KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 16 — Primary Industries Minister Teresa Kok today praised the decision by the United Kingdom’s advertising approval body Clearcast banning an anti-palm oil campaign video.
She said the video was “unfair, biased political propaganda”, and that the joint venture campaign between UK supermarket chain Iceland and environmental NGO Greenpeace was misleading.
“It is our belief that anti-palm oil campaigns like these, including by NGOs, are aimed at crippling our palm oil industry by using biased and unfounded information which ultimately leads to such unfair labelling practice,” said Kok in a statement.
She said the Iceland-Greenpeace campaign and its video played on emotions and personalities to convince its audience that palm oil is evil due to its destruction of wildlife habitats.
“It makes us wonder whose interest Iceland is protecting — is it the orangutan that are already protected by law in Malaysia?
“Do they not care for the 650,000 Malaysian smallholders and the foreign workers from other Asian countries who make an honest living from the palm oil industry?” Kok said.
Condemning the supermarket chain for resorting to what she labelled as a cheap and underhanded tactic, she said this sort of political arm-twisting was reminiscent of Western colonial attitudes in the past.
“It smacks of double-standards as well as a blatant attempt to safeguard their products at the expense of the palm oil industry in this region.
“Let us be absolutely clear here that the new Pakatan Harapan government led by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad was voted in with a clear mandate that had emphasised protecting the environment and safeguarding the livelihood of workers,” Kok said.
“Malaysia will not compromise on the matter, nor be cowed or stand idly by when such advertisements are being utilised to wrongly influence the minds of crucial markets.
“We will fight back, and fight back we will with facts from scientifically researched data,” she said.
Kok cited several data points, including the fact that Malaysian palm oil is developed on agricultural land and not permanent forest reserves, and sets aside over 50 per cent of land area as forest cover.
“We are a responsible member of the international community in fulfilling the collective duty of addressing climate change and protecting the world’s biodiversity for the common future of humankind.
“Our efforts to protect our wildlife have also been internationally recognised such as our Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre in Sabah and Semenggoh Wildlife Centre in Sarawak for Orangutans,” she said.
“We welcome the decision by Clearcast to disallow Iceland from using Greenpeace’s rehashed ‘Rang-tan’ video for its Christmas shopping promotion campaign, and hope it will not reverse its decision, despite pressure from certain quarters,” Kok said.
The video featured a cartoon orangutan explaining to a girl that its home in the rainforest had been destroyed, and has since been watched over four million and 15 million times on YouTube and Facebook, respectively. The hashtag #NoPalmOilChristmas is also currently trending on Twitter.
Following Clearcast’s decision to block the ad from airing on UK television, a petition was made calling for its repeal and has since garnered nearly one million signatures.
