The new council also plans to lobby China and India, both massive palm oil consumers who’ve so far shown little interest in anything other than buying large amounts of palm oil as cheaply as possible, to accept its new palm oil scheme.
While the council has promised sustainable palm oil and to limit forest fires, it is unclear how this will be achieved with a massive expansion of the palm oil industry.
Don’t feed Godzilla
The fires and dense haze that have plagued Southeast Asia this year are certainly not a one-off event. In fact, they’ve been an annual occurrence for many years, albeit worsened this year by an intense fire-breathing El Niño drought that we’ve long known was coming.
Indonesia is destroying its rainforests faster than any other tropical nation, and it is at the heart of the recurring air-pollution crisis in Southeast Asia. Its policies will have a huge impact on forests, biodiversity and the global climate. President Widodo’s recent pledge to halt peatland fires is an essential initiative and one that should be heartily applauded.
But if the newly formed council holds sway, any benefits from Widodo’s peat-burning ban could be overwhelmed by increasing forest destruction in some of the biologically richest real estate on the planet.
And I predict that any corporation rash enough to backslide on its hard-won no-deforestation pledge will be quickly targeted by environmental groups and, hopefully, punished by consumers.
This story was originally published by The Conversation.