Turner, “The destruction of these forests is a really serious cause of climate change, but some companies are still trying to look the other way. It’s time for them to cancel contracts with the worst suppliers, because purchasing power is a highly effective tool in changing this industry.”
Conservationists are increasingly wondering whether the wholesale destruction of rainforests to make margarine is the most striking of all examples of environmental lunacy. It isn’t just destroying one of the last great wildernesses, its rare animals and some of the remaining people whose ways are at odds with modern living. It also threatens to damage our own lives in the West.
Deforestation causes 18 per cent of Co2 emissions, according to British government figures – a key element in the rising temperatures that in coming decades will alter our world for ever. No one can be exactly sure what climate change will bring but, in Britain, we can expect more flooding and winter gales, drier summers, water shortages, and more food poisoning and skin cancer. The sea will not just sweep over Bangladesh and the Maldives, but possibly threaten low-lying parts of Britain, such as London, too. Meanwhile, millions of people in developing countries with failing agriculture could migrate to northern Europe.
The wealthy Western countries who have already felled their own forests (woods once covered Britain from Cornwall to Caithness) may have to pay more and more to protect those that remain in other parts of the world. At the Copenhagen summit in December, Britain and other countries will press for REDD (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation) – essentially a scheme for funding jungles in developing countries.
In the meantime, forest campaigners hope that big companies will come under increasing scrutiny over palm oil. The Unilever-backed RSPO wants them to commit to a sustainable supply. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace say palm-oil use should be reduced or phased out altogether. A few have already done so – PepsiCo, for instance, is phasing out palm oil from its remaining two products. United Biscuits says it has reduced palm oil in Digestives by 65 per cent and in McCoys by 76 per cent since 2005.
So far, companies have managed to avoid much scrutiny over the havoc palm oil is wreaking. For now, it is “only” the native peoples, the orangutans and the other animals of the rainforest who have experienced the most profound changes. They are losing the habitat that they thought would be around for ever.
“When I was a young girl I used to be so happy walking in the forest,” one Penan woman told Bruce Parry after trekking overnight to pass on her message. “I used to sing while I was looking for sago. I loved to hear the sound of the wild peacocks, the hornbills and the gibbons, and when I looked at the forest it was lovely.”
Palm oil facts
90 per cent of Sumatra’s orangutan population has disappeared since 1900. They now face extinction
90 per cent of wildlife disappears when the forest is replaced by palm, creating a biological desert
98 per cent of Indonesia’s forests may be destroyed by 2022 according to the United Nations
43 of Britain’s 100 top grocery brands contain or are thought to contain palm oil
Information above supplied by the Independent website here: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-guilty-secrets-of-palm-oil-are-you-unwittingly-contributing-to-the-devastation-of-the-rain-forests-1676218.html

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See how to help for free HERE

If you do manage to get some responses, please tell me about them, or any other actions you are taking yourself – even just spreading the word to people you know – I would love to post my readers help on this site to help encourage others to follow suit – email me at info@notjustanessexgirl.com

Join my mailing list for updates on this and other matters HERE

Related Articles:

• Top brands use palm oil
• Big Brands – their comments
• Top 100 products – contain palm oil or not?
• Products using palm oil - contact details
• Supermarkets and Palm oil – contact them
• Palm oil – What to buy – food, cosmetics and household products
• Palm oil – What not to buy
• Palm oil – What to do and how to help – have your say!
• Palm oil and your health
• Seeing palm oil plantations in Borneo – my experience
• Palm oil – the dangers – my report
• Save the orangutans
• If you holiday in Thailand – orangutans
• How Britons fuel destruction of the rainforest
• Leading article – palm oil shock
• Palm oil and climate change
• Lone Droscher’s report – orangutan genocide

Also use the top right hand links on this website to find out more!

Leading article: An oil shock we cannot ignore

sandra — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:19:54 +0000

Leading article: An oil shock we cannot ignore

There is no shortage of ways to measure the cost of palm oil. First there is the catastrophic impact on the wildlife of Malaysia and Indonesia, whose rainforests are being cleared to grow the crop. The habitat of endangered species, from orangutans to Sumatran tigers, is being torn down at a terrifying rate to make room for the fertile oil palms.

Related articles
Then there is the destruction on the livelihoods of those tribes which have traditionally lived in these ancient forests. Last, but far from least, the forest clearances, to make room for palm oil plantations, are a significant contributor to the dangerous warming of the planet. The destruction of the planet’s rainforests is responsible for a fifth of global carbon dioxide emissions. The unsustainable expansion of the palm oil industry might seem like a problem about which we in faraway Britain have no connection. But now an investigation by this newspaper has demonstrated how closely we are involved. The Independent has established that a host of the food products on sale in our supermarkets are made using the cheap vegetable oil.
The seminal 2006 Stern report into the economics of climate change argued that the first policy response of all governments to the threat of rising carbon emissions should be to stop deforestation. Most of the measures proposed to combat change in the West, from carbon capture to electric cars, will prove meaningless if we fail to deal with this fundamental source of carbon emissions. The only hope is for the richer half of the world to transfer resources to countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Brazil to encourage forms of development that do not involve rainforests clearances.
Such a plan will be on the table at the United Nations climate change negotiations in Copenhagen in December; another reason that meeting needs to succeed. But it would also help, in the meantime, if those of us in the developed world avoid the food products that are made with palm oil. The destruction wrought by the palm oil industry is no longer a distant problem. Its bitter fruits can be found in our shopping trolleys. We need to send a clear message to the food industry by removing them without delay.
Information above supplied by the Independent website here: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-an-oil-shock-we-cannot-ignore-1677070.html

Join my mailing list for newsletter updates on this and other matters HERE

Related Articles:

• Top brands use palm oil
• Big Brands – their comments
• Top 100 products – contain palm oil or not?

• Products containing palm oil - contact details
• Supermarkets and Palm oil – contact them
• Palm oil – What to buy – food, cosmetics and household products
• Palm oil – What not to buy
• Palm oil – What to do and how to help – have your say!
• Palm oil and your health
• Seeing palm oil plantations in Borneo – my experience
• Palm oil – the dangers – my report
• Save the orangutans
• If you holiday in Thailand – orangutans
• How Britons fuel destruction of the rainforest
• Palm oil and climate change
• Lone Droscher’s report – orangutan genocide

Also use the top right hand links on this website to find out more!

Palm oil and your health

sandra — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:22:20 +0000

Palm oil is bad for you and many other people and creatures!

Following on from the evidence of our food Companies using palm oil to a high degree, there is another dimension to this argument. They should be responsible for the palm oil sources, but more than that, they should be responsible for us as consumers – our health!!!

Palm oil is widely used as cooking oil, as an ingredient in margarine, and as a component of many processed foods. It is also an important component of many soaps, washing powders and personal care products, is used to treat wounds, and also controversially as a feedstock for biofuel.

High in Saturated fats…..

Biomedical research indicates that palm oil, which is high in saturated fat and low in polyunsaturated fat, promotes heart disease. Though less harmful than partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, it is far more conducive to heart disease than such heart-protective liquid oils as olive, soy, and canola. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, World Health Organization, and other health authorities have urged reduced consumption of oils like palm oil.

We want palm oil to be labelled, not just ‘vegetable oil’……

At present, it is difficult to find out who uses palm oil in their products, as it is often labelled ‘vegetable oil’ on the ingredients lists. Waitrose has made efforts with this and now labels palm oil on their own brand products, so if you shop there you have a choice. However, many others don’t, so it would be good for everyone if we could make that change happen – to make them show their use of palm oil will help us choose our products more wisely and it will show who is using it and to what extent. We do not want to boycott palm oil if it is grown as sustainable sources, such as in Columbia, but we do need the palm oil grown unsustainably (Borneo and Sumatra to start with) to be stopped, before it is too late.

See the information on the top 100 products in the UK HERE (you will note a high percentage use palm oil and I have listed the contact details of the ones that do so that you may write to them or telephone them)

Just to recap on the other harmful problems with the growth of unsustainable palm oil:

• Significant greenhouse gas emissions. Deforestation, mainly in tropical areas, account for up to one-third of total anthropogenic CO2 emissions. In simple terms, the rainforest trees hold in Carbon Dioxide whilst producing Oxygen. When they are cut down, they release the Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere, which increases global warming.
• Habitat destruction of critically endangered species (e.g. the Sumatran Tiger, the Asian Rhinoceros and the Sumatran Orangutan).
• Extinction of these species is inevitable if this process is not stopped.
• Many places that are of interest for growing palm are biodiversity hotspots, increasing the impact of this development on the environment. In addition to environmental impact, the logging, land-clearing and planting of oil palm continues to occur on native (Dayak tribe) land, despite their frequent objections. This has caused the degradation of their food, water, forest product sources as well as destroying their cash crop farms such as fruit and rubber trees in Sarawak, Sabah and Kalimantan, Borneo.
Greenpeace has concluded that many food and cosmetics companies, including ADM, Unilever, Cargill, Proctor & Gamble, Nestle, Kraft and Burger King, are driving the demand for new palm oil supplies, partly for products that contain non-hydrogenated solid vegetable fats, as consumers now demand fewer hydrogenated oils in food products that were previously high in trans fat content. Friends of the Earth have concluded that the increase in demand comes from biofuel, with producers now looking to use palm as a source.

Information sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_oil and other research

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You can help!

I have provided the contact details for some of the companies that are using palm oil from the top 100 UK products listing, so why don’t you drop them a line and ask them about their ethics of:

• Why they have been using unsustainable oil so long?
• When they plan to use sustainable oil
• Why they put palm oil into their foods when, as a saturated fat it is not good for us?
• Do they show palm oil in their products as palm oil or vegetable oil? If it is marked as ‘vegetable oil’, then ask them to make the change so that we, as consumers can choose whether we have palm oil or not when buying their products. (waitrose own brand products already do this)
• You can see my sample letter HERE – feel free to copy it
• You can see the listing of products HERE
• See the contact details listing HERE

• Top brands use palm oil
• Big Brands – their comments
• Top 100 products – contain palm oil or not?
• Products using palm oil- contact details
• Supermarkets and Palm oil
• Palm oil – What to buy – food, cosmetics and household products
• Palm oil – What not to buy
• Palm oil – What to do and how to help – have your say!
• Seeing palm oil plantations in Borneo – my experience
• Palm oil – the dangers – my report

• Save the orangutans
• If you holiday in Thailand – orangutans
• How Britons fuel destruction of the rainforest
• Leading article – palm oil shock
• Palm oil and climate change
•
• Lone Droscher’s report – orangutan genocide

Also use the top right hand links on this website to find out more!

Top brands – more information on their palm oil use

sandra — Fri, 08 May 2009 12:49:59 +0000

Household names: Big brands and palm oil

Kellogg’s (US) Uses palm oil in 50 products, mostly cereal bars but also cereals such as Special K and Crunchy Nut, where it binds together clusters. Does not buy sustainable palm oil.
Cadbury (UK) Pours palm oil into chocolate bars, including Cadbury Dairy Milk, where it is listed as vegetable oil. Uses 40,000 tonnes a year, none certified as sustainable.
Mars (US/UK) Uses palm oil in Mars Bars, Galaxy and Maltesers, where it is labelled “vegetable fat”. Does not buy sustainable palm oil. Says it wants to.
Procter & Gamble (US) Makes Ariel, Daz and Fairy Liquid, where use of palm oil is suspected but unproven. Says it will have a sustainable supply by 2015.
Unilever (UK) World’s biggest user of palm oil, which is found in Flora margarine, Pot Noodle, Comfort and Persil. Buys 1.6m tonnes a year – 4.2 per cent of global production. Acknowledging the damage to its reputation and the environment, Unilever set up the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.
Kraft (US) Says it does not use palm oil in Dairylea cheese but does in other products. Buys half a per cent of global supply. Says it will move to sustainable palm oil by 2015.
Heinz (US) Uses palm oil to fry potatoes for Aunt Bessie’s Potatoes, which it makes under licence.
United Biscuits (UK) Uses palm oil across its range including McVitie’s Digestives and McCoy’s crisps. Says it is reducing quantities.
Nestle (Swiss) Palm oil in KitKat, Quality Street, Aero and other brands.
Premier Food (UK) Uses in Hovis, Mr Kipling Cakes, Bisto Gravy and Cadbury cakes (made under licence). Hopes to move to a certified sustainable supply by 2011.
Pepsico (US) Makes Walker’s crisps. Has one of the best corporate policies, only using palm oil in Quaker Oat Granola and Nobby’s Nuts. Intends to phase out use on those two products.
Information above supplied by the Independent website here: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/how-britons-fuel-destruction-of-the-rainforest-1677096.html

Join my mailing list for newsletter updates on this and other matters HERE

Related Articles:

• Top brands use palm oil
• Big Brands – their policy & comments
• Top 100 products – contain palm oil or not?

• Product using palm oil in UK contact details
• Supermarkets and Palm oil

• Palm oil – What to buy – food, cosmetics and household products
• Palm oil – What not to buy
• Palm oil – What to do and how to help – have your say!
• Palm oil and your health
• Seeing palm oil plantations in Borneo – my experience
• Palm oil – the dangers – my report
• Save the orangutans
• If you holiday in Thailand – orangutans
• How Britons fuel destruction of the rainforest
• Leading article – palm oil shock
• Palm oil and climate change

Also use the top right hand links on this website to find out more!

Seeing palm oil plantations in Sabah, Borneo

sandra — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:42:20 +0000

palm oil kernel copyright sandra m dean

Seeing palm oil plantations

As we made our way to the Sepilok Jungle Resort, where we stayed that night, the guide showed us some palm kernels – the type which are being grown absolutely everywhere for its oil. Ok, they can make cooking oil, soap and lots of other stuff from it, and it brings wealth into the Country, but they are cutting down all the rainforest to plant them! This was my main reason for going to Borneo – to see what is going on with the plantations, and the damage they are doing to the forest’s inhabitants – particularly the Orangutans! He showed us the husk and the inside, and explained its many uses, but the fact that a whopping 80% of the virgin rainforest has been destroyed in favour of planting palms, does not convince me of it’s good! Imagine what the lack of natural rainforest must be doing to the food chain, the environment and possibly the ozone!

palm oil plantatiion copyright sandra m dean

palm oil mound copyright sandra m dean

palm oil copyright sandra m dean

However, throughout our whole journey in Sabah, no matter where we went, the landmass was covered in palm plantations as far as the eye can see. This is terribly harmful – read my report on the situation here

palm oil conditions copyright sandra m dean

See the itinerary for the rest of this trip here

Palm Oil problems – the facts

sandra — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 10:20:20 +0000

palm oil - the facts copyright Sandra M Dean

How much do you know about palm oil and how it is killing the orangutans? We are not looking for a boycott of palm oil useage – just a campaign to stop the use of ‘unsustainable palm oil’ for products in our supermarkets and to make biofuels. Sustainable oil plantations are out there and are accessible, so lets do something about it!

Learn more here