24-Jan-08

Environmental groups have criticised a plan by Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé and Heinz to certify palm oil as sustainable for not going far enough and having “fundamental problems”.

Last week the companies signed up a consortium of 200 oil producers and commercial buyers to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), which is working on a system to certify palm oil operations as meeting environmental criteria. The production of palm oil is reportedly causing the widespread loss of forests in Indonesia, which has the fastest rate of deforestation of any major forested country.

But Greenpeace says that the RSPO plan for certification, due to be applied in April, is “unable to deliver real sustainable standards that will prevent further forest clearances”. A Greenpeace spokeswoman says: “If the RSPO was serious about addressing the problem it would refuse to buy palm oil from sources that will not involve further conversions.”

Friends of the Earth (FoE) adds that the RSPO scheme has “fundamental problems” because it “will create an ethical market and an unethical market”. An FoE spokesperson says: “It doesn’t guarantee sustainability and I question if it is the best long-term solution.”

Under pressure from environmental groups and retailers about the destruction of forests for the production of palm oil, multinational consumer goods companies formed the RSPO in 2003. Unilever, the world’s largest single buyer of palm oil, is a founder member.

The World Wildlife Fund, which was involved in the formation of the RSPO defended the scheme. WWF-UK senior policy officer Adam Harrison says: “It is not 100% perfect but it certainly addresses some of the issues.”

In November last year, Greenpeace accused Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Kraft of being “climate vandals” for their part in clearing tropical forests.

Source: http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=59335&d=254&h=260&f=3

Demand End of Certification of Rainforest Destruction

(New York, New York) – Thursday the New York Climate Action Group (NYCAG) joins other environmental organizations denouncing Rainforest Alliance for profiting financially from the destruction of rainforests.

NYCAG is demanding a permanent end to the industrial logging of old-growth forests worldwide. Dressed as creatures from the rainforests of the world, environmentalists from New York City will participate in a festive rally to greet and inform the participants at a Rainforest Alliance cocktail party.

Scientific studies have shown that industrial logging in old-growth rainforests is never sustainable and leads to their permanent destruction by ranchers, mining operations, and industrial agricultural interests. Rainforest Alliance receives 30% of its funding by certifying industrial logging through their “Smartwood” program. They are the largest such certifier in the world. “Smartwood” certification follows Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) guidelines, which Rainforest Alliance claims will ensure sustainable forestry. In truth, however, FSC guidelines allow first-time logging of pristine ancient forests. These forests are recognized by climate scientists worldwide as our greatest defense against climate change.

Many cocktail party attendees coming expecting pina coladas will first be met by activists disguised as rain forest creatures, including an array of wild birds and mammals and even a gorilla to represent those imperiled because of certified logging schemes similar to Smartwood in the Congo.

The watchdog group, FSC-Watch, is directed by one of the founders of FSC Simon Counsell, who became its greatest critic. They have reported that, in addition to legal unsustainable logging, SmartWood has issued FSC certificates to various companies involved in illegal logging; its parent
organization, Rainforest Alliance, also issued ‘ethical certificates’ to a company which that was actually working with Colombian terrorists.

In recent weeks, opponents of FSC certification of old-growth forest logging have achieved important victories. On January 17th the city council of Ocean City (New Jersey) voted unanimously to cancel a $1.1 million purchase of ipê timber from ancient rainforests, despite claims that its FSC certification ensured sustainability. Dr. Glen Barry, of Ecological Internet, responded, “The message is getting through: for our survival rainforest logging must end. Remaining rainforests must be protected and allowed to expand, with compensation to local peoples.”

But is the message getting through?

Explains NYCAG member Emily Sandusky, dressed as a gorilla, “I hope Rainforest Alliance will recognize that FSC certification of old-growth tropical timber is certifying the destruction of the rainforest.”

The activists urged Rainforest Alliance to recognize the need to support permanent protected status for the world’s remaining old growth forests. The animals will ask cocktail party-goers to use their influence to get Rainforest Alliance to change its ways and to stop selling old growth rainforest timber products. Rainforest Alliance will also be urged to support NYCAG efforts to end New York City’s use of tropical hardwoods.

-end-

By MICHAEL CASEY – 7 hours ago

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — The world’s rush to embrace biofuels is causing a spike in the price of corn and other crops and could worsen water shortages and force poor communities off their land, a U.N. official said Wednesday.

Speaking at a regional forum on bioenergy, Regan Suzuki of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization acknowledged that biofuels are better for the environment than fossil fuels and boost energy security for many countries.

However, she said those benefits must be weighed against the pitfalls — many of which are just now emerging as countries convert millions of acres to palm oil, sugar cane and other crops used to make biofuels.

“Biofuels have become a flash point through which a wide range of social and environmental issues are currently being played out in the media,” Suzuki told delegates at the forum, sponsored by the U.N. and the Thai government.

Foremost among the concerns is increased competition for agricultural land, which Suzuki warned has already caused a rise in corn prices in the United States and Mexico and could lead to food shortages in developing countries.

She also said China and India could face worsening water shortages because biofuels require large amounts of water, while forests in Indonesia and Malaysia could face threats from the expansion of palm oil plantations.

“Particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, land availability is a critical issue,” Suzuki said. “There are clear comparative advantages for tropical and subtropical countries in growing biofuel feed stocks but it is often these same countries in which resource and land rights of vulnerable groups and protected forests are weakest.”

Initially, biofuels were held up as a panacea for countries struggling to cope with the rising cost of oil or those looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union, for example, plans to replace 10 percent of transport fuel with biofuels made from energy crops such as sugar cane and rapeseed oil by 2020.

But in recent months, scientists, private agencies and even the British government have said biofuels could do more harm than good. Rather than protecting the environment, they say energy crops destroy natural forests that actually store carbon and thus are a key tool in the fight to reduce global warming.

Some of those doubts were on display Wednesday at the U.N. forum, with experts saying many countries in Asia have rolled out plans to mandate biofuels for transport without weighing the potential risks.

Thailand, for example, is considering delaying the introduction of diesel blended with 2 percent biofuel for two months until April because of palm oil shortages, while the Philippines is considering shelving a biofuels law over concerns about the negative environmental effects.

India is facing criticism that its plans to plant 30 million acres of jatropha trees by 2012 for biofuel could force communities from their land and worsen deforestation. There are also concerns that it will be unable to find the 100 million acres of vacant land it needs to grow the shrub-like plants.

Varghese Paul, a forest and biodiversity expert with the Energy and Resources Institute in India, said dependence on a single species is dangerous.

“An outbreak of pests and diseases could wipe out entire plantations in one stroke,” Paul said.

Source: http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hIipI7rsh-IaoutsJKgAmzG5Mh0gD8UBKQ6O1

In Loving Memory of Josephine
Born in Sumatra Circa 1960
Died in San Diego January 17, 2008
Rest in Peace, Sweet Lady

From the San Diego Zoo’s website:

We regret to announce that 47-year-old Sumatran orangutan Josephine, who lived at the San Diego Zoo for 14 years, died January 17. Josephine was diagnosed with heart disease and had been under veterinary care and management to treat her condition for several years. In January 2007 she underwent a procedure to drain fluid accumulation from around her heart. Although the procedure provided her immediate relief from pain and increased her quality of life, it only extended her life for a short time. Since then, despite drug treatments, the heart fluid had returned on a few occasions and she had difficulty recovering from the procedures that prolonged her life. Her condition had continued to deteriorate despite these measures. On January 17, Josephine went to the veterinary hospital to have her condition evaluated. Due to her age and advancing health issues the animal care staff made the difficult decision to euthanize her.

Josephine was one of the oldest orangutans living in the U.S. She was Satu’s mother and Cinta’s grandmother. She was well loved by staff and Zoo visitors alike. She will be sorely missed. Please take a moment to share your sympathy with animal care staff who have cared for her over these many years.

Visit the San Diego Zoo’s website and check out the Ape Cam:
http://www.sandiegozoo.org/zoo/ex_absolutely_apes.html

Please visit mongabay.com, the source of this article. Rhett Butler’s blog is encyclopedic in its scope and serves as a great place to start educating yourself on the perils of palm oil as well as a host of other environmental issues.

http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0117-biofuels.html

By Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
January 17, 2008

U.S. incentives for biofuel production are promoting deforestation in southeast Asia and the Amazon by driving up crop prices and displacing energy feedstock production, say researchers.

William Laurance, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, says that massive subsidies to promote American corn production for ethanol have shifted soy production to Brazil where large areas of cerrado grasslands are being torn up for soybean farms. The expansion of soy in the region is contributing to deforestation in the Amazon.

“Some forests are directly cleared for soy farms. Farmers also purchase large expanses of cattle pasture for soy production, effectively pushing the ranchers further into the Amazonian frontier or onto lands unsuitable for soy production,” said Laurance.

“In addition, higher soy costs tend to raise beef prices because soy-based livestock feeds become more expensive, creating an indirect incentive for forest conversion to pasture,” added Laurance. “Finally, the powerful Brazilian soy lobby has been a driving force behind initiatives to expand Amazonian highway networks, which greatly increase access to forests for ranchers, farmers, loggers, and land speculators.”

Satellite imagery from NASA supports Laurance. Data released last summer indicates that much of the recent burning is concentrated around two major Amazon roads: Trans-Amazon highway in the state of Amazonas, and the unpaved portion of the BR-163 Highway in the state of Pará.

Brazilian satellite data also show a marked increase in the number of fires and deforestation in the region. The states of Para and Mato Grosso — the heart of Brazil’s booming agricultural frontier — both experienced a 50 percent or more increase in forest loss over the same period last year coupled with a large jump in burning: a 39-85 percent jump in the number of fires in Para during the July-September burning period and 100-127 percent rise in Mato Grosso, depending on the satellite. More broadly, the 50,729 fires recorded by the Terra satellite and 72,329 measured by the AQUA satellite across the Brazilian Amazon are the highest on record based on available data going back to 2003.

“American taxpayers are spending $11 billion a year to subsidize corn producers—and this is having some surprising global consequences,” said Laurance. “Amazon fires and forest destruction have spiked over the last several months, especially in the main soy-producing states in Brazil. Just about everyone there attributes this to rising soy and beef prices.”

“We see soy prices going up partly because less soy is being grown in the U.S. as corn expands to meet the surging demand for the emerging ethanol industry,” explained Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center. “Soy production is… encroaching on the Amazon.”

Biodiesel trends conspire to destroy orangutan habitat in Indonesia

While the corn connection to deforestation in the Amazon has been well-explored in recent months, the American biodiesel incentives that are promoting soy expansion in the Amazon are also fueling oil palm establishment in Indonesia, by boosting prices for all energy crops.

Clay Ogg, an agricultural economist with the U.S. government, finds the current biofuel boom has lifted palm oil prices by nearly half, leading to oil palm plantation expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia at the expense of carbon-rich peat swamps and species-rich tropical rainforests.

“Reductions in U.S. exports of corn and other crops lead to higher, world commodity prices,” wrote Ogg in a paper presented last year at a Farm Foundation conference on “Biofuels, Food & Feed Tradeoffs” in St. Louis, Missouri. “Higher prices can contribute substantially to deforestation in tropical countries.”

“In the U.S., it is easy to plant less soybeans and more corn when the price of corn doubles, as occurred recently. This raises the world price of soybean oil… so we are a major contributor to the increase in vegetable oil and palm oil prices,” he continued.

“Palm oil is the cheapest to produce of the vegetable oils, so when European drivers burn rapeseed oil or soybean oil in their cars, it causes vegetable oil prices to increase, including palm oil prices. As various vegetable oils are used for fuel in Europe, in the U.S. and in other countries, China will meet its growing vegetable oil needs by importing palm oil, and palm oil prices are projected to increase by about 50 percent, largely as a result of the biofuel related demands. Consumption of various vegetable oils in automobiles, therefore, provides much the same encouragement to drain swamps in Indonesia as does the consumption of palm oil.”

The draining of peat swamps in Indonesia results in large carbon dioxide emissions — some 2 billion tons per year according to estimates by Wetlands International. These releases have made Indonesia the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China, despite the country’s small industrial base.

Clay Ogg’s paper is especially pertinent as India’s Tata Motors rolls out its Nano, a $2500 car that is projected to expand the Indian car market by 65% according to rating agency CRISIL, creating more demand for fuels, including biodiesel.

“The Nano and similar hyper-affordable models currently under development by other manufacturers could expand oil demand much faster than expected,” states an editorial from Biopact, a bioenergy web site. “A scenario based on a very rapid expansion of the global car fleet and its effects on oil prices could have one immediate result: a massive and unstoppable rush into biofuels. Because the poor not only want to own their Nano, they want to drive it. Ultra-expensive gasoline simply won’t be an option… For the millions of new small car owners, biofuels - even with all their current drawbacks - would become the only acceptable alternative to unaffordable gasoline.”

Although the U.S. is unlikely to see much of a jump in car ownership or fuel consumption as fleet-wide vehicle fuel efficiency improves in response to higher gas prices and new laws, its subsidies may impact palm oil biodiesel consumption in other ways, says Dorab Mistry, an analyst of London-based Godrej International Ltd, a research firm.

“The subsidy the U.S. government gives is meant to encourage local soybean oil being converted into biofuel. But many people are importing palm diesel instead of using local soyoil to make biofuels,” Dorab Mistry told Reuters. “They import palm diesel, mix it with 1 percent local diesel, make the blend, that is biofuel, and collect the subsidy.”

Though this source of demand for palm oil is small, the overall impact of U.S. policy on biofuels is substantial.

Will the U.S. follow in Europe’s footsteps? Not likely

While it is clear that U.S. incentives for biofuel production are having a substantial environmental impact beyond American borders, it is unlikely that the country will take steps to mitigate damages from these supposedly “green” energy sources. The U.S. farm lobby continues to demand generous subsidies for corn ethanol production, while a tariff on imported ethanol “protects” American consumers from savings that would otherwise be realized from biofuels produced more-efficiently overseas. Further, because the U.S. imports little biodiesel directly, it means that initiatives like that announced by the E.U. this week — which bans biofuels produced on forest lands and in other sensitive ecosystems — won’t have much of an impact.

The best hope for mitigating the damages wrought by U.S. bioenergy policy may lie in the next generation of biofuels, specifically feed stocks derived from farm waste, weedy grasses (switchgrass, miscanthus), and fast-growing trees (poplar, sweet gum). Researchers say such “second generation” biofuels offer a higher net energy balance with lower greenhouse gas emissions. Further, such feed stocks can be grown with fewer fertilizer and pesticides, and are viable on marginal agricultural lands so they don’t compete with food crops.

Comments

References

* Ogg, C. (2007) Environmental Challenges Associated with Corn Ethanol Production. Presented at the Farm Foundation conference on “Biofuels, Food & Feed Tradeoffs” in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 12, 2007
* Jan Fuglestvedt et al. (2007). Climate forcing from the transport sectors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences January 7-11, 2008.
* Laurance, W. F. Science 318, 1721 (2007)
* Other citations linked in the text

Source: http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0117-biofuels.html

Looks like it’s time to keep an eye on the airlines! — Orangutan Outreach

By Jane Rawson
22 January 2008

Source: http://travelblog.viator.com/a-tank-full-of-palm-oil-biofuel-flights-to-start-in-february/

n the UK, airline flights account for 7% of that country’s CO2 emissions, but thanks to more and more cheap flights this will probably rise to 25% in the next couple of decades. Worldwide, flights make up about 2% of all emissions, and again the percentage is rising.

The numbers are not good news for travelers who care about the environment. It’s downright annoying spending a year catching public transport to work to make the world a better place, only to discover that your short break to Hawaii emitted more CO2 than you could hope to make up in 10 years of not driving.

For those who travel because they want to see the world’s beautiful places before they’re gone, the irony could blow a blood vessel – taking a plane to see the Great Barrier Reef, whose existence is threatened because people take so many planes…

So what can we do? For most of us staying home is not an option; there’s too much world to see, family and friends to visit, cultures to learn from, foods to taste and mountains to climb. And if it really is going we want to see it before it’s gone. One option is to hope the airlines can come up with a way to make flying more earth-friendly. Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin airlines, is on a mission to do just that. He’s proposed all kind of ideas – his work on using new technology to both reduce circling times and cut down the distance planes need to be towed before they take off is boring but immensely practical– but this last week one of them is off the drawing board and (almost) on the runway.

Virgin Atlantic has announced that in February it will make its first flight using biofuels. The flight – from London to Amsterdam – won’t carry any passengers, and it won’t be entirely powered by biofuel (only 20%, in fact). But Branson thinks it’s a step in the right direction. So do Air New Zealand, who are competing to get their biofuelled plane in the air before Virgin’s.

The two airlines have been working with Boeing and GE Aviation on the project, which will use conventional engines. According to the manufacturers, burning biofuels doesn’t mean modifying the engines, and it won’t affect the plane’s performance. Neither airline is willing to reveal yet what kind of biofuel they’re using. Why not, you may well ask. Does it even matter? Surely any biofuel is better than aviation fuel, right?

Not necessarily. A couple of years ago, biofuels seemed like the solution to all our problems: a clean, green way to keep our cars and trucks on the road and our planes in the air without digging up more oil and churning more CO2 into the air. Europe was particularly quick to embrace biofuels: they set a target for biofuel imports and alternative gas stations began springing up all over the place.

But it’s not all good news. As farming corporations dream of becoming the new oil barons, small-scale farmers are being kicked off their land in South America and Asia, and biofuel crops are replacing much needed food crops (with recent reports suggesting biofuels may lead to widespread famine). In South-East Asia, ancient forests and peat beds are being cleared and burned to make way for palm oil plantations so Europeans can fill up with biofuel – the clearing and burning is releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere than the biofuels could ever hope to make up. (Europe has just this past week declared that it is reviewing its biofuel targets to make sure they don’t cause more problems than they solve.)

The rethink may be the fly in Richard Branson’s green ointment, and the reason why he’s currently keeping mum about the source of his biofuel. Or it may be that he’s discovered a revolutionary fuel that he’s not yet willing to announce.

Let’s hope it’s the latter, and that it won’t be too long before every airline is filling up with sustainable biofuels, letting those of us who worry about such things fly with a clear conscience, even if it is to see the melting glaciers of Greenland.

Source: http://travelblog.viator.com/a-tank-full-of-palm-oil-biofuel-flights-to-start-in-february/

By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: January 19, 2008

KUANTAN, Malaysia — Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material.

This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.

The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.

In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.

According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

“The urban poor, the rural landless and small and marginal farmers stand to lose,” said He Changchui, the agency’s chief representative for Asia and the Pacific.

A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food.

A growing middle class in the developing world is demanding more protein, from pork and hamburgers to chicken and ice cream. And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some of the places best equipped to do so, like Australia.

In the last few years, world demand for crops and meat has been rising sharply. It remains an open question how and when the supply will catch up. For the foreseeable future, that probably means higher prices at the grocery store and fatter paychecks for farmers of major crops like corn, wheat and soybeans.

There may be worse inflation to come. Food experts say steep increases in commodity prices have not fully made their way to street stalls in the developing world or supermarkets in the West.

Governments in many poor countries have tried to respond by stepping up food subsidies, imposing or tightening price controls, restricting exports and cutting food import duties.

These temporary measures are already breaking down. Across Southeast Asia, for example, families have been hoarding palm oil. Smugglers have been bidding up prices as they move the oil from more subsidized markets, like Malaysia’s, to less subsidized markets, like Singapore’s.

No category of food prices has risen as quickly this winter as so-called edible oils — with sometimes tragic results. When a Carrefour store in Chongqing, China, announced a limited-time cooking oil promotion in November, a stampede of would-be buyers left 3 people dead and 31 injured.

Cooking oil may seem a trifling expense in the West. But in the developing world, cooking oil is an important source of calories and represents one of the biggest cash outlays for poor families, which grow much of their own food but have to buy oil in which to cook it.

Few crops illustrate the emerging problems in the global food chain as well as palm oil, a vital commodity in much of the world and particularly Asia. From jungles and street markets in Southeast Asia to food companies in the United States and biodiesel factories in Europe, soaring prices for the oil are drawing environmentalists, energy companies, consumers, indigenous peoples and governments into acrimonious disputes.

The oil palm is a stout-trunked tree with a spray of frilly fronds at the top that make it look like an enormous sea anemone. The trees, with their distinctive, star-like patterns of leaves, cover an eighth of the entire land area of Malaysia and even greater acreage in nearby Indonesia.

An Efficient Producer

The palm is a highly efficient producer of vegetable oil, squeezed from the tree’s thick bunches of plum-size bright red fruit. An acre of oil palms yields as much oil as eight acres of soybeans, the main rival for oil palms; rapeseed, used to make canola oil, is a distant third. Among major crops, only sugar cane comes close to rivaling oil palms in calories of human food per acre.

Palm oil prices have jumped nearly 70 percent in the last year because supply has grown slowly while demand has soared.

Farmers and plantation companies are responding to the higher prices, clearing hundreds of thousands of acres of tropical forest to replant with rows of oil palms. But an oil palm takes eight years to reach full production. A drought last year in Indonesia and flooding in Peninsular Malaysia helped constrain supply. Worldwide palm oil output climbed just 2.7 percent last year, to 42.1 million tons.

At the same time, palm oil demand is growing steeply for a variety of reasons around the globe. They include shifting decisions among farmers about what to plant, rising consumer demand in China and India for edible oils, and Western subsidies for biofuel production.

American farmers have been planting more corn and less soy because demand for corn-based ethanol has pushed up corn prices. American soybean acreage plunged 19 percent last year, producing a drop in soybean oil output and inventories.

Chinese farmers also cut back soybean acreage last year, as urban sprawl covered prime farmland and the Chinese government provided more incentives for grain.

Yet people in China are also consuming more oils. China not only was the world’s biggest palm oil importer last year, holding steady at 5.2 million tons in the first 11 months of the year, but it also doubled its soybean oil imports to 2.9 million tons, forcing buyers elsewhere to switch to palm oil.

Concerns about nutrition used to hurt palm oil sales, but they are now starting to help. The oil was long regarded in the West as unhealthy, but it has become an attractive option to replace the chemically altered fats known as trans fats, which have lately come to be seen as the least healthy of all fats.

New York City banned trans fats in frying at food service establishments last summer and will ban them in bakery goods this summer. Across the country, manufacturers are trying to replace trans fats. American palm oil imports nearly doubled in the first 11 months of last year, rising by 200,000 tons.

“Four years ago, when this whole no-trans issue started, we processed no palm here,” said Mark Weyland, a United States product manager for Loders Croklaan, a Dutch company that supplies palm oil. “Now it’s our biggest seller.”

Last year, conversion of palm oil into fuel was a fast-growing source of demand, but in recent weeks, rising prices have thrown that business into turmoil.

Here on Malaysia’s eastern shore, a series of 45-foot-high green and gray storage tanks connect to a labyrinth of yellow and silver pipes. The gleaming new refinery has the capacity to turn 116,000 tons a year of palm oil into 110,000 tons of a fuel called biodiesel, as well as valuable byproducts like glycerin. Mission Biofuels, an Australian company, finished the refinery last month and is working on an even larger factory next door at the base of a jungle hillside.

But prices have spiked so much that the company cannot cover all its costs and has idled the finished refinery while looking for a new strategy, such as asking a biodiesel buyer to pay a price linked to palm oil costs, and someday switching from palm oil to jatropha, a roadside weed.

“We took a view that palm oil prices were already high; we didn’t think they could go even higher, and then they did,” said Nathan Mahalingam, the company’s managing director.

Growth in Biofuels

Biofuels accounted for almost half the increase in worldwide demand for vegetable oils last year, and represented 7 percent of total consumption of the oils, according to Oil World, a forecasting service in Hamburg, Germany.

The growth of biodiesel, which can be mixed with regular diesel, has been controversial, not only because it competes with food uses of oil but also because of environmental concerns. European conservation groups have been warning that tropical forests are being leveled to make way for oil palm plantations, destroying habitat for orangutans and Sumatran rhinoceroses while also releasing greenhouse gases.

The European Union has moved to restrict imports of palm oil grown in unsustainable ways. The measure has incensed the Malaysian palm oil industry, which had plunged into biofuel production in part to satisfy European demand.

Another controversy involves the treatment of indigenous peoples whose lands have been seized by oil plantations. This has been a particular issue on Borneo.

Anne B. Lasimbang, executive director of the Pacos Trust in the Malaysian state of Sabah in northern Borneo, said that while some indigenous people had benefited from selling palm oil that they grow themselves, many had lost ancestral lands with little to show for it, including lands that used to provide habitats for endangered orangutans.

“Finally, some of the pressures internationally have trickled down. Some of the companies are more open to dialogue; they want to talk to communities,” said Ms. Lasimbang, a member of the Dusun indigenous group. “On our side, we are still suspicious.”

Demand Outstrips Supply

As the multiple conflicts and economic pressures associated with palm oil play out in the global economy, the bottom line seems to be that the world wants more of the oil than it can get.

Even in Malaysia, the center of the global palm oil industry for half a century, spot shortages have cropped up. Recently, as wholesale prices soared, cooking oil refiners complained of inadequate subsidies and cut back production of household oil, sold at low, regulated prices.

Street vendors in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, complain that they cannot find enough cooking oil to prepare roti canai, the flatbread that is the national snack. “It’s very difficult; it’s hard to find,” said one vendor who gave only his first name, Palani, after admitting that he was secretly buying cooking oil intended for households instead of paying the much higher price for commercial use.

Many of the hardest-hit victims of rising food prices are in the vast slums that surround cities in poorer Asian nations. The Kawle family in Mumbai’s sprawling Dharavi slum, a household of nine with just one member working as a laborer for $60 a month, is coping with recent price increases for palm oil.

The family has responded by eating fish once a week instead of twice, seldom cooking vegetables and cutting its monthly rice consumption. Next to go will be the weekly smidgen of lamb.

“If the prices go up again,” said Janaron Kawle, the family patriarch, “we’ll cut the mutton to twice a month and use less oil.”

Contributing reporting were Andrew Martin in New York, Anand Giridharadas in Kale, India, and Michael Rubenstein in Mumbai.

Source: New York Times

In Indonesia, oil palms feed world thirst for clean fuel, but forests, climate and species pay a steep price

By Tom Knudson
January 20, 2008

Every morning, the cage doors swing open and 34 orangutan orphans climb into the outstretched arms of their human mothers.

Grabbing at wrists, tugging at elbows, these baby apes cling to the young women like Velcro, happy to be free of their cages, to play in the dappled sun of the nearby forest for a few hours.

It’s primate day care, a scene that seems choreographed for the Animal Planet channel. But this spectacle of one hominid helping another is more than entertainment. It is a genuine reflection of environmental collapse.

These rust-red fluff balls were born in the wild, in the steamy, lime-green rain forest of tropical Indonesia. Today this jungle is being leveled and its great apes captured, killed and orphaned to grow palm oil, a plantation crop refined into biofuel for environmentally conscious consumers in Europe and the United States.

We live in a world of wanna-be-green commerce, of guilt-ridden citizens eager to protect nature, shrink their carbon footprints and free themselves from Middle East oil. But not every new fuel and eco-friendly product soothes the planet. Some are saddled with environmental baggage of their own, with not-so-obvious links to pollution, climate change and deforestation.

During the past year, supported by a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, I have reported on two such cases: a gourmet line of “conservation-based” Starbucks coffee that was grown on a plantation in a threatened Ethiopian rain forest and a petroleum substitute fueling U.S. cars that was strip-mined from Canada’s boreal forest.

Nothing captured my attention like the orphaned orangutans of Indonesia. Here was a new generation of primates with no forest to explore, no mothers to mimic. Yet they clowned around at my feet, nearly stole my backpack and played tug of war with a stick. Other endangered species don’t do that.

As symbols of environmental change, orangutans are hard to beat. But their struggle is more than a tale of paradise lost. It is also – through the logging of Indonesia’s great rain forests and the resulting massive release of carbon into the atmosphere – a story with a broader connection to the warming of the Earth’s atmosphere and mankind’s role in triggering it.

By coincidence, my November visit came just ahead of the largest global climate gathering in years, a United Nations conference in the Indonesian resort community of Bali.

As delegates from nearly 190 nations met to lay the groundwork for a global warming treaty, another climate drama with worldwide implications was unfolding 400 miles to the north across the pale blue Java Sea in Borneo and farther west in Sumatra.

Where a rich rain forest once stood, storing carbon in its roots, branches, trunks and soil, vast fields of oil palms stretched across the landscape, displacing native people and leaving some of the world’s most majestic creatures – from Sumatran tigers to orangutans – without a home.

“There is no greater curse for orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra than palm oil plantations,” said Biruté Galdikas, one of the world’s leading primate scientists, who lives in Indonesia but spends part of the year in Los Angeles, home to her nonprofit group: Orangutan Foundation International. “People who buy palm oil have orangutan blood on their hands.”

Growing taste for palm oil as fuel

For more than 30 years, Indonesia’s oil palm plantations have fed a global market for vegetable oil, most used in everyday food products from cream cheese to candy bars, cookies to hamburger buns. As concern about climate change and oil prices has grown, interest in palm oil as a green, renewable fuel has soared.

The trend began in Europe a decade or so ago when governments began subsidizing companies to blend soybean, palm and other vegetable oils with diesel to reduce carbon emissions. Since 2004, biodiesel production has more than doubled in Europe to 4.9 million metric tons.

Now biodiesel is catching on in the United States. Last year, the nation’s largest biodiesel plant, supplied in part with palm oil, opened in Washington state. In 2007, 15 million gallons of palm oil were offloaded in Southern California, where it helped power cruise ships and semi-trailer trucks.

Regulators are increasingly uneasy. This week, European Union officials plan to propose a law to ban the import of biodiesel derived from crops grown on recently destroyed forests. California’s own alternative fuels plan says palm oil should “come from plantations whose creation does not disrupt that habitat of rare species.”

Wade Randlett, co-founder of NextFuels Inc., the San Francisco company that imported the 15 million gallons of palm oil to California, said his supplies – from Malaysia and Indonesia – meet that test.

“Every drop is from a sustainable source,” he said. “Not one square foot of rain forest has been destroyed.”

The difficulty of tracing palm oil – a bulk commodity blended and shipped in giant batches – to specific land management practices in the tropics makes some biofuel entrepreneurs wary.

“Palm-based biodiesel, practiced poorly, is an environmental disaster,” said Eric Bowen, chairman of the California Biodiesel Alliance. “You’ve got orangutan populations under pressure. You’ve got deforestation going on.”

Environmental concerns prompted food and biodiesel companies to join with conservation groups in 2003 to form the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which promotes more eco-friendly production, including sowing plantations on land already cleared for farming instead of in rain forests.

Not all environmentalists think the group can live up to its name.

“How can (palm oil) be sustainable if it’s causing so much destruction?” said Leila Salazar-Lopez, agribusiness campaign director with the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco.

Expansion becomes disaster, critic says

The roots of Indonesia’s palm oil expansion reach back 3 1/2 decades, when the government of former President Suharto set aside vast swaths of forest for logging and plantations. Overcutting caused widespread damage and continues to be a problem, according to Lisa Curran, a Yale University professor of tropical resources.

So little wood remains on legal timber concessions that companies log illegally inside national parks and other protected areas, Curran wrote in a 2004 article in the journal Science. Once forests are logged of valuable trees, they often are cleared for oil palm plantations, Curran noted.

“Oil palm is a disaster all the way around for biodiversity if converted from logged forest or peat swamp,” Curran – the recipient of a 2006 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award for her work on Indonesia’s deforestation – wrote in an e-mail. “Oil palm is fine if they actually put it on totally degraded lands – but they don’t.”

Indonesia’s government believes there is still plenty of land left for nature, said Riaz Saehu, a spokesman for the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, D.C. But, he said, in recent years it also has begun taking a more cautious approach toward oil palm plantations.

“There is an effort to reduce plantation expansion,” Saehu said, pointing out that palm oil plantations now cover about 15 million acres – roughly the size of 20 Yosemite National Parks – up from 1.5 million acres in 1986. “What we do now is basically to promote sustainability.”

Curran, who also directs Yale’s Tropical Resources Institute, has her doubts. “After 23 years there I must say they can talk the talk but never walk the walk,” she said.

And what about the palm oil industry? “It’s wrong to say palm oil destroys the forest,” said Siam Maksum, a safety officer for the sprawling Astra Agro Lestari plantation whom I met at a business exhibition in south-central Borneo. “We are not responsible for that.”

Maksum showed me a movie about palm oil and gave me a brochure about the promise of biodiesel. His company is the largest palm oil producer in Indonesia and, he said, it brought jobs, schools and opportunity to the hinterlands.

Plantation destroys rain forest riches

My first glimpse of a palm oil plantation came on the back of a motor scooter flying along the mud-slick back roads of Sumatra with members of an indigenous tribe, the Kubu people. They drove, sometimes wildly. I hung on and hoped for the best.

For mile after muggy mile, the palm trees flew by, growing in long, shadowy rows like an oversized Iowa cornfield. Here and there, we passed charred stumps, reminders of the cathedral-like rain forest that once defined this landscape. At one spot, where the land had been bulldozed for new planting, pinkish-red soil was bleeding into a creek.

Through an interpreter, the Kubu told me they had lived for generations off the riches of the rain forest – its fish, deer, plants and turtles. Now, their jungle pantry was lean. “Before, there were many animals,” said Abas, a Kubu leader, who like some Indonesians uses just one name. “Today, there is hardly anything.”

We kept moving, fishtailing through muddy spots, splashing through puddles, until we came to a tiny village of stick huts surrounded by oil palms, where a bronze-skinned mother of five invited me inside for a visit. She said her name was Anna.

“I am a victim,” said Anna, who wore only blue shorts and a black bra. “I have lost my garden. I cannot grow the rubber, bananas, chiles and other things I need to feed my family.” A plantation palm oil tree grew in Anna’s front yard.

A village leader named Matt Aman joined the conversation. Years ago, this corner of Sumatra was a chorus of birdsong, he said. Now, an eerie quiet grips the land – a silent spring all year long.

“There are no sounds from the birds anymore,” he said.

Deforestation unlocks carbon gases

A day’s drive north of the Kubu villages in the palm oil capital of Indonesia, Riau province, deforestation is stirring a global debate over climate change.

All deforestation contributes to global warming, of course, by releasing carbon long stored in trunks, leaves and branches back into the atmosphere. But Indonesia’s forests – especially its soggy peat jungles being drained and burned for palm oil plantations – are special.

Locked inside those forests and swamp-like thickets is a Fort Knox of carbon – about 24 billion tons – that has been captured from the atmosphere over eons through the magic of photosynthesis. Now deforestation is opening those vaults.

“First, there is a natural compaction that takes place. The peat sinks,” said Art Klassen, regional director for the Tropical Forest Foundation, a science-based U.S. nonprofit group. “Then there is the natural oxidation of the upper layer. Because of the sun, there is greater biological activity, which decomposes that peat, completely releasing CO2 and oxidizing it.”

Indonesia’s deforestation-related carbon releases have lately drawn global attention because of their scale. A recent World Bank report put the loss at 2.6 billion tons a year – out of a national total of 3 billion tons – making the impoverished nation the third largest source of climate-warming carbon dioxide on Earth, behind China and the United States.

“Indonesia! Who would have thought it?” said Galdikas, the primate scientist in Jakarta. “It’s because of the massive burning of forests for palm oil, used for biofuel. It’s enough to make you support Saudi Arabian oil.”

The week I visited Riau province, Greenpeace activists aboard the Rainbow Warrior were blockading a shipment of palm oil off its coast. A large banner tied to the ship’s masts read: “Palm Oil Kills Forests & Climate.”

As land cleared, wildlife driven out

Riau province also is home to one of the rarest mammals on Earth: the Sumatran tiger. Fewer than 350 are believed to survive in the wild. And as plantations expand – for palm oil and for acacia trees, grown for pulp and paper – many scientists fear the worst.

“The tiger is going to go extinct if we don’t do something,” said Sunarto, a wildlife biologist in the regional capital of Pekanbaru.

On several occasions, Sunarto said he has returned to tiger study areas only to find the rain forest mowed down to make way for plantations. “It’s very sad,” he said. “The trees are gone. The animals are gone.”

Still, Sunarto soldiers on. The jungle where he works is sticky-hot, soggy-wet and buggy. Every member of his research team, Sunarto included, has come down with malaria. “We say we are going to put malaria on our résumés,” he joked.

A similar spirit motivates researchers 700 miles east on the island of Borneo where the object of attention is Asia’s only great ape – the orangutan.

“Orangutans are almost ancestors,” said Galdikas, a protégée of the late anthropologist Louis Leakey. “They share 97 percent of their genetic material with us. They are basically what we once were before we left the Garden of Eden. Do we want orangutans to disappear from the face of the Earth as biologically viable populations?”

Now 61, Galdikas arrived in Borneo in 1971 when she was 25 and Borneo was one of the wildest places on Earth. She built a research station on the swampy southern coast, named it Camp Leakey and set out to study and live with orangutans in the wild.

Over the years, she’s had more scrapes and close calls than Indiana Jones. Once, she said, she was kidnapped by loggers and held at knifepoint. “It was about forests,” Galdikas said as she sat calmly in her quiet home in Jakarta. “They beat me. I have teeth missing. I can talk about it now because it was 17 years ago.”

Since then, she said, the struggle against illegal logging largely has been won. Camp Leakey is part of Tanjung Puting National Park, which Galdikas helped create. But now, she said, palm oil plantations represent a bigger threat.

“They just clear the forest,” she said. “They take out the valuable timber and the rest they burn. And in the process, they drive out all the wildlife. When the burning is over, orangutans become refugees.”

Many of those homeless orangutans – along with others rescued from an illegal pet trade – end up at the care and rehabilitation center Galdikas directs just outside Pankalabuun, where they are given names and impress the volunteers with their antics and aptitude.

Consider Kristen, a 22-year-old female. “She’s extremely intelligent,” said Jodie Sheridan, an Australian volunteer at the facility. “One day, she escaped from her cage, took herself straight to the vet’s kitchen, mixed up a sugary mess and walked herself back to the cage.”

Designed a decade ago for 40 animals, the center’s orangutan population has ballooned to 325. “That’s the most we’ve ever had,” said Waliyati, the care center’s manager. “Every year, we get 60 to 80 more.”

Over the past year, the number of orphaned orangutan babies and toddlers has more than doubled, from 15 to 34.

“A refugee camp” of orangutans

An orphaned orangutan is a biological fire alarm. Few species bond more closely to their mothers. In the wild, a baby orangutan swings and dangles from its mother for at least three years, then remains with her for five more. In the wild, an orangutan orphan is an oxymoron.

Why, then, are so many orphans turning up at the care center? Galdikas and six other orangutan scientists and care workers I interviewed maintain that more and more it’s because their mothers are shot or bludgeoned to death while foraging for food on palm oil plantations.

“They actually hire hunters to kill them because they view them as agricultural pests,” Galdikas said. “The police have told me that.”

Shortly after Sheridan arrived to volunteer at the care center in early 2006, she was shown some photos of a young male orangutan that had recently been mortally wounded in a palm oil plantation. In two of the pictures, which I later received via e-mail, the limp body of an orangutan is sprawled beneath a palm oil tree. Its mouth hangs open. Its right eye is swollen shut.

“People here were phoned to come and pick him up. But by the time they got there, he’d been beaten so badly that he only lived for two days,” Sheridan said. “There are close-ups of his face and they’ve taken a big bat, a big lump of wood to him. And you’ve got all these palm oil workers standing around his body on the ground.”

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint who is killing orangutans. But Siam Maksum, the palm oil safety officer in Pangkalanbuun, told me his company is not to blame. “The orangutan never comes to our plantation because the land is already degraded,” he said.

What about other companies? I asked.

“I have no idea,” he said.

At the time of my visit to the care center, the newest orphan was Sirdado, who had arrived on Nov. 7. He was found wandering in a palm oil plantation, reported Fajar Dewanto, the field supervisor with Orangutan Foundation International in Borneo who organized the rescue.

His mother was missing – a telltale clue. “If we find an infant, we know the mother has been killed,” Dewanto said.

Though Sirdado was tucked away in quarantine, swarms of other primate preschoolers tumbled around on the ground in a makeshift playground and swung through some branches. Others held tight to their new human mothers.

Touching, yes. But tragic, too.

“The number of orangutans in rehabilitation centers is simply a symptom of how fast the forest is going,” said Stephen Brend, a British zoologist who works at the facility.

“It’s a major burden and a real horror story,” he added. “It’s just a refugee camp.”

Source: http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/647848.html

IT’S HIGH TIME TO DO THE SAME IN BORNEO - BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE !!!!!

Massive local and international protest has stopped a Malaysian company’s plan to grow oil palms on nearly all of a pristine Papua-New Guinean island.

The PNG agriculture minister, John Hickey, who first approved the plan has now confirmed that it’s been dropped. The palm oil was to be exported for agrofuel production.

The Malaysian Vitroplant Ltd. had intended to clear away 60,000 hectares of rain forest on the island of Woodlark, which lies about 280 kilometres from Papua New Guinea and has a total area of about 85,000 hectares.

The 6,000 islanders would have lost their culture, their hunting grounds and their lands for growing food. The palm plantation would have destroyed almost all the still intact flatland rain forest of the island and with it a breathtaking biodiversity. Marine life along the island’s coasts would also have been destroyed by wastes produced by the palm oil project.

Almost without exception the islanders resisted the plan, backed by pressure from environmental activists around the globe. Almost 8,500 people sent protest letters just through the Germany-based “Rettet den Regenwald” (Save the Rain Forest) website ( http://www.regenwald.org).

Rettet den Regenwald has started another protest campaign asking for letters to demand that the European Union give up its plan to mandate 10% agrofuels in transportation by 2020.

Even the EU’s Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, conceded in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation on 14 January 2008: “We have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were. So we have to move very carefully.”

A draft internal report gives the EU Commission a scathing assessment of the European agrofuel plans and warns of devastating ecological and social problems resulting from them.

On 23 January 2008 the Commission intends to present a climate and energy package of which the agrofuel quota is a core element.

Source: http://de.indymedia.org/2008/01/205247.shtml

NOW IT’S TIME TO GO AFTER THE ILLEGAL LOGGERS AND POACHERS !!!!!!!

JAKARTA, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) — The U.S. government on Thursday handed 15 high-speed patrol boats to the Indonesian police and agreed for additional funding for police reform totaling 6.4 million U.S. dollars.

The ceremony to handover the speedboats and the signing of the agreement was held on Batam island.

U.S. Ambassador Cameron Hume and Indonesian National Police Chief Sutanto were present on the occasion and signed a related agreement.

The high-speed patrol boats and support equipment are provided by the U.S. Department of Justice International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), funded by the State Department Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

The patrol boats will be deployed in the waters of Sulawesi, Sumatra and Kalimantan to assist the police in their maritime security efforts throughout the archipelago.

Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-01/17/content_7440550.htm