In our latest report on the palm oil industry, reporter Jocelyn Zuckerman reveals a startling fact: palm oil operations around the globe have been linked to a series of assassinations of lands-rights activists who are getting in the way of business. The story, “The violent costs of the palm oil boom,” published in partnership with The New Yorker site last weekend, documents these assassinations, which occur with some regularity, according to human rights groups.
Bulldozing forests — and targeting activists — makes way for the growth of palm oil, which is found in half of the items currently on American grocery-store shelves. Since 2002, palm oil imports to the U.S. have risen 446 percent, and have topped a million metric tons in recent years, Zuckerman tells us.
“In theory, at least, the palm oil industry has committed resources to monitoring itself and preventing abuses: a number of multinational companies and NGOs working in the sector came together in 2004 to establish the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). But the organization’s record has been spotty, at best, and even a RSPO representative acknowledged to me that the process it uses to certify palm oil producers is ‘not perfect,’ ” Zuckerman writes.
Zuckerman’s earlier stories for FERN looked at an incredibly biodiverse region in Indonesia threatened with development, and the impact on communities displaced by palm oil plantations. For her latest story, she talks about her work in a Q&A here.
We expect to continue working with Zuckerman on these stories, but this international reporting does not come cheap. So we hope you consider a donation in this giving season. For $100 or more you can elect to receive The Dirt, a handsome anthology of five years of our work, which features a foreword by Michael Pollan. With your help, we can continue to support important work, such as Zuckerman’s, during this time of great uncertainty about the future of food, agriculture and the environment.
Photo by E. Torres via Friends of the Earth