Greenpeace is urging its members and society at large to petition Unilever (the company that, among other things, produces the Dove cosmetics range) for buying palm oil from suppliers who are rapidly destroying Indonesia's rainforests. If you are concerned about multinationals burning up Borneo, please send a letter to Unilever now!
Besides being treasures of biodiversity (the orangutan, for instance, can only be found in Borneo and as a result is critically threatened by the destruction of its habitat), tropical forests are essential carbon sinks and therefore instrumental in keeping global warming at bay. Forest destruction is responsible for approximately 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Destruction of Indonesia’s peatland forests alone accounts for 4% of global annual emissions, placing the country 3rd in the global rankings behind the US and China. The tiny province of Riau, on the island of Sumatra, already holds 25% of the country’s palm oil plantations and there are plans to expand these by 200%. This would have devastating consequences for Riau’s peatlands, which store a massive 14.6 billion tonnes of carbon - equivalent to one year’s global greenhouse gas emissions.
Indonesia’s Government and the palm oil industry should heed the growing European rejection of Indonesian palm oil. Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Italy have all recently taken measures to limit destructively sourced Indonesian palm oil from getting onto their markets. Only in the last few weeks Belgium’s Antwerp Province has refused to grant environmental permits for the construction of at least one palm oil power plant on the grounds that they would be ‘unsustainable’.
Unilever claims that it is leading the search to find solutions to achieving sustainable palm oil. However, when asked how many sustainable palm oil plantations existed in Indonesia today, the embarrassed answer was - None.
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