18/03/2013 (fnbnews.com) - World Growth, a pro-development NGO, recently released a report titled Costs and Challenges of Small Farmer Certification, which shows how a campaign to dictate how palm oil should be produced will harm both small farmers in Southeast Asia who produce 40 per cent of the world’s palm oil and low-income consumers in India who constitute one of the world’s biggest markets for palm oil.

The campaign, called Transforming Markets, is being run by the Western-based environmental NGO - the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) and is a part of a bigger strategy to capture global supply chains in critical food products whereby multinational processors and retailers in major western markets will dictate production standards and farming methods to producers in southern economies.

The World Growth report shows the Worldwide Fund for Nature campaign will reduce the competitiveness of small producers and increase the cost of palm oil to low-income consumers. Indian consumers, in particular, will be adversely affected by WWF’s campaign. Palm oil is a key cooking ingredient found in most Indian homes. The WWF campaign would raise the costs of palm oil.

According to the World Bank, one out of three people in India still live below the poverty line, while World Food Programme (WFP) statistics show that India is home to about a quarter of the world's hungry. Indian households need affordable food staples, not products that meet WWF’s expensive environmental standards or certification systems that cater to Western consumer values.