In response to Biofuels Digest (@bdigest) on the World Bank, ‘World Growth’ and palm oil

By admin, on August 31st, 2010

Biofuels Digest blotted its moral copy book in a recent article on palm oil development:

The NGOs have manufactured yet another Western justification for the villages of Africa and Asia to be denied the very benefits of economic development that no sane Dane ever denied to Denmark. In moral terms, it reminds us of the man who wolfed down his food, and then declared to the rest of the family that dinner time was over.

I never cease to be amazed at the intellectual dexterity of capitalistically minded advocates of unfettered market access in accusing the environmental movement of being fundamentally anti-development.

The Digest would do well to take care for its credibility when quoting in the same article Mr Oxley and making statements like: “If you can’t prevent development in the Third World, starve it by imposing conditions that were never imposed on the OECD in its developing years.”
Mr Oxley is notable (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Alan_Oxley) as an advocate of free trade agreements such as propagated by the WTO – and if ever there was a set of rules imposed by the west on developing countries that the OECD did not adopt in its own development, the WTO is it.
There is little evidence, as far as I can tell, to suggest that ‘World Growth’ has the interests of any poor person in Malaysia or Indonesia at heart – if it did, one might expect it to be more positively inclined to the sustainability programs such as RSPO that help protect palm oil workers from illness, poisoning and exploitation.

There are many things the west exports that have a dubious moral standing – however, I think that if the Digest reflected a little more fully on the issue, it would find that environmentalism is probably not one of them, and that the activists at Greenpeace and elsewhere want to save the developing world from exactly the mistakes that rampant ecologically damaging industrialisation has done to the long term interests of the American communities that this article invokes.

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