10/10/2009 (The Nation (Thailand)) - With the UN's deadline looming, diplomats have made almost no progress towards a new global emissions agreement. With deep divisions between the EU and the Americans, experts in negotiations, now predict no new treaty will be inked at Copenhagen.

Even if governments were willing to hike energy costs to reduce greenhouse gases in the midst of an economic crisis, they could not do so between now and November with the current 200-page, incredibly caveated, draft treaty text. Most of the positions are just opening gambits and seriously impractical.

Yet instead of focusing efforts to advance agreement, environmental NGOs are fashioning strategies to curb activities to which they object. Palm Oil has become a prime target.

The result is that a handful of Western companies, environmental groups, and policy-makers are spreading the message there's something wrong with palm oil. Lush cosmetics in the UK and Cadbury chocolate in New Zealand have made a show of pulling it from their products. The European Union has now erected a trade barrier against its imports. And activist organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have blamed the crop for everything from deforestation to greenhouse gases.

While all these campaigns offer salacious headlines, they provide little in the way of facts.

Palm oil, for instance, does not cause deforestation. In fact just last week, CNN personality Becky Anderson asked Wangan Maathai - the world's first female African Nobel Prize winner and originator of the Green Belt movement in Kenya - for the best way to stop deforestation. Her answer? "Reduce poverty".

Maathai's insight offers the public a refreshing, alternative view to the anti-palm oil propaganda pushed by some in the environmental movement. Moreover, unlike Greenpeace's unfounded campaign, her proposal is based in fact. She was not only reflecting her own experience in Kenya, but offering the assessment of the world's leading forestry analysts at the Food and Agricultural Organisation in Rome.

The FAO have reported year after year that the leading cause of deforestation is the pressure for land from the poor, homeless, and the hungry in developing countries. Forest land is cleared in Africa to get fuelwood, in Asia to farm crops, and in both to create space for shelter and homes.

Dig deeper and the facts about palm oil tell quite a different story. First of all, it's a major food staple. The vegetable oil it produces is a vital, basic ingredient for people in the developing world. The key market is not Western producers of luxury goods like cosmetics and chocolate, it's for cooking by hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa.

Moreover, it's a wondrously sustainable product. One hectare of palm oil produces more oil than a hectare of soybean or rapeseed, and it uses less inputs, such as fertilizer. It is also significantly cheaper and healthier than most alternatives. (There are no trans fats in palm oil.)

And the crop's "green" credentials are impressive too. Properly run, palm oil plantations are more effective absorbers of carbon dioxide than natural forest. Many land owners in Brazil and Malaysia are planting it on degraded forest land and making a significant, positive reduction in emissions.

But the public hasn't heard these accolades. Instead, the coverage of palm oil has been monopolised by hyped PR campaigns from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth alleging that that this sustainable crop is endangering the Orang-utan. That too is simply not the truth.

The hunger for land in Sumatra - where the population is growing faster than in the rest of Indonesia - is what is reducing the forest habitat for Organgutan there. Yes, action needs to taken to ensure the survival of the species. But the solution is not to stop conversion of forest lands to other uses; it is to develop conservation strategies, of which there are several in both Sumatra and Borneo.

Despite these facts, Green NGOs continue to push their zero-sum "no more deforestation" strategy for the new global climate change treaty. And that means no more expansion of economically and environmentally beneficial palm oil plantations in the developing world.

Their campaign glosses over a simple truth: the most effective thing developing countries can do to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases is to mitigate poverty by expanding sustainable industries including commercial forestry and plantation crops like palm oil. Even the UN's own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2007 that expanding carbon sinks by expanding sustainable forestry was the cheapest and most effective way to reduce greenhouse gases.

Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have yet to accept these realities. And since these groups are largely responsible for lack of recognition in the Kyoto Protocol of the role plantations and commercial forestry can play in reducing emissions, their refusal potentially comes at a high cost for millions living in poverty.

The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have at various times observed that palm oil has been a very effective industry for reducing poverty, in part because small holders are able to produce it. In the largest producers, Indonesia and Malaysia, around 40 per cent of all production is by small holders. The Malaysian government has used palm oil to provide land to landless people and made a very poor sector of society prosperous.

Demand for this sustainable oil is rising in the developing world and the opportunity to expand production in Africa and Latin America is also an opportunity to reduce the poverty identified by Wangan Maathai as the leading cause of deforestation. Some forest land may need to be converted for this purpose. There is plenty available. Most countries have already set aside more than the 10 per cent specified under the Convention of Biodiversity as required to protect forest biodiversity.

So what is this impact of these side-plays on prospects for Copenhagen? They are diminished. Environmental NGOs groups have wholly disregarded the working principle which underpins the climate change negotiations in the UN. Actions to tackle climate change should not impede actions to raise living standards. Until that is respected, little progress will be made.

The environmental NGOs deserve censure for seeking to overturn the UN consensus. But the larger question they need to answer is "how is their approach morally defensible?"