AMID the raging anti-palm oil campaign, one wonders whether there are workable PR tactics to keep anti-palm oil lobbyists at bay.
In February, palm oil giants Indonesia and Malaysia were reported to be teaming up to fight what they call a smear campaign targeted at the commodity.
The move sets the stage for what activists deem to be a costly PR (public relations) war that would shift the focus away from efforts to clean up the industry.
The two Southeast Asian countries produce 85% of the world’s palm oil, a ubiquitous ingredient in processed foods, cosmetics and biodiesel.
But production of the commodity has long been associated with the wholesale clearing of tropical rainforests, burning of peatlands, destruction of endangered wildlife habitat, land conflicts with indigenous communities and labour rights abuses.
Resorting to PR brings back the memory of how former Primary Industries Minister Teresa Kok Suh Sim, 54, leveraged the ‘grassroot’ campaign to cultivate a love for palm oil among Malaysians, chiefly by defending palm oil by virtue of the crop’s health benefits.
Apart from the Love My Palm Oil campaign, another programme mooted was to get students to act as palm oil ambassadors (going to campuses to create awareness sessions with students).
“So we are looking to create a series of activities that would stimulate interest in palm oil. The issue is that our own Malaysian people don’t appreciate palm oil,” she told FocusM (then a print media) in January 2019.
“Many of our kids in Kuala Lumpur, have they seen oil palm trees? So I have told some plantation companies and I will also meet people in the education department to see how we can partner them.
“From here, we can identify schools that request for oil palm trees and we’ll ask plantation companies to plant one in their compound or campus. It all boils down to awareness. A lot of us have not been to oil palm plantations. We don’t know the life of an oil palm tree. “
PR stunt
While what Kok mooted was a ‘low-budget’ PR campaign, running a similar campaign in Europe to counter the criticisms and fight the introduction of tighter regulations in the palm oil industry is by no means a cheap affair.
In Indonesia, the BPDP-KS (Oil Palm Plantation Fund Management Agency), a government fund that manages revenue from palm oil exports, has even gone a step further to run a “black campaign” against European producers of olive, rapeseed, sunflower and other vegetable oils.
This tit-for-tat PR stunt has raised eyebrows among dismayed environmental activists who believe the focus should remain on reforming the palm oil industry.
Nur Hidayati, executive director of Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the country’s biggest green group was spot on when she argued that the money and effort for such a campaign would be far better spent on improving the sustainability of the palm oil industry.
“Instead of taking corrective actions on the palm oil sector seriously, the government is doing a PR stunt that won’t have a positive impact on the people and the environment in Indonesia,” she lamented.
“The various facts about environmental degradation and conflicts that taint the palm oil sector can’t be hidden or denied by the government.”
One of the industry’s key talking points is that, hectare for hectare, oil palm is far more productive than other vegetable oil crops – in some cases, yielding 10 times the oil from the same area of cultivated land.
Proponents cite this to make the case that replacing oil palms with rapeseed, soybean or other vegetable crops would require a much greater area of land to achieve the same yield – nearly six times as much in the case of soy which is itself strongly associated with deforestation in Brazil.
But this must come with genuine commitment given many industry players have committed to zero deforestation in their palm oil supply chains by end-2020 but fell short of their ‘green’ pledges.
A more expansive version of the zero-deforestation commitment is NDPE which stands for ‘no deforestation, no planting on peatland, and no exploitation’ of workers and local communities. On this pledge, too, the industry has failed to deliver.
Insofar as the Indonesian experience is concerned, only 30% of oil palm plantations in Indonesia has been certified under the Indonesian Sustainable Palm Oil (ISPO) certification standard by 2020.
In fact, a 2019 government audit found that more than 80% of oil palm plantations are operating in violation of numerous regulations such as operating in areas larger than permitted, not complying with the ISPO standard, and failing to allocate sufficient land for smallholder farmers in their operations. – Aug 10, 2021
