Reuters cheap shot deals Indonesian palm oil a black eye
Reuters the global news platform has just dealt Indonesian palm oil a black eye with an opinion that can only be construed as extremely prejudiced.
Written by Southeast Asia Correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Adi Renaldi, the Reuters piece titled “How does Indonesia's palm oil industry fuel the climate crisis?” reads like something that was put together hastily to meet writing quotas.
The stuff he talks about is quite common in online opinions on palm oil. It would have been dismissed as more “anti palm oil” or “black campaigns” had it not been published on a Reuters owned website.
Written by Southeast Asia Correspondent for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Adi Renaldi, the Reuters piece titled “How does Indonesia's palm oil industry fuel the climate crisis?” reads like something that was put together hastily to meet writing quotas.
The stuff he talks about is quite common in online opinions on palm oil. It would have been dismissed as more “anti palm oil” or “black campaigns” had it not been published on a Reuters owned website.
Reuters cheap shot at Indonesian palm oil
As published in the Reuters Context website with a trademarked term Know Better. Do Better, Adi Renaldi’s opinions as approved by editor Ayla Jean Yackley, should be read by the Indonesian palm oil industry with concern as Reuters is not some foreign NGO that can be bought for cheap.
Context presents itself as:
Context is a media platform brought to you by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Our aim is to provide news and analysis that contextualises how critical issues and events affect ordinary people, society and the environment. Context is powered by original reporting from the Thomson Reuters Foundation and anchored around three of the most significant and interdependent issues of our time: climate change, the impact of technology on society and inclusive economies.
Our award-winning team of journalists has decades of experience reporting from the ground in more than 70 countries. We adhere to the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles of integrity, independence and freedom from bias.
Adi Renaldi’s piece is in obvious violation of Thomson Reuters Trust Principles of integrity, independence and freedom from bias as it is neither free from bias nor formed from independent thought.
To support his context on Indonesian palm oil, Adi rattled off a series of quick shots against the lndonesian palm oil industry with claims like:
But environmentalists fear surging demand for the versatile product may drive mass deforestation in Indonesia, home to the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest, and exacerbate the global climate crisis.
As companies and small landholders replace natural habitats with palm oil plantations, activists and researchers are warning that large amounts of planet-heating carbon is being released into the atmosphere.
Indonesia lost 721,000 acres of primary, or old growth, forest in the last two decades – equivalent to 221 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Global Forest Watch.
All the way to orangutans and palm-based biodiesel!!
Sumatra and Borneo, home to the endangered orangutan and other endemic species, have lost 36% and 45% of their tropical forests, respectively, due to palm oil expansion, according to Nusantara Atlas, a non-profit that tracks deforestation.
Palm oil is a primary ingredient of biodiesel, a cleaner-burning, renewable fuel used in transportation. But a growing body of research shows that biofuels from vegetable oils like palm actually emit more carbon than fossil fuels, primarily due to changes in land use in order to grow the crops.
In quoting Transport & Environment, Europe’s best well paid media platform for anti-palm oil campaigns, Reuters shows that it is poorly informed about what exactly, palm based biofuels means for Indonesia.
But the most outrageous attempt by Reuters Context to paint Indonesian palm oil black, is quoting this paper that palm oil cultivation in Indonesia has no social benefits.
Researchers claim palm oil has not contributed to the welfare of people living near plantations. The rate of poverty remains high in the palm oil-rich regions of Sumatra and Borneo, where people face food insecurity after farms were cleared to make way for palm trees.
Quoting one report by people associated with foreign universities with a token Indonesian thrown in does not even begin to address the socio-economic benefits in Indonesia’s climb to become the world’s biggest producer of palm oil.
An informed view on palm based biofuels by Palm Oil Analytics should have been caught by Reuters as capable of rubbishing Adi Renaldi’s opinion.
The Indonesian people, whose numbers are very large, require a large supply of fuel to support various economic activities, such as daily transportation, shipping, processing, and more. For quite some time, this demand was met by using fossil fuels derived from coal. However, since 2008, the government has officially regulated the use of alternative energy sources through the issuance of Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Regulation Number 32 of 2008 concerning the Provision, Utilization, and Trade of Vegetable Oil Fuels (Biofuel) as Alternative Fuels.
Edi Suhardi, Head of Palm Oil Campaign for the Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI) dismissed the article as criticism that reflects Reuters poor knowledge of the issues on palm oil and deforestation in Indonesia.
“In Indonesia, according to Law 41/1999 forest is defined as a certain area which is designated and or stipulated by government to be preserved as permanent forest.
The Indonesian laws state that new oil palm cultivations can only be developed on the non-forest area or Area for Other Purposes (APL) outside designated state forest areas. Hence, deforestation is not applicable for the new palm oil development on APL area.
The NGOs’ report which the writer referred to is uses a forest landcover map based on their own analysis. This map was not confirmed by the Indonesian government or other stakeholders.
Using this landcover map to identify forest and deforestation is both a blunder and a fallacy. Degraded lands abandoned for few years in a tropical country like Indonesia with high rainfall and fertile soils is rapidly recovered by vegetation to reach a landcover type that can appear to satellite imagery as “forest.” Therefore, it is naïve to attribute any landcover change without footwork done on the ground.
The article also undermines the positive contributions of palm oil in helping Indonesia towards its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Palm oil now supplies over 40 percent of the global vegetable oil market. Its yield of over 3 tons of oil per hectare is extreme compared to 0.34 ton for olive oil, 0.26 ton for coconut oil and 0.7 ton for sunflower oil.
Hence to meet population growth and demand for oil crops, turning to non-palm oil alternatives will lead to far more deforestation as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature said in 2018.
As for Reuters claim that palm oil has not contributed to the welfare of people living near plantations, Reuters should have known that in Indonesia, 6.8 million hectares or 41 percent of oil palm estates are owned by small farmers. Are these not people living near plantations?
The Indonesian palm oil industry further provides jobs for seventeen million people from farming to processing and office work.
The article would be less hurtful to all the Indonesians that benefit from the palm oil industry if it was balanced with facts from Indonesia. It is obvious that Reuters did not attempt to verify the claims it made against Indonesian palm oil or bother to fact check what it said."
Indonesia cannot be held responsible for climate change
The outrage expressed by GAPKI against the Reuters piece on Context is understandable. Indonesia could have chosen to continue the use of fossil fuels to power its economy.
However, in its national commitment to reduce emissions, Indonesia is counting on biofuels from palm oil to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. On top of palm oil, Indonesia has aspirations to include ethanol from sugar cane to add a new source of biofuels.
According to this Reuters report, out-going President Joko Widodo aims to plant 700,000 hectares with sugarcane to increase sugar output, which Nicke said could help produce 1.2 million kilolitres of ethanol for fuel.
Will this provoke yet another opinion from Reuters on how Indonesia is using its wetlands for agriculture?
One has to cringe at how hard Adi Renaldi tried to paint Indonesian palm oil as bad for climate change.
“The loss of carbon-storing forests is compounded by the conversion of peatland into plantations. Indonesia is home to more than a third of the world’s tropical peatlands, a type of wetland that is the world’s biggest land-based store of carbon.”
That is very true Adi. It is also true that:
-More than 50% of the prairie wetlands in North America have been reclaimed for agricultural development, resulting in the average loss of 10.1 Mg/ha of SOC on over 16 million ha of wetlands https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301479722025920
-Peatlands, which cover an area of the EU the size of Germany, are especially badly impacted by human activities, and especially badly protected. More than half have been degraded by drainage, so the land can be used for agriculture, forestry, and construction, or mined for peat for use in horticulture or as a fuel. A century ago, one-third of Finland was covered in peatlands but has since lost more than half through drainage for forestry and strip mining for fuel.
https://earth.org/interview/sonia-mena/
The main point here is that Reuters cannot hold the preservation of Indonesian forests as being essential for solving climate change. Not when the climate crisis today was caused by other countries and commodities that have absolutely nothing to do with Indonesian palm oil.
Whether palm oil or nickel or coal, Indonesia is punching above its weight to reduce the climate change impacts of its development. While it's unfortunate that Reuters has dealt an underserved black eye to the Indonesian palm oil industry, Reuters has also discredited itself with the publication of such a shallow piece as written by Adi.
Published September 2024 CSPO Watch
Context presents itself as:
Context is a media platform brought to you by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Our aim is to provide news and analysis that contextualises how critical issues and events affect ordinary people, society and the environment. Context is powered by original reporting from the Thomson Reuters Foundation and anchored around three of the most significant and interdependent issues of our time: climate change, the impact of technology on society and inclusive economies.
Our award-winning team of journalists has decades of experience reporting from the ground in more than 70 countries. We adhere to the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles of integrity, independence and freedom from bias.
Adi Renaldi’s piece is in obvious violation of Thomson Reuters Trust Principles of integrity, independence and freedom from bias as it is neither free from bias nor formed from independent thought.
To support his context on Indonesian palm oil, Adi rattled off a series of quick shots against the lndonesian palm oil industry with claims like:
But environmentalists fear surging demand for the versatile product may drive mass deforestation in Indonesia, home to the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest, and exacerbate the global climate crisis.
As companies and small landholders replace natural habitats with palm oil plantations, activists and researchers are warning that large amounts of planet-heating carbon is being released into the atmosphere.
Indonesia lost 721,000 acres of primary, or old growth, forest in the last two decades – equivalent to 221 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Global Forest Watch.
All the way to orangutans and palm-based biodiesel!!
Sumatra and Borneo, home to the endangered orangutan and other endemic species, have lost 36% and 45% of their tropical forests, respectively, due to palm oil expansion, according to Nusantara Atlas, a non-profit that tracks deforestation.
Palm oil is a primary ingredient of biodiesel, a cleaner-burning, renewable fuel used in transportation. But a growing body of research shows that biofuels from vegetable oils like palm actually emit more carbon than fossil fuels, primarily due to changes in land use in order to grow the crops.
In quoting Transport & Environment, Europe’s best well paid media platform for anti-palm oil campaigns, Reuters shows that it is poorly informed about what exactly, palm based biofuels means for Indonesia.
But the most outrageous attempt by Reuters Context to paint Indonesian palm oil black, is quoting this paper that palm oil cultivation in Indonesia has no social benefits.
Researchers claim palm oil has not contributed to the welfare of people living near plantations. The rate of poverty remains high in the palm oil-rich regions of Sumatra and Borneo, where people face food insecurity after farms were cleared to make way for palm trees.
Quoting one report by people associated with foreign universities with a token Indonesian thrown in does not even begin to address the socio-economic benefits in Indonesia’s climb to become the world’s biggest producer of palm oil.
An informed view on palm based biofuels by Palm Oil Analytics should have been caught by Reuters as capable of rubbishing Adi Renaldi’s opinion.
The Indonesian people, whose numbers are very large, require a large supply of fuel to support various economic activities, such as daily transportation, shipping, processing, and more. For quite some time, this demand was met by using fossil fuels derived from coal. However, since 2008, the government has officially regulated the use of alternative energy sources through the issuance of Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Regulation Number 32 of 2008 concerning the Provision, Utilization, and Trade of Vegetable Oil Fuels (Biofuel) as Alternative Fuels.
Edi Suhardi, Head of Palm Oil Campaign for the Indonesian Palm Oil Association (GAPKI) dismissed the article as criticism that reflects Reuters poor knowledge of the issues on palm oil and deforestation in Indonesia.
“In Indonesia, according to Law 41/1999 forest is defined as a certain area which is designated and or stipulated by government to be preserved as permanent forest.
The Indonesian laws state that new oil palm cultivations can only be developed on the non-forest area or Area for Other Purposes (APL) outside designated state forest areas. Hence, deforestation is not applicable for the new palm oil development on APL area.
The NGOs’ report which the writer referred to is uses a forest landcover map based on their own analysis. This map was not confirmed by the Indonesian government or other stakeholders.
Using this landcover map to identify forest and deforestation is both a blunder and a fallacy. Degraded lands abandoned for few years in a tropical country like Indonesia with high rainfall and fertile soils is rapidly recovered by vegetation to reach a landcover type that can appear to satellite imagery as “forest.” Therefore, it is naïve to attribute any landcover change without footwork done on the ground.
The article also undermines the positive contributions of palm oil in helping Indonesia towards its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Palm oil now supplies over 40 percent of the global vegetable oil market. Its yield of over 3 tons of oil per hectare is extreme compared to 0.34 ton for olive oil, 0.26 ton for coconut oil and 0.7 ton for sunflower oil.
Hence to meet population growth and demand for oil crops, turning to non-palm oil alternatives will lead to far more deforestation as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature said in 2018.
As for Reuters claim that palm oil has not contributed to the welfare of people living near plantations, Reuters should have known that in Indonesia, 6.8 million hectares or 41 percent of oil palm estates are owned by small farmers. Are these not people living near plantations?
The Indonesian palm oil industry further provides jobs for seventeen million people from farming to processing and office work.
The article would be less hurtful to all the Indonesians that benefit from the palm oil industry if it was balanced with facts from Indonesia. It is obvious that Reuters did not attempt to verify the claims it made against Indonesian palm oil or bother to fact check what it said."
Indonesia cannot be held responsible for climate change
The outrage expressed by GAPKI against the Reuters piece on Context is understandable. Indonesia could have chosen to continue the use of fossil fuels to power its economy.
However, in its national commitment to reduce emissions, Indonesia is counting on biofuels from palm oil to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. On top of palm oil, Indonesia has aspirations to include ethanol from sugar cane to add a new source of biofuels.
According to this Reuters report, out-going President Joko Widodo aims to plant 700,000 hectares with sugarcane to increase sugar output, which Nicke said could help produce 1.2 million kilolitres of ethanol for fuel.
Will this provoke yet another opinion from Reuters on how Indonesia is using its wetlands for agriculture?
One has to cringe at how hard Adi Renaldi tried to paint Indonesian palm oil as bad for climate change.
“The loss of carbon-storing forests is compounded by the conversion of peatland into plantations. Indonesia is home to more than a third of the world’s tropical peatlands, a type of wetland that is the world’s biggest land-based store of carbon.”
That is very true Adi. It is also true that:
-More than 50% of the prairie wetlands in North America have been reclaimed for agricultural development, resulting in the average loss of 10.1 Mg/ha of SOC on over 16 million ha of wetlands https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301479722025920
-Peatlands, which cover an area of the EU the size of Germany, are especially badly impacted by human activities, and especially badly protected. More than half have been degraded by drainage, so the land can be used for agriculture, forestry, and construction, or mined for peat for use in horticulture or as a fuel. A century ago, one-third of Finland was covered in peatlands but has since lost more than half through drainage for forestry and strip mining for fuel.
https://earth.org/interview/sonia-mena/
The main point here is that Reuters cannot hold the preservation of Indonesian forests as being essential for solving climate change. Not when the climate crisis today was caused by other countries and commodities that have absolutely nothing to do with Indonesian palm oil.
Whether palm oil or nickel or coal, Indonesia is punching above its weight to reduce the climate change impacts of its development. While it's unfortunate that Reuters has dealt an underserved black eye to the Indonesian palm oil industry, Reuters has also discredited itself with the publication of such a shallow piece as written by Adi.
Published September 2024 CSPO Watch