PALM oil has had its fair share of smear campaigns and boycott from both the Western environmental NGOs and major consumer goods manufacturers.
The EU and Anti-Palm Oil Campaigns: Growing Body of Evidence
According to Roger Helmer, a British member of the European Parliament who sits on European Parliament’s temporary committee on climate change and the European conservatives and reformists group, there is a growing body of evidence that the EU is actively promoting the anti-palm oil campaigns by funding environmental organizations such as The Friends of the Earth and singling out palm oil for unfair treatment.
Helmer described environmental NGOs as "agents of the state", receiving large sums of funding to support their campaigns and activities.
According to him, the European Commission alone had provided more than 60 million euros to these pressure groups through a programme called LIFE+.
“The driving priority of the various NGOs is to have free funding and keep their media profile high so that people want to talk to them, by creating scares and also creating scapegoats.
“They decided palm oil is a terrible thing and decided it drives deforestation and threatens habitat like the iconic orang utan, that it is a food crop and therefore wrong to convert to biofuel.
Deforestation Watch is pleased to publish in full an analysis of this issue, especially the Renewable Energy Directive (EU RED) entitled “The EU must reshape its palm oil policies” by Hanim Adnan of The Star.
The toughest challenge to date is mostly environmental related. The most pressing one is the adoption of the renewable energy directive (EU RED) by the European Union parliament on biofuel content which imposed strict regulations on carbon emission introduced back in 2008.
Read more at Deforestation Watch here
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