The palm oil industry is aggressively expanding palm oil production for both cooking oil and biofuel. That means destroying millions of acres of forests and small farms and converting them into vast plantations of oil palm. In many countries, and especially in Indonesia and Malaysia, oil palm plantations are forcing forest-dwelling peoples to abandon the forests just ahead of the advancing bulldozers. Indigenous communities are uprooted; their source of food, medicine, and building materials are destroyed; and many are forced to work in near slave-labor conditions for the companies that destroyed their forest home.
Cultural Survival has joined Rainforest Action Network in pressing major purchasers of palm oil to demand environmentally sustainable and socially responsible practices in the palm oil industry. Our first target: the Girl Scouts! Yes, those cookies are made with palm oil.
When Girl Scouts from Michigan told Cultural Survival’s Global Response program that they were trying to convince the Girl Scout Organization to change its recipe to save the orangutans in Indonesia’s rainforest, we told them that Indigenous Peoples are also being displaced by the expanding oil palm plantations. We wrote a letter to the Girl Scouts and endorsed Rainforest Action Network’s “Pathway to Change for Market Leaders.”
If you are a conscientious Girl Scout supporter or cookie-eater, write your own letter!
