Clare Rewcastle Brown supports anti-palm oil campaign
(FMT) – Clare Rewcastle-Brown, who has written extensively about deforestation in Sarawak, has seemingly endorsed a now banned anti-palm oil commercial, which has since drawn Putrajaya’s ire and that of the industry.
The editor of the Sarawak Report, a whistleblowing site, said the advertisement by Iceland — a supermarket chain based in Wales — helps highlight deforestation, one of the many impacts of the palm oil industry.
Speaking to the Evening Standard, Rewcastle-Brown — who was born in Sarawak — said the advertisement plugs into grassroots shoppers and projects a message that consumers have a choice over what to purchase.
“And the publicity’s great. I’ve been banging on about this for 10 years but I had to damn well get a story that overthrew a government before I could get anywhere,” she was quoted as saying by the daily, possibly alluding to the 1MDB saga which she had also chronicled.
She says the plight of the orangutan is emblematic of wider devastation in the region.
Rewcastle-Brown also told the Evening Standard that she met tribal people whose lands had been taken away “by brute force in many cases, by the big logging gangs going in and raping the women and daughters of these native communities”.
She went on to recall oil palm plantations where “tractors were lined up in a row to bring the jungle down as quickly as possible”.
Earlier today, AFP reported that the Christmas ad, featuring a cartoon orangutan telling a little girl that its jungle home had been destroyed, racked up millions of views on social media and sparked the trending hashtag #NoPalmOilChristmas on Twitter.
Primary Industries Minister Teresa Kok labelled the advertisement as “biased political propaganda” and welcomed the decision by Clearcast, the United Kingdom’s body for approving advertising material for broadcast, to ban the commercial.
She also pointed out that Malaysian oil palm plantations are developed on agricultural land and not permanent forest reserves. The country’s efforts in protecting its wildlife have also been internationally recognised.
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, meanwhile, slammed the advertisement as a cheap publicity stunt.
