permaculture

[Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>]

Also, keep in mind that the vast majority of *certified organic* palm oil
comes from Daabon in Colombia. Daabon has been implicated in forcing
campesinos off their land, sometimes through the use of paramilitary units,
then establishing their own title and planting monocrop palm. Palm oil is
all around nasty, both in social and environmental effects.

-Ben

On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 3:57 PM, Brent McMillan <brent@gp.org> wrote:

> ADM's New Frontiers: Palm Oil Deforestation and Child Labor
> by Charlie Cray, Special to CorpWatch
> May 18th, 2010
>
> ADM used to be known as the country’s corporate welfare king, and its
> top executives drew headlines as they perp-walked to prison. That was
> then, when the company ran elaborate price-fixing schemes in the lysine
> and other global commodity markets. This is now: For the second year in
> a row, ADM topped Fortune magazine’s list of most admired food
> production companies.
>
> But underneath its improved public image, ADM’s major forays into new
> markets, including cocoa and palm oil, are raising concerns. This time
> they center on the impacts of the global food conglomerate’s supply
> chain, and on charges of complicity in forced child labor and massive
> deforestation.
>
> The Palm Oil Food Chain of Destruction
>
> About 40 million tons of palm oil worth $20 billion is produced each
> year – 85 percent of it by Indonesia and Malaysia, where giant oil palm
> plantations account for the highest rates of deforestation in the world.
> As of 2009, more than seven million hectares of palm oil plantations had
> been planted where forests super-rich in diversity once stood. Within a
> couple of decades, the deforestation is projected to triple to more than
> 20 million hectares.
>
> While most palm oil is processed for cooking oil, biofuels and other
> uses in China and Southeast Asia, U.S. consumption has tripled in the
> past five years, making North America the fastest-growing market. Most
> palm oil exported to the United States – one million tons in 2008/2009 –
> is extracted from the hard kernel at the center of the fruit, and
> processed into a variety of ingredients for food products, including
> vitamins.
>
> U.S. consumers might be shocked to learn that an estimated 10 percent of
> common grocery goods – including chips and crackers, ice cream,
> margarine, instant noodles, chocolate, cereals, canned vegetables,
> soaps, shampoos, cosmetics and detergents – already contain some kind of
> palm oil ingredient. They might be doubly shocked to learn that palm oil
> is implicated in the same health problems that are driving trans fats
> out of the market. Merely replacing trans fatty acids with other
> artery-clogging saturated vegetable fats not only does little to bring
> down the incidence of heart attacks and strokes (still the top killers
> in America for public health), but it is also fueling deforestation and
> social injustice halfway across the planet.
>
> more...
>
> http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15587
>
> posted by:
>
> Brent McMillan, Steward of Woodhaven
> Avilla, IN USA
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