What is it with the EU that it should resort to dark subterfuge and engage in desperate gutter campaigns against a third world crop using green group surrogates with a level of manufactured evidence that is breathtaking in its blatant deceit and inherent fraudulence?

Italian civil rights group, Libertiamo thinks that it has uncovered the soft underbelly of a fraud perpetuated by the EU Commission against probably the most benign edible oilseed crop, environmentally speaking. What is most sad is that the no one, including the mass media has a problem with the brazen deliberate dishonesty of the palm oil campaigns conducted by these green groups against palm oil!

According to Libertiamo, the shocking part is that the EC is aware that the palm oil campaigns funded by them are based almost entirely on cooked up and manufactured evidence!  Says Libertiamo: “NGOs have become "peddlers of half truths to drive donations and attract government largesse. And donor governments support them, in the interest of uncompetitive domestic industries and neo colonial ambitions!

In their report called “Taxpayer Funding, NGO Collusion and Manufactured Crises: A Case Study of Malaysia and Palm Oil,” Libertiamo points out that the real reason behind the EU Commission’s bizarre funding of environmental NGOs to carry out vicious anti-palm oil campaigns that they are aware are based on false and manufactured evidence is to erect artificial trade barriers against palm oil to prevent competition against the EU’s own edible oil industries such as rapeseed and sunflower oil!

The fact that their actions threatens the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of smallholders do not appear to trouble the conscience of the crooks ensconced in the offices of the Environment Directorate of the EC and their crass pandering to the indigenous EU oilseed crops like sunflower and rapeseed, which are hapless in facing the market onslaught of the rampantly hyper yielding palm oil will inevitably come back to bite them! Perhaps, it is already poetic justice that the EU should be facing the economic turmoil that it currently faces. Rather than promoting policies designed to increase productivity and encourage growth , the EC is paying the price for taking their eye off the ball, choosing to prop up its indigenous uncompetitive industries!

Noting the predilection of these NGOs to make spectacular claims, Libertiamo observed that one of the most commonly used is a statistic that in SE Asia alone, the equivalent of 300 football fields are deforested every hour for palm oil plantations, a claim that has been exposed as a significant distortion of facts by the FAO?s recent "State of the Forests 2011" report which observes that whilst rates of deforestation between 1990-2000 were high at a time of significant development in SE Asia, the trend had reversed dramatically between 2000-2010. Deforestation rates during this latter period "more than halved, making the NGO claims of rampant expansion entirely false!"

In our view, it is certainly time for the EU Commission to face dark truths about itself and save itself from the toxic waste of its own humbug? THE END