Ashley Schaeffer Posts

Last week, Rainforest Action Network (RAN) contacted Cargill employees in over 20 countries to alert them to the company’s ties to rainforest destruction and orangutan extinction. The email urged employees to watch a recent eye-opening prime time NBC news story profiling the imminent extinction of orangutans due to unchecked palm oil expansion in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Late last week, NBC’s primetime program “Rock Center with Brian Williams” aired an episode about the destruction of the last remaining orangutan habitat, the Tripa forest of Indonesia, for palm oil plantations.
Rainforest Action Network helped with the behind the scenes legwork to get this important program on the air. Now we need to maximize its impact by ensuring as many people see i...

Cargill: Keep Corporate Influence Out of Science!

Two weeks ago, the mainstream media caught fire with a Stanford study questioning the benefits of organic foods. It turns out the anti-organics study may have the fingerprints of agribusiness giants Cargill and Monsanto. That’s right, Big Ag has been bankrolling Stanford’s Food Security and the Environment (FSE) program. In fact, Cargill donated $5 million to Stanford over a 10 year period. According to Cargill’s own website, the agri-giant has established a 25-year partnership with Stanford to conduct “research, teaching, and outreach” as part of the program.

Do you think it is a coincidence that the first big study to undermine the benefits of organics has links to Cargill?

We need to tell Cargill: ENOUGH. Corporate money should not sway science.

Whether it be for elections or our research institutions, corporate money comes with an expectation of influence. When a company like Cargill donates millions of dollars—it is likely expecting something in return.

It’s time to get Cargill out of our food supply. A big part of that is getting the company to stop influencing crucial food research for its own agenda.

Sign our petition TODAY to protect our food supply and tell Cargill that you want corporate influence out of science and research.

This story has blown up on the blogosphere, but Cargill is counting on this PR disaster blowing over. We think this is a crucial part of the Stanford study that needs to be told, and we need your help to do that.

Please sign the petition to let Cargill know that you want its influence out of our food supply. After you sign, please take a moment to share this petition with your friends and family. It will take all of us to counter Cargill’s heavy weight.

We just got word that a round of closed door negotiations will begin this week for the largest free trade agreement in history. We are talking about NAFTA on steroids—an 11-country free trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Right now, negotiations for the TPP are being conducted in secret. The corporate lobbyists pushing for this agreement include a who’s who list of Big Oil, Big Ag and Wall Street power brokers. Our country’s negotiators have granted approximately 600 of these corporate lobbyists access to the negotiating texts while flatly refusing to show the agreement to the public. Even members of Congress are left in the dark on the actual contents of the agreement.

Send a loud and clear message to the lead U.S. trade negotiator, Ron Kirk, that we don’t want this trade agreement passed in our names. He needs to know we’re watching.

Among the corporations pushing hardest for this agreement is none other than Cargill, the leading importer of forest-destroying palm oil into the United States. If the TPP is successful, Cargill will be able to export Malaysian palm oil tariff-free to the 11 partner nations involved in the agreement.

Let’s show Cargill’s corporate lobbyists and the US trade negotiators that we will not stand quietly by while this massive anti-environment trade agreement is passed.

At the behest of companies like Cargill, U.S. trade negotiators are pushing hard for the Trans-Pacific Partnership to include so-called “investor-state” provisions that would grant transnational corporations the power to challenge virtually any environmental law, regulation or court decision that negatively affects their expectation of profits.

As you know, current trade rules have helped cement unsustainable production and consumption patterns worldwide. These rules have allowed companies to move operations to wherever labor and environmental standards are the weakest, wreaking havoc on forests, communities and the climate. Every country that will be part of the TPP is home to tropical rainforests or other endangered forest ecosystems that we need to be protecting, not exploiting.

There is still a chance to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but time is running out. Send a message to stop this trade agreement today. We’ll hand-deliver all of your messages to US trade representatives, as well.

We must learn our lessons from the failed trade agreements of the past and stake out a different course for the future, where peoples’ lives and livelihoods are protected. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is going in the wrong direction at a time when we must strengthen environmental protections, not facilitate a race to the bottom in environmental deregulation.

Captured on hidden camera footage released by the Indonesia Ministry of Forestry, rare sighting of Sumatran Rhinos sparks international attention

Is protecting a small fragment of intact natural forest habitat amidst a sea of oil palm plantations enough to combat extinction?

Two rare, critically endangered Sumatran rhinos were recently captured on hidden camera in Leuser National Park, Indonesia for the first time in 26 years. This came as a surprise to wildlife conservationists, as there are only an estimated 200 Sumatran rhinos left in the wild in small pockets throughout Indonesia and Malaysia. An estimated 70 percent of the Sumatran rhino population has been lost since 1985, due to poaching and loss of habitat from palm oil and pulp and paper plantation expansion.

Although it’s clearly great news that these two rhinos have been documented inside the Leuser National Park protected area for the first time in 26 years, a new study published in Nature shows that protecting the land surrounding these areas is every bit as important as the health of the reserves themselves. The authors report:

Crucially, environmental changes immediately outside reserves seemed nearly as important as those inside in determining their ecological fate, with changes inside reserves strongly mirroring those occurring around them.

Meaning that, even with the best of intentions, the conservation of discreet pieces of park land cannot maintain healthy and vibrant habitat for wildlife if the ecosystem right outside the boundaries of the park is being devastated.

Tripa Swamp: A Threatened Pocket of Biodiversity Amidst the Greater Leuser Ecosystem. Click for larger image.

This finding sheds light on the fate of Tripa—an area of 61,803 hectares on the west coast of the province of Aceh that represents one of only six remaining populations of the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan. Tripa is part of the Leuser Ecosystem, in the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, which covers more than 2.6 million hectares of prime tropical rain forest and is the last place on earth where the Sumatran sub-species of elephants, rhinoceros, tigers and orangutans coexist.

What we’ve witnessed in the past six months is the near wholesale extinction of Sumatran orangutans due to the fires intentionally set by palm oil companies both inside and outside Tripa, threatening endangered orangutans throughout the region.

Given the amount of endangered species struggling for survival inside Leuser National Park, our task is not only to protect this pocket of biodiversity that may not be able to survive long term, but to protect natural forests throughout Indonesia that are being razed to the ground to feed the growing appetite of international markets for cheap palm oil and pulp and paper. Whether it’s orangutans or rhinos who are eking out survival inside protected areas that are themselves under threat by encroaching deforestation, the habitat that these creatures depend on has been relentlessly chipped away by palm oil producers and pulp and paper companies.

The urgency of the situation on the ground in Indonesia is even more pressing today than our August 2011 analysis that protected areas alone are not enough to combat the sixth mass extinction.

A recent Indonesia Finance Today article clarifies that Cargill plans to expand its plantation land in Indonesia to 90,000 hectares in April 2013 and that while the company’s crude palm oil production (CPO) in Indonesia is currently at 300,000 tons, it’s targeting to reach one million tons.

This is an interesting turn of events. In response to RAN’s April 2012 exposé profiling the demise of one of the world’s most important tropical rainforests for oil palm expansion, Cargill aggressively argued in a public statement that it “does not import Indonesian palm oil to the United States” in an attempt to minimize its role as one of the largest palm oil traders in the world and evade responsibility for the Indonesia deforestation crisis.