I’M a human in a forest and I don’t know what to do. That was my feeling after seeing Iceland supermarket’s advert, an adapted Greenpeace film, and then looking into where we’re at globally in the fight against palm-oil related deforestation. That story is at the heart of the advert which went viral last week after it looked set to be banned from television. It's one which starts with Disney-like sweetness as a girl finds an orangutan in her bedroom, but turns dark and brutalist, as the “Rang-tan” tells the story of the burning of his forest to make way for a palm-oil plantation. He, voiced by Emma Thompson, declares: “There’s a human in my forest and I don’t know what to do.”
It’s always difficult to know what to do about something which is going on at the other side of the planet, yet which we are, as consumers part of. Yes, we know something must be done, and fast – not just for the sake of the orangutans, but for the wider planet since tropical forest loss accounts for 8% of the world’s global CO2 emissions – but what? Iceland’s advert provides what seems like an answer in its end-titles. “Until all palm oil causes zero rainforest destruction," it says, "we’re removing palm oil from all our own label products.”
Ostensibly it seems a good move. Palm oil related deforestation, after all, is a problem. Buying things that don’t contain it is surely a good idea. We can sign the petition, delivering Iceland its PR coup, and head down to Iceland for our palm-oil free Christmas goodies and feel smug.
But, though it starts the conversation, it’s barely the solution. For, even if we all became green shoppers and stopped buying anything with palm oil in, we wouldn’t become instantly decoupled from crop-related deforestation. It’s not just the palm oil in our processed foods that is the problem. It’s the palm protein meal in our animal feeds, the palm oil, until the recent EU ban, in our biofuel.
And even if we managed to eliminate it, we still wouldn’t have rid ourselves of the problem, for most likely what would happen is that palm oil would be replaced with another oil, and one that has as much, if not more, impact on the environment. Many researchers and environmental groups have pointed out, a ban on palm oil could too easily just result in a shift in the global industry growing another crop that is even less sustainable, for instance soybean oil, which has a greater impact on the environment for less yield. Four commodities – palm oil, soy, beef and paper and pulp – account for half of global deforestation.
So the problem here is not palm oil itself but what Greenpeace calls “dirty palm oil”. Given this, it would seem, the obvious answer is to push harder for a proper sustainable palm oil. But that goal, which is already been worked towards through certification, remains elusive. A report, for instance, earlier this year, by Imperial College London observed that genuinely “deforestation-free” palm-oil products were hard to guarantee because of the nature of the supply chains.
It has been predicted that demand for palm oil is set to double by 2050. Where will this supply come from? Currently 90% is produced in Indonesia and Malaysia. But it’s speculated that Africa may be a significant future producer, and researchers are concerned already about what that might mean for the primate populations in those areas. Meanwhile, in Brazil, president-elect Jair Bolsonaro has pledged to open the Amazon to economic development.
We humans are in a forest and it’s hard to know what to do. What’s clear is that we can’t fight this merely by being green consumers. This is an issue that requires political will and overseeing – policies, perhaps, like France’s recently announced strategy to ban all deforestation imports by 2030. Above all, though, we cannot afford to do nothing. It’s not just the “Rang-tans” at stake, but the wider future of our planet and human and wildlife generations to come. In this context, the Iceland film isn’t just for Christmas, but for now and the coming decades. We should grasp it, before it’s too late.
DID Steve Bannon really come to Scotland? Did he bring his Movement here? I ask this, although I know he was here, and there’s plenty of evidence for that, including the reports in newspapers and on Twitter on what he said when questioned by Sarah Smith. There was even the arrest of one protestor for holding up a placard which declared “Nae Nazis” – though that, in itself, is not evidence of his presence, just that one person was denied the freedom to make his statement. Meanwhile Bannon, purveyor of alt-right ideology, went on stage and made his. Still, he might as well not have been in Scotland – for events like the News Xchange conference seem have so little to do with this country that we might as well not be hosting. The next stop for Bannon, of course, was the Oxford Union. Both events seemed to say something about those movers who purport to be populist and anti-elite. Even they – those people like Bannon – barely touch the surface. Even they are just part of the privileged media-bubble they critique, participating in what seems like another elite, yet all the more dangerous for its remove, boxing match.
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