What we're doing wrong

Palm oil protest

7th June 2008

Nutella made from palm oil grown in place of orangutan habitat

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A lab analysis of Nutella obtained by Greenpeace reveals that it is 31 per cent vegetable oil, most of which is palm oil (the exact recipe is a trade secret). Rain forests are felled and peat swamps are drained to grow oil palm in Indonesia, which releases greenhouse gases (four per cent of global emissions come from draining and burning Indonesian peat) and destroys pristine rain forest in its portion of Borneo, the last home of endangered orangutans.

“We have been writing to Ferrero [Nutella's parent company], asking where they source their palm oil, but they have never answered our questions,” says Chiara Campione, forest campaigner for Greenpeace Italy.

Greenpeace has campaigned about palm oil for the past year, including a recent protest against Italy’s national soccer team, which is sponsored by Nutella. Dressed up as orangutans and posing as “Borneo’s soccer team,” they demonstrated outside the squad’s training centre.

Last month, the organization succeeded in pressuring Unilever – the world’s largest consumer of palm oil – to join them in their call for a moratorium on deforestation for palm oil. But the result of Unilever’s announcement remains to be seen. Unilever and Ferrero are both members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, but since its inception in 2002, the RSPO has done nothing, Ms. Campione says. “Many members of the RSPO are still destroying rain forest and peat,” she says.

Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail

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• Tags:
• Biodiversity
• Greenpeace
• Palm Oil
• Rainforests
• The Way We Eat

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