3 ms·
The deforestation has to stop, I've traveled in Indonesia both personally and professionally and have seen the devastation that illegal (but government tolerate
by furyg3 11y ago
The deforestation has to stop, I've traveled in Indonesia both personally and professionally and have seen the devastation that illegal (but government tolerated) deforestation causes.
At the same time abandoning palm oil is both extremely impractical and causes numerous other sustainability problems. Palm oil has incredibly high yields per hectare when compared with other oil crops, which is important to consider when discussing it's 'sustainability'. It's yeilds are something like 3-5 tons per hectare per year, while soy/sunflower/others are less than 1 ton/ha/yr. Not to mention the human impact, it's a cash crop for many small holders who's livelihood depends on it. For these reasons, even very vocal environmental organizations like GreenPeace stop short of calling for boycotts... the focus needs to be on producing it sustainably.
Consumers need to demand that the palm oil in their products is sustainably produced e.g. via the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) or otherwise. Unfortunately even knowing if palm oil is in your product or not has been difficult, and even brands who use sustainably produced palm oil are hesitant to draw attention to the the oil in their products.
I've worked closely with this program on technical projects, and while it certainly has a number of flaws, the accountably is much higher than for conventional palm oil. I'm really hopeful that research into other methods (Algae oil production) will be more economical/efficient/sustainable, but at the moment it's still theoretical. :(
- cowpig 11y agoIt sounds like you are well-informed on this issue. I'd like to ask you more about it but I can't seem to find any kind of private messaging functionality on HN and you don't have an email address in your profile :O
- CONTRARlAN 11y agoPlease ask him more here, so we can all benefit from the discussion.
- cowpig 11y agoI work for a global campaigning/petitioning organization and one of our focuses is climate change. I'm wondering who the key players are, what is currently being done, whether there's opportunity for public pressure to influence any of the actors, etc.
- CONTRARlAN 11y agoThanks. Looking forward to reading the reply.
- furyg3 11y agoI'd highly recommend you get in tough with GreenPeace as they're pretty active in this space, not only in pressuring organizations to use sustainable palm oil, but also pushing the RSPO to improve themselves and holding it accountable, too. I'm sure they have a much better assessment than I could ever make of the worst performers, the biggest players, and the key organizations to target to bring change. Not to mention that if they have campaigns running/planned it would be nice to coordinate with what it sounds like your organization is doing. Annisa Rahmawati (@AnisaHijauDamai) was representing them at this years RSPO european roundtable two weeks ago. The WWF is also very involved with the RSPO and Palm Oil. Good luck!
- saranagati 11y agohow did this become a topic of sustainability? it was banned due to health concerns.
- CyberDildonics 11y agoEducating consumers seems like a pretty big hurdle. I think it would make a lot more sense to ban importing palm oil from Indonesia unless it can be proved to be sustainable.