It was a cold spring morning as my colleague, Marshall and I sat ensconced outside a café in Knightsbridge, London.  It was our daily ritual to meet here for our habitual morning coffee and croissant breakfast on our way to work.

Marshall was engrossed doing his daily crossword puzzles whilst I sat with a copy of The Telegraph opened on the café table as I was wont to do.

Suddenly a news item caught my attention.  Quoting a Dow Jones Newswire, The Telegraph reported that according to data released recently by media research company ABC, the average U.K. daily newspaper circulation had fallen 5% in the six months to March 31.  When I read further that the Independent had the steepest drop, falling 15.44% to 204,384 compared with 241,702 last year, and that its Sunday edition had the biggest drop in circulation, down 21% to 169,777, I remarked to Marshall that I had a strong hunch that palm oil would be attacked in due time by the Independent.

Marshall looked at me quizzically and remarked that I was paranoid.  My response was a simple “Time will prove my hunch right!”

On May Day, I observed labour-day with The Telegraph as usual.  Now the news had turned ominous for the Independent.  “The future of Independent News & Media (INM) is in doubt after the media group failed to reach agreement with bondholders over a €200m (£179m) bond,” reports The Telegraph. “The owner of The Independent warned there was a "strong likelihood" that it would breach its financial covenants unless it could reach a deal with its lenders by May 18,” the paper continued.  I shook my head, convinced now that the attack against palm oil was imminent!

Sure enough, on that very day itself, I later learnt, the Independent had published a “report” alleging that palm oil “is driving the destruction of the rainforests, displacing native people and threatening the survival of the orangutan!" Using emotive language that’d make Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) proud, the paper alludes that palm oil, which is “is present in grocery products commonly found in the UK” is to be blamed for a tree-felling rampage in Southeast Asia.

The paper then went on to point out that palm oil is present or suspected in 43 of 100 best-selling brands in the UK, far more than the one in 10 products estimated by Friends of the Earth four years ago. It should be observed that the Independent used the word “suspected” with relish, attempting to cast negative aspersions and introduce the fear factor towards palm oil through an insidious choice of words!

Pointing out that palm oil is present in Hovis and Kingsmill bread, the country's best-selling margarine Flora, KitKat and Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bars, as well as Dove soap, Comfort fabric conditioner and Persil washing powder, the paper gives a hint as to the real reason for it’s investigative report, that all this comes “amid a surge in demand for the world's cheapest cooking oil.”

It does not take an investigator from CSI to recognize a pattern here, a pattern so obvious that the specter of an anti-palm oil witch hunt that is clearly coordinated and well funded by anti-palm oil competition lobbies.

First, in the early eighties, we have the curiously named and infamous Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) making unfounded allegations that palm oil is saturated fat and therefore hazardous to heart health.  When several scientific studies established instead the lowering effects on cholesterol by palm oil, CSPI beat a hasty retreat to their liar in Washington DC to plan a new assault on palm oil.

They emerged some two decades later with a new stratagem.  This time CSPI alleged that palm oil is causing massive deforestation and therefore threatening the extinction of the orang utans, a red ape indigenous to South East Asia.

It did not take long before other “environmental NGO’s” such as Friends of the Earth (FOE), Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network (RAN) took up the cudgels and launched campaigns alleging, you’ve guessed it, “massive deforestation threatening the extinction of the orang utan”.  What was most interesting was the timing of the attacks, for they appeared to be well coordinated, with one “environmental NGO” starting their campaign as soon as the campaign by the preceding “environmental NGO” had run its course!  The costs involved in running such campaigns as well the careful coordination between rival “environmental NGO’s” has given rise to the sneaky and irresistible suspicion amongst independent observers that an unseen hand is at work here.

However, the long pole in the tent for these witch hunters is that the facts fly in the face of their desperate leaps of logic to paint palm oil as an unsustainable crop.  For one there is “a surge in demand” for palm oil for a reason.  

Fundamentally and irrefutably, palm oil is inherently the most sustainable of all oilseed crops! Being a tree crop, and a perennial crop at that - one that does not require replanting for some 20 to 30 years, palm oil is inherently superior in terms of sustainability to other oilseed competitors such as soy, rapeseed and sunflower, all of which known for their inefficient land use as they require annual replanting, fertilization, etc.  Thus in terms of sequestration of CO2, it can be said that palm oil plantations, which are virtually “planted-forests” put its competitors in the shade!

Secondly, palm oil is the most productive of all the oilseed crops, for the simple reason that it has an enviable yield of more than 4.5 metric tons per hectare.  This dwarfs the miniscule 0.5 metric tons yield typical of its competitors such as soy, rapeseed and sunflower.  This extremely high productivity means several things.
 
For one, the plentitude makes palm oil relative cheap and therefore popular with consumers, restaurateurs and food manufacturers alike.  The healthful profile of the oil makes palm oil a formidable competitor in the edible oil stakes.  The popularity and suitability of palm oil as a feedstock for palm based biofuel and biodiesel also triggered panic attacks as it threatened the hegemony of the west.

For another, the high productivity also means that less land is required for palm oil plantations to produce the same amount of oil as the competing oil seeds. This is borne out by the fact 65% of Malaysia remains forest land after more than a century of cultivating palm oil plus other crops like rubber, cocoa, etc.  Moreover, the oil palm planted area of 4.3 million hectares represents a mere 0.09% of the global planted area (read that again, 0.09%) which puts to the sword the wild allegations of the likes of CSPI, Greenpeace, FOE, RAN and now the Independent that palm oil is adding substantially to deforestation and global warming!

As for palm oil “threatening the survival of the orang utan”, can the Independent explain its silence to the fact that more than 100 million sharks are killed each year for their fins . Yet it had the temerity and moral authority to claim that the orang utans survival is threatened by palm oil, which as we shall see fly in the face of facts again.

A recent study showed that the orang utan population in the wild in Sabah (Malaysia Borneo) has not shown any decline but has, in fact, grown as the permanent forest area has not changed over the last 5 years.  With orangutan in the wild population in Borneo alone currently estimated at between 45,000 and 69,000, it behooves one to ask just how is it even remotely possible for the orang utan, by any leap of logic or stretch of imagination, to have their survival threatened?   

This does not even take into account the many conservation programs and orang utan enclaves established by Malaysia and Indonesia. Orang utan conservation centres had been established in Indonesia including those at Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan, Kutai in East Kalimantan, Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, and Bukit Lawang in the Gunung Leuser National Park on the border of Aceh and North Sumatra. In Malaysia, conservation areas have been set up and they include the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre in Sarawak and Matang Wildlife Centre also in Sarawak, and the Sepilok Orang Utan Sanctuary near Sandakan in Sabah.  

In case the Independent is unaware, the recent discovery of more than 2,000 wild orang utans by scientists in Indonesian Borneo  has left many environmentalists red faced, especially RAN which had predicted that the orang utan would go extinct by 2011 (in 2 year’s time). The new find could well add 5 percent to the world's known orangutan numbers, said Erik Meijaard, senior ecologist for the Nature Conservancy in Indonesia.

Now that the Independent has joined the ranks of the integrity-challenged witch-hunters, it cannot escape the attention of neutral observers that this dubious club is made up of a disparate group of desperadoes, reliant on slush money to stay afloat or to fund their operations! THE END.