The severity of the H1N1 outbreak was deliberately exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies that stood to make billions of dollars from a worldwide scare. So says a leading European health authority who alleged that drug firms had collaborated with WHO officials to deliberately create a "campaign of panic" and a ‘false disaster’ over swine flu pandemic fears. Wolfgang Wodarg, Chairman of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Health Committee, has accused the makers of vaccines for the virus of influencing the World Health Organisation's (WHO) decision to declare a pandemic.

The council, a Strasbourg-based body responsible for the European Court of Human Rights, has decided to investigate Wodarg's claims in an emergency debate on the issue to be held later this month.

Wodarg said the crisis led to governments around the world ordering and stockpiling millions of doses of anti-flu drugs which were not needed. Reports have also emerged that the United Kingdom is trying to offload Billions of Pound Sterling worth of
vaccines ordered at the height of the scare.

Says Wodard: "The WHO in collaboration with some big pharmaceutical companies and their scientists, re-defined pandemics and lowered the alarm-threshold. Those new standards forced politicians in most states to react immediately and sign marketing commitments for additional and new vaccines against "swine-flu" and spend billions of dollars to catch up."

'It's just a normal kind of flu. It does not cause a tenth of deaths caused by the classic seasonal flu,' Dr Wodarg told the
Daily Star. In any year, seasonal flu may cause up to half a million deaths worldwide with a normal flu pandemic causing up to 2 million deaths, while the H1N1 "pandemic' resulted in less than 5,00 deaths worldwide.

Wodarg is focusing on the motives for profit, as well as the ties between the World Health Organization (WHO), the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and research scientists, a nexus which Canada Free Press points out is eerily similar to the Climategate revelations that CRU research scientists fudged data to "hide the decline" in proxy temperatures in order to support global warming claims.

Wodarg stated: "A group of people in the WHO is associated very closely with the pharmaceutical industry." "The great campaign of panic we have seen provided a golden opportunity for representatives from labs who knew they would hit the jackpot in the case of a pandemic being declared."

Says Wodard: “"In April when the first alarm came from Mexico, I was very surprised at the figures furnished by the World Health Organization (WHO) to justify the declaration of a pandemic. I was immediately suspicious: the numbers were very low and the alarm level very high. There were not even into a thousand patients when there was already talk of the pandemic of the century."

Wodarg also raised concerns about the safety of swine flu vaccines in an interview with France’s L’Humanite. He highlighted the intentional deception, which subjected innocent people to an experimental and untested formula.
"The vaccines were developed too quickly. Some ingredients were insufficiently tested," he said. "The vaccine developed by Novartis was produced in a bioreactor from cancerous cells, a technique that had never been used until now."

This form of scaremongering for profit is nothing new.  The palm oil industry has been subjected to the same kind of cleverly
planned and executed global scare campaigns.  What is patently clear, is the obvious pattern and manner in which the environmental organizations take turns to attack palm oil, launching their anti-palm oil campaigns one after the other, like an unethical game of opprobrious musical chairs.

First in the mid-eighties, the dubious Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) launched a scathing campaign alleging
falsely that palm oil was unhealthy and bad for the heart.  When the weight of scientific evidence was brought to bear on the
issue, proving through many scientific studies that palm oil was, in fact heart friendly and good for health, CSPI quickly
abandoned this campaign.

Almost 2 decades later, CSPI thought out a new stratagem.  This time, in a report called “Cruel Oil: How Palm Oil Harms Health, Rainforest and Wildlife”, CSPI sought to paint a picture of utter devastation of pristine rainforest by the palm oil industry and hence causing massive deforestation and threatening the extinction of the orang utan.

Before long, Greenpeace and the curiously named Friends of the Earth joined the bandwagon issuing “reports” with such emotive titles as “Cooking the Climate”, “The Oil for Ape Scandal” and “Rainforest in your Shopping”. Both outfits organized loud and theatrical demonstrations often dressed in orang utan suits.

 Before long, in what appeared to be a carefully coordinated and planned global campaign , one “environmental organization” after another took up the cudgels against palm oil almost as if on cue, as soon as the anti-palm oil campaign of the preceding organization had run its course.

Organizations like Wetlands, followed immediately by the Rainforest Action Network which is then followed by the Palm Oil Action Group which is followed by Nature Alert and currently even the Melbourne Zoo and the Auckland appears to have picked up the baton.  Their campaigns appear to be well funded and the timing of their anti-palm oil campaign launches appears to be carefully coordinated, scheduled and stage-managed.

There was only one thing wrong with the anti-palm oil campaigns organized by these disparate groups of environmental NGOs and this strikes at the heart of their anti-palm oil stance – their claims are not supported by the facts.

Of course, when campaigns are based on hype there is a natural tendency to embellish the facts and resort to gross exaggeration and hyperbole and this ultimately erodes the credibility of these organizations and their claims! 

So we have the Rainforest Action Network claiming on their website that the orang utan are predicted to become extinct as early as 2011.  However, this wild claim could not stand up to the scrutiny of cold hard facts.!

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 it is even remotely possible for the orang utan, by any leap of logic or stretch of imagination, to go extinct by next year! 

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.  The Malaysian Palm Oil Council has also recently established a US$6 Million Wildlife Conservation Fund.

Then we have Nature Alert alleging: “What's happening is that after years of freedom to log millions of hectares of rainforest and in the process of doing so wiping out tens of millions of wildlife forms, the palm oil industry is at last being held accountable for the undeniable death and destruction they have wreaked, relatively unchecked, until now.” 

It borders on the ludicrous when we wonder just how palm oil could be wiping out tens of millions of wildlife forms, given that the number of known species for ALL animals living on this planet other than arthropods is only about 250,000! 

Any doubt about Nature Alert’s congenital inclination for hyperbole is instantly dispelled when they warn that “some 20 years from now there could be little or no forest cover left in Malaysia and Indonesia.”

Even the mainstream media is not immune to these spasmodic and paroxysmal abuse of facts.  Recently, the BBC in a program called “The End of the Jungle” hosted by Angus Stickler in which the reckless host made the preposterous claim that the Malaysian government and the palm oil industry is "laying waste to the last remaining rainforests of Borneo in what has been described as a corporate land grab."  Stickler rages: "It's estimated that only 3 percent of the primary rainforest of Malaysian Borneo remains.”

Perhaps Mr Strickler needs to be apprised of the fact that the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) had in a survey found that Malaysia is one of the few remaining heavily forested tropical countries with 61 percent of total land area of 20.06 million ha covered in natural forest.

Malaysia      33.00   19.81      0.25      20.06                 60.8 

 Source: FAO

From the FAO Table above, it is clear that as at 2001, the forest cover in the state of Sarawak alone stands at a whopping 79.1% whilst Sabah (both states make up Malaysian Borneo) can boast forest cover of 57.4%.

One wonders, therefore, just how Stickler could arrive at the conclusion that “only 3 percent of the primary rainforest of Malaysian Borneo remains”!

The Achilles heel for the anti-palm oil front is the undeniable fact that palm oil is an inherently sustainable crop with the highest productivity and thus most efficient land use factor amongst all edible oilseeds. With a yield of 4-5 metric tons per hectare, a yield that is close to ten times the yield of other oilseed crops, palm oil requires ten times less land to produce the same unit of edible oil as its nearest competitor.  Palm oil, therefore does not require quite as much land as its critics would want us to believe.

This explains why, Malaysia, which is a small country (about the size of New Mexico) could be the world’s largest producer of palm oil for over a century.

Despite being the world’s largest producer of palm oil for more than a hundred years, Malaysia still has an enviable forest cover of more than 60%, which is one of the highest forest cover prevailing in the world today - certainly far higher than the 11% forest cover prevailing in the United Kingdom, from which the BBC hails.

Further, palm oil cultivation takes up less than 1% of the total world agricultural area, with Malaysian palm oil plantations occupying less than 0.5% of it. How can it then be credible to claim that palm oil is causing “massive deforestation” and is responsible for 20% of global carbon emission?

In the light of these concerted attacks against a crop that occupies just 1% of the world agricultural area, it is certainly unconscionable for the BBC to conveniently remain silent on the environmental impact of the other 99% cultivated land in the rest of the world – unless the BBC is asserting that there is no environmental impact made by the other oilseed crops.  The Palm Oil Truth Foundation is compelled to ask whether this is due to the fact that most of these 99% agricultural land reside in the developed economies from which these critics hail?

If conservation is truly a concern, the BBC and green NGOs should propose that palm oil be cultivated in place of the other oilseed crops such as soy, corn, sunflower and rapeseed (weather permitting) in view of its superior efficient land use!

It is obvious that if palm oil cultivation is curtailed or taken away altogether from the trade equation, the world would be scrambling for more oil which , in turn, would see ten times more land being opened up for other oilseed cultivation to fill the gap left by palm oil.

In those circumstances, perhaps the BBC's and green NGOs’ claims of massive deforestation may then have a modicum of credibility and become a stark reality!

As things stand, it is patently obvious to even the uninitiated, that the anti-palm oil campaigns are carefully planned and coordinated. More sinisterly, the nature and careful scheduling of these campaigns raises the ugly specter of a grand global campaign funded and stage-managed by anti-palm oil interests.

In the view of the Palm Oil Truth Foundation, palm oil is today indisputably, the world’s cheapest and most popular cooking oil and its suitability as feedstock for the making of biofuel has raised the stakes and triggered a trade war.  It cannot be ruled out that a rival commodity (or even BIG OIL itself), fearful of the rise of palm oil’s popularity as an edible oil and biofuel is happy to fund & pull the strings behind the anti-palm oil campaigns by these “green groups”!  Certainly, a pattern can be discerned of the stratagem employed by anti-palm oil lobbies to wage their trade war against palm oil. The BBC has just been a witting or unwitting party to this cleverly orchestrated and stage-managed smear campaign against palm oil!

Given the startling similarities to H1N1gate and Climategate, the fact that palm oil is targeted by “green groups” working under the direction of anti-palm oil interests is certainly plausible and not far-fetched! THE END