NORTH HIDES NEFARIOUS AIMS UNDER GREEN CLOAK

North hides nefarious aims under green cloak

THOMPSON AYODELE- Published: 2009/12/17 07:21:01 AM

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=89781

ENVIRONMENTAL groups from rich countries have for years waged a campaign against those in poor countries who want to harness their natural resources for economic growth. Their efforts threaten to do lasting harm to the aspirations of millions of poor people in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and must be resisted at all times and in all places.

One of those places is the Copenhagen climate change summit taking place in Denmark. Thousands of delegates from around the world are gathered there trying to work on ways to limit global warming. But it is increasingly clear to those of us in the south that the north is using the summit as a way to maintain their living standards, while keeping the developing world in a state of destitution.

For example, just this week a document emerged that outlined a plan to stop poor countries from clearing some of their forest lands to make room for more productive uses, such as palm farming, rubber farming and urban development. The suggestion — encapsulated in the so-called “Danish text” — is risible and morally obtuse and its emergence threatens to torpedo the entire conference.

Every nation in history has harnessed its resources in the early stage of its development. Indeed, Europe itself was arguably the most forested region on the planet for most of its history until it started its economic growth path several centuries ago. Over the course of many decades, Europeans sensibly altered and re-altered their land use to permit more productive agricultural use and enterprise, with the resultant job creation.

Today, nations across the developing world aim to do the same thing — to harness some of their natural endowments to create products for sale in world markets. And so countries in Africa and Asia develop palm plantations to sell palm oil across the globe. Farmers in Latin America alter land uses to grow fruits, vegetables and flowers to satisfy customers in their region and beyond.

Tese efforts come with some ecological costs, just as they did in Europe , North America , Japan and other places in the north in decades past. Only once the northern nations became rich — and not a moment before — could they afford the environmental protections they now demand of their poorer neighbours to the south.

The environmental campaigners scored a victory this week, forcing a major multinational corporation, Unilever, to stop purchasing palm oil from a southern hemisphere producer.

The victory by the environmental activists will do nothing to protect the environment but it will toss thousands of poor people out of their jobs.

How Greenpeace employees can sleep well at night after an effort such as this is a mystery . Of course, they live in rich countries where everyone has soft pillows, fine linens, heating and air- conditioning, which must make sleeping with a guilty conscience easier.

The victory over Unilever is just a start, and green groups are hoping to use Copenhagen as their vehicle to, in effect, outlaw developing world vegetable oils across the globe.

If they succeed, millions of people whose livelihoods depend on natural resource industries will be thrown into economic chaos.

A little-reported but critical aspect of this story is that green groups are making common cause with large European vegetable oil producers. The European producers do not like the competition from Africa and elsewhere, and so they are pressing the European Union to halt imports of competing vegetable oils.

They mask their protectionist efforts under a cloak of environmental urgency, but the end result is the same — Europeans maintain their jobs and living standards while the poor countries are denied opportunity.

The rich-world campaign against palm oil is worrying on many levels. It shows how easy it is to promote a one- sided argument regarding forest destruction without balancing it with the many benefits that can arise from changes in land use — principally benefits to some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

It also shows how easy it is for protectionists and businesses to use environmental issues to pass laws and regulations so as to further protect their interests, regardless of the implications for trade, the world’s poor and consumers around the globe.

This episode also exposes the troubling hypocrisy at play in the climate change and broader environmental debate.

Europeans used their own resources and those from many other nations in order to advance, become powerful and improve the living standards of ordinary men, women and children.

Poor countries need to be given the same opportunity. Basic notions of decency insist on it.

- Ayodele is the director of the Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, Lagos, Nigeria.

WESTERN COMPANIES CAMPAIGNS LEADS TO UNETHICAL IMPACT

THE PARADOXICAL RISK OF 'ETHICAL' INVESTMENT

How campaigns by big Western companies like Whole Foods can have a very unethical impact

By Alan Oxley

http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/06/palm-oil-whole-foods-climate-change-opinions-contributors-alan-oxley.html

Some notable major brand names have joined the "green" bandwagon in the lead up to the U.N. climate negotiations at Copenhagen in December. Suddenly, palm oil is "bad," so Whole Foods retailers in the U.S. , Lush cosmetics in Britain and Cadbury chocolate in New Zealand have made a show pulling this maligned commodity from their products. Even government is in on the act, with the E.U. recently placing restrictions on imports.

Yet just what is the business aim? Doing good, riding the marketing buzz or protecting the value of the brand? Whatever the reason, companies are heading into murky territory. Shareholders ultimately rate companies by the business they do, not the causes they support.

Environmental activists like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth now blame the crop for everything from spreading deforestation to increasing greenhouse gases and, as such, are pressuring business and government to go along. Yet, there's reason to suspect that being "ethical" to satisfy activists will have a very unethical impact—namely, increasing poverty.

A newly released analysis by the NGO World Growth shows that this is just the risk these companies run.

Palm oil is vital in two respects. First, it is a basic food product for the poor in the developing world. The main consumers of palm oil are not wealthy shoppers at Whole Foods or lovers of Lush or Cadbury; they are the hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who use it as food staple.

Second, palm oil is something of a miracle food. Like "miracle rice"--which lifted millions out of poverty in the '60s and '70s--this vegetable oil uses less land to produce more energy at a lower price than competing oil seeds in Europe or the Americas . That's one of the reasons why the World Bank described oil palm in Indonesia as a most successful tool to reduce poverty. (Heck, it's even trans fat free.) Having already raised living standards in Southeast Asia, it can do the same thing in Africa and the equatorial Americas .

The green movement doesn't see it that way. They charge oil palm with destruction of habitat of native animals. These groups are right that forest is being reduced in the developing world, but are wrong about the reason. A much more powerful force than growing agriculture industries is at work here.

Deforestation is a primordial drive by poor, hungry people to gather wood for building shelter and to clear land for growing food. Researchers at the Food and Agricultural Organization report regularly that deforestation in developing countries is result of the search for firewood and land to house and feed people. When Nobel Peace prize winner Mangari Maathai from Kenya was asked recently by CNN what the key to stopping deforestation was, she replied "end poverty."

This was how Europe and North America developed, and it is how the third world is growing too. The Malaysian Government promoted palm oil, making it the world's largest producer for several years as a deliberate and successful strategy to provide prosperity and economic security to previously landless workers.

Palm oil is also very greenhouse friendly. Properly managed, plantations absorb more carbon dioxide than natural forest, though Western consumers hear none of this. "Wash your hands of palm oil," is the kind of message driven by "green" groups instead. Their game--in the name of tackling climate change--is to lock measures that halt commercial forestry into the new convention.

They claim this is essential to protect biodiversity. It isn't.

Five years ago the U.N. concluded that the biodiversity target of preserving 10% of the world's forests had been reached. There is more forest preserved in the developing world now than in Europe .

This is now merely a campaign to satisfy a Western urge to see pleasant landscapes.

Whole Foods, Lush, The Body Shop, Cadbury and all the other Western-based corporations might feel they have protected their brand by gathering under the banner of "corporate social responsibility." Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth approve. But what is the ethical position they are in?

They have business strategies that satisfy western based NGOs but reduce the capacity of poor countries to raise living standards, which produces in the future consumers for their products in emerging markets.

Denying opportunities for growth is clearly unethical. Shareholders will note something else: It's bad business in the long run.

Alan Oxley serves as Chairman of the NGO World Growth, which just released a report, "Palm Oil – The Sustainable Oil," at the UN Bangkok Climate Change negotiations as part of an effort to restore balance to the larger debate.

BIO-FUELING A TRADE WAR

In Europe, protectionism passes as environmentalism.

By BENEDETTO DELLA VEDOVA

Europe is facing the twin challenge of trying to get economic growth back on track while being a good steward of the environment. These goals are not necessarily in conflict with each other—unless of course the protectionists get in the way. The European Commission in June adopted regulations about the international trade of green energy technologies that might trigger a global trade war that would harm the economy and the environment in the process.

The “Renewable Energy Directive” pushes the European Union to generate increasing amounts of energy from green, renewable sources, including biofuels. A good idea in principle. But European biofuel producers—fearful of increased competition from the U.S. and Asia—succeeded in pressuring Brussels to restrict imports of biofuels from abroad. The Commission wants to impose onerous production standards on Asian and Western Hemisphere biofuels that wouldn’t apply to European producers. What’s more, a coalition that includes European biofuel producers and NGOs are pushing the EU to use the so-called Indirect Land Use Change policies to further discriminate against U.S. biofuels. Indirect Land Use Change is a fundamentally flawed concept whereby European government bureaucrats would seek to punish biofuel producers—in this case American—for the supposed indirect impact that their production has on land use and food prices in the developing world. The problem is that this is virtually impossible to calculate accurately and objectively, which leaves too much room for protectionist tinkering with the numbers.

Biofuel producers, particularly in Germany, also complain that large American agribusinesses are “dumping” subsidized biofuels on the market. No doubt U.S. producers enjoy generous government handouts—but so do their German competitors. Moreover, Europe’s consumers would certainly benefit from access to cheaper clean energy sources precisely when their economy needs a boost. While German producers might chafe at the competition from America, Europe’s automobile drivers and manufacturers who rely on biofuels as a key power source would be the beneficiaries.

Meanwhile, Europe’s biofuel producers have argued also for limiting Asian imports. Asian producers can’t be accused of dumping, so instead European producers argue that their fuels aren’t environmentally friendly. Their claims are amplified by NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. But these allegations don’t stand up to scrutiny.

Most of Europe’s biofuel comes from rapeseed while most American biofuel comes from soybeans and corn. Biofuel made from these sources provide two to three times the amount of usable energy required to produce it. In contrast, most Asian biofuel comes from palm oil, which generates as much as ten times the amount of energy required for its own production. As a result, palm oil uses significantly less land to generate the same amount of usable energy. This leaves more land for the generation of food and other products while satisfying growing demand for renewable energy.

The environmental NGOs who decry the Asian biofuels actually oppose all forms of biofuel because they fear it may lead to a reduction of rainforests. This argument is seriously flawed, however. For example, Malaysia restricts its palm oil production to 20% of the land which is allocated for agricultural purposes. Sixty percent of Malaysia’s territory is reserved for forest (the average in Europe is 25%). The NGOs prefer wind and solar as energy feedstock. But given the EU’s pressing economic needs right now, it is foolish to think that the continent’s economy can be powered by wind and solar in the near future. As such, biofuels—from both Europe and abroad —must play an important role in the energy mix.

Meanwhile, Europe’s biofuel producers cynically echo the arguments made by the NGOs knowing that while European regulators won’t limit the growth of Europe’s biofuel production, they might well be counted on to block imports. The real reason for their effort to block Asian imports is plain old protectionism masked as environmentalism.

And it’s not that Europe’s biofuel producers are struggling. They enjoy a strong competitive position in their home market. EU biodiesel production accounts for 78% of the biofuels consumed in the EU, according to the European Biodiesel Board. Europe is also a major player on the global stage, responsible for 65% of the world’s biodiesel production. At a time, though, when European producers are under pressure from the economic downturn, it is understandable they would look to Brussels for help.

Let’s hope far-sighted policymakers will resist the siren call of protectionism and defend free-trade in biofuels and other goods. Protectionism in the 1930s turned a bad situation into a disaster. Let’s not repeat that mistake.

Mr. Della Vedova is a member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and aformer member of the European Parliament.

BEAT POVERTY FIRST, THEN TACKLE EMISSIONS

BEAT POVERTY FIRST, THEN TACKLE EMISSIONS

01/08/10

The Australian
Beat Poverty First, Then Tackle Emissions
Alan Oxley
January 08, 2010
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/beat-poverty-first-then-tackle-emissions/story-e6frg6zo-1225817130035

THE climate change debacle at Copenhagen last month underlined the reality that any new global agreement will be on the terms set by developing countries. Leading commentators have written that China's leading role in this was a demonstration of its new influence as an economic power.

In one important sense they are wrong. This was not just China, but India, Brazil and the Arab oil states as well. Furthermore, the position of these countries and the rest of the developing world has not changed in the 20 years since climate change has been on the global agenda.

For developing countries, climate change and other environmental strategies which retard economic development are unacceptable. They scored this into UN orthodoxy at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. They executed the principle when they emasculated the Kyoto Protocol by insisting only rich countries cut emissions.

The failure at Copenhagen was not the result of the greater influence of developing countries, it was a failure, yet again, of Green activists and environmental officials in rich countries to understand the position of developing countries and the political implications of that.

China used its enhanced authority to deliver the developing country message in the form of a humiliating public snub to Western leaders at Copenhagen.

China sent an official, not a political leader, to negotiate with Barack Obama.

The European Community, the champion of the Kyoto Protocol, was shut out of the negotiations between the US and the leading developing economies. When the Danish Prime Minister nominated an Indian minister to pair with Penny Wong to sort out differences on one issue, the Indian minister simply did not show up.

The zealotry which has imbued the campaign to halt global warming has blinded environmental officials and many politicians to the reality of what can be achieved. Any experienced UN negotiator would have warned it was a mistake to send a large number of heads of government to Copenhagen in the belief that that would overcome the deep and fundamental divide between rich and poor.

The justification for engaging in such a diplomatic suicide mission is that stopping global warming is the overriding moral issue of the time. Not to everyone.

In India and China alone there are 600 million people living below the poverty line. Eradicating poverty is the moral imperative in the developing world.

The leading US climate change economist, William Nordhaus at Yale, has maintained for years that if developing countries cut emissions too sharply and too soon as advocated by Greenpeace, WWF and the European Union, they would further impoverish their people.

What is the solution of environmental activists? Greenpeace and WWF laid theirs out before Copenhagen. They recognised that the result of their strategies to increase power costs and cease conversion of forests to more economically productive activities in developing countries would lower economic growth and hinder efforts to increase agricultural production.

Their solution? Double current aid budgets (presently about US$100 billion per year).

This became a mantra among Western leaders before Copenhagen. If more aid is not on the table, no deal is possible, intoned Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy and Hillary Clinton. But they were talking to Green activists, not developing countries, and still viewing climate change through a rich country lens. They had bought the Green line that the world's poor were on the same side as the activists. They clearly are not.

Welfare is provided to the disadvantaged in rich countries (as in the Rudd plan to compensate low-income earners harmed by the emissions trading). So do the same to compensate the world's poor for the cost of global emissions trading.

They have forgotten a golden rule of aid that developing countries have not used it to promote economic growth, not to provide cash. The rich country plan is correctly perceived as a form of global green welfare compensation for the loss of jobs and income which would be caused by deep and early cuts in emissions by developing countries.

Zealots have short life spans when the cost and impracticality of what they urge becomes apparent. Only now are the costs of their climate change plans becoming apparent. If Copenhagen was not a climate change epiphany for Western leaders, they will never be able to envisage a practicable global strategy to reduce global warming.

Any strategy has to protect the capacity of poor countries to eradicate poverty. What rational person would reject that proposition?

Alan Oxley is chairman of World Growth, a US-based free market NGO which attended the Copenhagen Summit.

PALM OIL, DEFORESTATION & POVERTY

Deforestation Watch

Palm Oil, Deforestation and Poverty
Ross Spencer, January 22, 2010

Which is the issue that is considered the world’s biggest problem. Is it climate change, terrorism or war? According to a major worldwide BBC poll out Sunday, it is poverty that is the biggest and most intractable problem facing the world today!

Overall, 71 percent of people named extreme poverty as the biggest global issue, compared to 64 percent who cited the environment or pollution and 63 percent the rising cost of food and energy. Terrorism, human rights and the spread of disease were singled out by 59 percent, climate change and the state of the world economy by 58 percent and war by 57 percent.

"Even if the global recession has kept economic problems top of people's minds this year, extreme poverty is clearly viewed as the world's most serious global problem," said Sam Mountford, research director for GlobeScan, which conducted the poll for the BBC World Service.

"But with many other global problems seen as very serious, this represents a daunting agenda for institutions like the UN and G20 to address."

Results varied between nations. People in India and Pakistan rated terrorism as their top concern and it was also in the top three in Britain, Indonesia and Spain, which have suffered major attacks in recent years.

Japan was the only country to view climate change as the most serious issue, while China ranked it second and the United States ninth.

More than 25,000 people in 23 countries were interviewed face-to-face, online or over the telephone for the poll, which was conducted between June and October last year.

It should be observed that Deforestation Watch has been pointing out for some time now that the "Naturist" religion, what we call "environmentalism" today, elevates every other form of life above human life. Sad but true.

Africans are dying due to malaria and yet these environmental types oppose the use of DDT as it, wait for this, causes thinning of bird’s eggs! The fact that most environmentalists come from Europe and the U.S. where living conditions are so good that they need not fear this deadly and debilitating disease could explain their irrationality and total lack of empathy for the plight of fellow humans in Africa.

These fanatics will not only fudge data to get their way, but they will even create it if that's what it takes. The recent specter of what is now popularly called “Climategate” where in an explosive expose, a hacker recently broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet.

The revelations contained in the 1079 emails and 72 documents were so damning that this scandal could well be the “greatest
scandal in modern science”!

These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing Anthropogenic Global Warming (man-made global warming) theory – suggest conspiracy, collusion in faking and exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more!

Also John Stossel reported recently that in Washington State, government biologists, determined to prove that lynx lived in Washington, "nailed pieces of carpet soaked with catnip onto trees, hoping a lynx would rub up against them and leave some fur -- evidence of the lynx's existence in this particular area." Sure enough, they found hairs on the carpet, and they sent samples to
the lab which showed that they were in fact lynx hairs. This would be bad news indeed for ranchers and farmers in the area who could lose their land rights in favor of a threatened species. As it turns out, the biologists, those impartial proponents for Truth, had rigged the tests. "The regulators went to a zoo, got hair samples from captive lynx, and sent those hairs to the lab to be tested."

In many ways this propensity of environmentalists to make wild claims and to fudge data to support the claims is all too familiar to the palm oil industry.

Take the case of Greenpeace, the infamous Friends of the Earth (with the unfortunate acronym “FOE”) and the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) who have all been guilty of overactive imaginations.

Dressed in bright orange orang utan suits, FOE activists picketed Tesco supermarkets in the UK loudly screeching that palm oil is responsible for massive deforestation and thus threatening the very existence of the orang utans. Greenpeace activists, meanwhile also screeching like the primates that they are, clambered over the walls of Unilever dressed in, you’ve guessed it, bright orange orang utan suits. RAN of course takes the cake. Alleging in their website that due to palm oil expansion, the orang utan may become extinct as early as 2011!

Obviously, RAN had not checked and was not aware that more than 50,000 orang utans currently exists in the wild in the tropical rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. The recent discovery of 2,000 or more red apes in the Indonesian part of Borneo has only splattered more egg on the faces of the mathematically challenged fanatics at RAN.

More often than not, wealthy western countries, prodded by green activists, have demanded that poor countries severely curtail their palm oil production.

However, says Alan Oxley, Chairman of World Growth International: “The demands constitute an unconscionable attack on the livelihoods of millions of poor people. Developing nations will resist and they are right to do so.”

Led primarily by the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the environmentalists claim that palm oil is a leading generator of greenhouse gases. A rash of reports produced by these organizations blame palm oil for deforestation and for destroying orangutan habitat in Southeast Asia.

However, as pointed out by Oxley, these assertions are simply not true. He explains: “Development and forestry experts know that two-thirds of forest clearance is driven by low-income people in poor countries searching for land for habitation and food production.”

Oxley observed that palm oil is the most environmentally sustainable vegetable oil available. “It uses one-tenth of the land required by other vegetable oil crops to produce the same quantity of oil - including that produced in rich countries in Europe and North America,” he said. “Palm plantations are effective sinks for absorbing carbon dioxide” and “palm oil is also a more effective and greener renewable diesel fuel than biodiesel made from other vegetable oils such as rapeseed in Europe or corn in the United States,” said Oxley.

In the view of Deforestation Watch, whilst there appears to be a deficit of empathy amongst certain environmentalists like Greenpeace, FOE and RAN, we can and should take steps towards preserving the environment. In truth, we have been, and
the environment is certainly much better than it was thirty years ago.

That's a good thing. But when radicals for whom environmentalism is a religion, attempt to destroy the constitutional rights of citizens and the livelihood of palm oil planters and farmers in the developing world and trample the inalienable rights to life of dying and sickly Africans, they've gone too far. The fraud and the fanaticism have to stop as it, ultimately, does not aid and instead damages their cause.