Palm Oil Industries will never be
sustainable
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The total paralysation of further
deforestation and conversion of land use to oil palm cultivation,
the cancellation of trade relations between companies purchasing
palm oil and suppliers destroying the livelihood of indigenous
peoples and violate human rights, to stop violence and exploitation
of livelihood ressources of the people, and the Resolution of all
existing land conflicts between citizens and plantations
companies.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Forests has
identified government policies replacing forests by industrial tree
plantations, including palm oil plantations, as the causes of
deforestation and degradation. Palm oil is produced in large
scale monoculture in tropical countries to be exported to the global
market (including the EU, China, India and the United Nations of
America). |
The negative consequences of monoculture oil palm
plantations are tangible in Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua-New Guinea,
Cameroon, Uganda, Côte d'Ivoire, Cambodia, Philippines and Thailand
and also in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico,
Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Palm oil plantations already have
caused deforestation of primary forests that in reality are part of
ancestral and community land. As consequences, water sources, food,
medicine, spirituality and culture are depleted. Furthermore,
deforestation in the world is the second largest source contributing
to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
According to
the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 60 million indigenous
people all over the world run the risk of loosing their land and
means of subsistence due to the expansion of plantations to produce
agro-energy. Of these, 5 million people are located in Borneo
(Indonesia) where the indigenous communities are threatened by plans
for the expansion of oil palm plantations. In spite of this,
Government agricultural and forest planning has foreseen
establishing another millions of hectares of new oil palm
plantations.
The Round table on Sustainable Palm Oil
(RSPO) is dominated by the industry and does not genuinely consult
affected communities who have to accept the worst negative
consequences. The RSPO scheme enables the companies to certify
individual plantations, eluding overall assessment of their whole
production of all of their plantations. Again, RSPO is yet another
attempt at camouflaging and denying the true situation, providing "a
green-wash" to make a model of production that is intrinsically
destructive and socially and environmentally unsustainable, appear
to be "responsible."
With accelerating climate crisis,
large scale industrial monoculture plantations have negative
consequences: They further threaten the existence of indigenous
people, bring more occupation of land, more land conflicts and human
rights violations, including violations to the right to food
sovereignty, and the use of toxic chemicals on a large scale. And
the winners are the companies, not the
people.
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(http://www.eng.walhi.or.id/)
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