Palm Oil

Palm Oil – An Evil Comes in Many Disguises

byFanny Bucheli

It takes hours to complete my weekly grocery shopping, but I try to do the ethically responsible thing. Culprit number one is without question that one little ingredient, often well hidden in tiny print, camouflaged in fuzzy terminology and almost always completely unnecessary – Palm Oil.

Palm Oil was hailed the saving grace of the food and cosmetics industry a couple of decades ago. Falsely celebrated as a healthy alternative to butter, palm oil has managed to sneak into absolutely everything we consume, be it food, beauty products, detergents and even candles. It is in virtually everything that is industrially produced and available in your supermarket.

Why is palm oil so bad? Doesn’t its production create countless jobs for entire populations? Yes, it does. But along with it comes significant increase in cardiovascular diseases, a new kind of slave trade of poorly treated migrant workers and indigenous communities being cheated out of their ancestral lands without compensation.

Palm oil consumption has more than quadrupled in the last 20 years – Malaysia and Indonesia take the lion share of 85% of worldwide production. Our ecosystem can simply not cope with the demands. The equivalent of 300 football fields worth of rainforest is razed by fire and plough every hour in South East Asia, 80% of the orangutans’ natural habitat has been destroyed. At this rate, these gentle herbivores will be extinct by 2020, and 98% of all rainforest in the region will have disappeared forever.

Are we really willing to sacrifice our rainforests, biodiversity, birds, elephants, tigers, orangutans to the luxury of a relatively inexpensive loaf of bread? Are we willing, as we munch on a cereal bar, to take a hard look at the photos of thousands of slow-moving orangutans burned to death as they are unable to escape their burning habitat?

Source: causes.org

Are we willing, while we enjoy the smell of our scented candle, to hear of Peni, the baby orangutan who, barely alive and trembling, clung to her dying mother’s chest, as she was tied, beaten and drowned in a pond. Killed by ignorance rather than by malice, when her only crime was to come too close to humans in search for food after her forest had gone up in flames?

Source: Feri Latief/International Animal Rescue

There is talk of so-called sustainable palm oil in the future. But until then, by all means shop with your magnifying glass in hand. Find palm oil, vegetable oil, sodium laureth sulfate or pretty much any other word you don’t recognize on the ingredients list of your baked goods, chips, instant noodles, chocolate, ice cream, milk, margarine, soap, toothpaste, shampoo, lipstick, detergents. If it’s processed, it’s got palm oil - it’s that simple. Put it back on the shelf, help end this holocaust and safe an orangutan from dying an unimaginably cruel death.

Let There Be Bees

The mini-paper-umbrella clad drinks are glistening gently in the last rays of sunshine by the pool, the children are giggling at a safe distance chasing each other barefoot on the lawn and we let ourselves be lulled into leisurely small talk with good company. Life is slowing down, life is good.

Bzzz, bzzzz! We get yanked out of our late afternoon reverie, we swat at the airborne intruder like ninjas in an ambush, we order the youngsters off the treacherous green, conversations end abruptly, relaxation is instantly over.

The enemy is tiny, it is the danger signaling black and yellow striped kind, it zeros in on our sweet refreshments like a drone, it perfidiously lands on a flower, which may, at any moment, be stepped on by an unaware little foot.

A shoe will do, a shirt, a towel or a poisonous spray, we hunt the bug, we squash the bug, we will defend our family, we will prevail.

Or not!

If the buzzing trespasser that so unbecomingly ruined our well-deserved rest happened to be of the genus Hylaeus, we might as well have shot an elephant or clubbed to death a baby seal. Because the pollinator more commonly known as the bumblebee, the gooey mess sticking to the sole of the shoe we so proficiently used as a weapon, has recently been labeled an endangered species.

Wild bees, as opposed to their domesticated cousin the honey bees, are among the most prolific pollinators on the planet. Their work is vital in the maintenance of flowering plants, crops, and our entire ecosystem. In fact, about a third of the food we eat depends on bee pollination one way or another. The United Nations have recently estimatedinsect pollination worldwide to have a value of about 150 billion dollar. Industrialized and technologically advanced farming could never catch up to the pollinating effort of food plants as diverse as carrots, apples, lemons, onions, melons, and even coconuts, performed by bumblebees.

If this wild, buzzing insect were to be extinct, a considerable amount of our worldwide food supply would vanish within a few years. Without bees, an important amount of bird species would go extinct due to lack of food within even fewer years. With indiscriminate use of pesticides, genetically modify crops, global warming as well as the destruction of habitat, flowering meadows and smoking out wild beehives, the bees will go extinct.

And when the bees go, so do we.

Blowin' in the Nobel Wind

What’s wrong with me, you might ask? For once I am very familiar with the work of a Nobel Prize winner. And still, I’m not sure I like Bob Dylan as this year’s top literature laureate.

I will admit, many of his illustrious peers are and will remain unappreciated, at least by my book club and me. But be honest, which of Svetlana Alexievich’s works have you read lately? Or Patrick Modiano’s? How about Mo Yan? No? Well, they happen to be the 2015, ’14 and ’12 winners respectively.

In 1895, Alfred Nobel asked in his will that the laureates should have bestowed "the greatest benefit on mankind". All too often, in the field of literature, has this led to shortlisted works of exceptionally difficult content that is phenomenally tough to digest. Not so Bob Dylan’s poetry, I’ll give you that. But does it really bestow the greatest benefit on mankind?

I will keep fond memories of elementary school music classes, singing and drumming to the beat of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’; it was so much more enjoyable than some dry exercise on pitch notations and harmonies. I do remember proudly feeling part of a new idea, a new rebel movement while singing along to lyrics such as “A hard rain’s a-gonna fall” or “Like a Rolling Stone”, even if the political undertones of Bob Dylan’s songs were accusatory hymns of days long gone. Great benefit to me for certain, but for mankind?

There is no doubt the man with the harmonica gave modern rock, pop, folk and soul music an immense impulse. His lyrical poetry is challenging the listener’s intellect; it is relevant today as much as it was in the ‘60s; it is politically pertinent and still vastly successful. Bob Dylan is an exceptional singer-songwriter; he holds a well-deserved place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Maybe, just maybe, the Academy felt that, after 23 years it was high time they awarded the top prize to an American again. But then again, maybe, just maybe, the Academy doesn’t like to feel pressured by issues as mundane as their laureates’ nationality. So maybe, just maybe, winning the Nobel Prize for literature somehow clips the rebel wings of a non-traditional writer, an untypical pop star, an accessible poet like Bob Dylan. So I’m not sure I like Bob Dylan as this year’s top literature laureate.

The Greatest Games

The Greatest Games

So it has begun! Ah sorry, no I didn’t mean Pokémon Go. Although I will admit that, this too, has its positive sides, but let’s leave this topic for another day.

I mean the other greatest game – the 2016 Summer Olympics, or Jogos Olímpicos de Verão de 2016, as they are known in their host country’s native Portuguese.

Each city hosting the games, Athens, Beijing, London and now Rio to cover just the last decade, have aimed at organizing the bigger, better, and certainly more memorable games than their predecessors.

At the Athens Games in 2004, the organizers had found a unique way of making their games the biggest in Olympic history. The Hellenic Games were definitely inimitable as no other nation could start the marathon races in the city of Marathon.

In 2008, Beijing hosted the games of records and superlatives. In true Chinese tradition, the opening ceremony was unforgettably artistic, acrobatic and beautiful and the venues such as the “Birds Nest” and the “Water Cube” architectural masterpieces.

London 2012 introduced a new kind of superlative. 10,500 athletes from 204 countries competed for 302 gold medals. Events that were made possible thanks to the support of a 200,000 strong workforce. 600 basketballs, 2,700 footballs and 356 pairs of boxing gloves were sourced for the London Games.

True to the Olympic motto “Citius, Altius, Fortius” meaning Faster, Higher, Stronger, each host city has duly outdone the previous one. Unfortunately, not only the celebrated achievements of organizers and participants were memorable. Doping scandals and political statements have always overshadowed the Games, like China’s appalling human rights records before Beijing 2008 and this year’s protests in the streets of Rio.

Rio 2016 had not even started and issues like the Zika virus, the death of a wild jaguar during a torch ceremony and the country’s economical collapse had already made huge headlines worldwide. So what are we going to remember from the Rio Games? Scandals, doping charges, corruption cases?  Let’s not.

photo by businessnews.blogs.latrobe.edu.au Emma Sherry.

Besides some phenomenal world and Olympic records and truly memorable victories, I will choose to remember this years Olympic Games for the fact that there is a Refugee Olympic Team, and for the Games manifesto of “unity, respect for diversity and the will for change”. I want to remember Rio 2016 for the North Korean athlete who asked her South Korean competitor for a selfie, and for Joseph Schooling, who met Michael Phelps in 2008 in a Singapore swimming pool and now beat his idol to a gold medal. But maybe most of all, I will remember Rafael Nadal’s radiating smile as he walked into Stadium Maracanã with the Spanish team. That smile of anticipation, pride, generosity, these intense emotions are what Olympic Games should be all about.

Let the Games begin!