Palm oil industry slams advertisement on deforestation
British supermarket chain, Iceland Food Limited was slammed for a commercial about an orangutan left homeless due to deforestation from palm oil planting.
The Christmas ad featured an animation with an orangutan telling a little girl that her jungle home had been destroyed.
The advert gained a huge following on social media with the hastag #NoPalmOilChristmas on Twitter.
The multi-billion-dollar palm oil industry was up in arms saying that banning palm oil is not going to help the world’s most widely used vegetable oil.
“Banning palm oil is not the solution. Boycotting is not the solution,” Darrel Webber, chief executive of the Malaysia-based Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), told AFP on Friday.
Retailers’ margins are very small these days. The cheapest way to get publicity is the best way for them,” he added.
Frozen food specialist Iceland previously announced that it would stop using palm oil, found in everything from margarine and biscuits to soap and shampoo, over concerns that it causes widespread environmental destruction.
“We have not removed palm oil from our own label food as ‘a marketing gimmick’, but to raise public awareness of the continuing destruction of the rainforest,” Iceland managing director Richard Walker said in an email to Bloomberg News.
“By doing so we hope to apply pressure to the palm oil industry to deliver the genuinely sustainable product that it has long been promising.”
A petition with almost one million signatures is calling for the ad to be aired on British television after it was blocked for being too political.
The supermarket chain is now reportedly planning to release a life-size animatronic orangutan on Britain’s streets to draw attention to the issue.
Firms in Malaysia and Indonesia, which dominate global palm oil production, have been routinely accused of deforestation and using slash-and-burn forest clearance that destroys the habitats of under-threat species, including orangutans.
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