Completed campaign Malaysian Oil Palm Threatens Brazilian Amazon

Malaysia's government owned and subsidized oil palm and agrofuel industry -- the scourge of Asia and the world's rainforests -- is continuing to expand, this time into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. Malaysia‘s Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) will soon break ground on a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to establish 30,000-100,000 hectares (ha; 75,000 – 250,000 acres) of oil palm plantations in the heart of Brazil's Amazon rainforest.

THIS STILL CURRENT ALERT HAS BEEN UPDATED Malaysia's government owned and subsidized oil palm and agrofuel industry -- the scourge of Asia and the world's rainforests -- is continuing to expand, this time into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. Malaysia‘s Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) will soon break ground on a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to establish 30,000-100,000 hectares (ha; 75,000 – 250,000 acres) of oil palm plantations in the heart of Brazil's Amazon rainforest. Similar oil palm development continues to devastate Asia-Pacific's rainforests, and increasingly the world, with some thirty square miles of carbon and biodiversity rich habitat being cleared a day to provide palm oil for the global food and chemical industry as well as agrodiesel for transport. Oil palm agrofuel is heralded as a climate change mitigation measure, yet the rainforest clearance leads to much more carbon release than its production and use avoids. Oil palm hastens regional and global ecosystem collapse. Should oil palm production — in toxic, biologically impoverished monoculture tree plantations — become widely established in the Brazilian Amazon (almost certainly, eventually to fuel cars in the United States) it would be a global ecological tragedy for biodiversity and climate, and a crime against local peoples and humanity. Oil palm plantations will endanger the Amazon's flora and fauna, cause environmental upheaval, and result in drastic cultural change. The initial logging will cause many rare species to go extinct, and toxic waste and runoff will threaten freshwater and marine ecosystems. Malaysian tax dollars, along with subsidies from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, are to be used to colonize Earth's largest rainforest, on the other side of the world. FELDA is a Malaysian government agency that is accountable to the Prime Minister's Department. Recently Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak (then Deputy) said Felda Global Ventures Brazil Sdn Bhd would invest some RM25mil (US$7.12mil) for a 70% stake in the project near the Amazon River in Brazil, planting between 3,000 ha and 5,000 ha every year. It is estimated that 2.3 million square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon are suitable for growing oil palm. FELDA also has some 105,000 ha of oil palm plantation ventures at the expense of primary rainforests in Papua New Guinea and at least 45,000 ha in Indonesia. Large scale biofuel production runs counter to urgently addressing climate change and threatens to cause more deforestation, hunger, human rights abuses, and degradation of soil and water. Global ecological sustainability and local well-being depend critically upon ending all industrial development in the world's remaining old forests -- including plantations, logging, mining and dams. The amount of primary and old growth forests that have been lost has already overshot the carrying capacity of Earth. Globally there are not enough old forests to maintain climatic and hydrological cycles, meet local forest dwellers' needs, and to maintain ecosystems and the biosphere in total. Local peoples must be assisted to fully protect, restore and benefit from intact, standing forests.