Canada- Canola meal could be headed for new research facility

A million tons of excess canola meal could find its way through the doors of a new, $12.6-million University of Saskatchewan research facility in North Battleford, The Star Phoenix reports. The new feed mill and research centre will help scientists lower the cost of raising livestock by increasing the nutrition of additives, such as low-grade canola, that are used in feed. The amount of low-grade canola available is increasing due to bio-fuel production, while international demand for high-quality feed remains high, especially in Asia, the project leader said. (6 May 2009)

Source: Kingsman Biodiesel News Summary (5/6/2009) - www.kingsman.com

Rainforest certified Lipton tea reaches U.S. - Reuters

By Marcy Nicholson

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rainforest Alliance-certified Lipton tea will reach American store shelves for the first time this month, as Unilever aims to put the sustainable logo on all of its tea, a company executive said on Wednesday.

"By 2010, I would expect that the vast majority of our European and United States volumes would be certified sustainable by Rainforest Alliance," Vindi Banga, president of Foods, Home and Personal Care for Unilever, told Reuters.

By 2015, Unilever aims to have all of its tea Rainforest Alliance certified.

Unilever, a European based Anglo-Dutch food and household products maker that owns such well-known brands as Lipton tea and Dove beauty care, accounts for about 12 percent of the world's tea, London-based Banga said while visiting New York.

"Today, virtually half of our Lipton and PG Tips volume is already certified as sustainable," Banga said.

The company began selling tea certified by Rainforest Alliance, a New York-based nongovernmental organization that requires multiple levels of sustainability, two years ago in Europe.

"The prices don't change for the consumer but we do pay a little bit more for the tea as sourced currently. We believe that this is how we should make all our products, they should all be sustainable," Banga said.

Rainforest Alliance certifies farms that meet specific criteria for worker welfare, farm management and environmental protection.

Two-thirds of Unilever's raw materials are agricultural crops and the company is committed to sustaining and improving soil and water health and farmer livelihoods, Banga said.

Unilever's next big project is to use only sustainably certified palm oil for its beauty products by 2015, Banga said.

The company buys about 4 percent of the world's palm oil, he said.

In November 2008, Unilever received its first shipment of palm oil certified by Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

"We are working on all our raw materials," Banga said.

Unilever buys about 7 percent of the world's tomatoes to make products like Ragu tomato sauce and is taking steps to ensure its tomato sources are completely sustainable through its own criteria, he said.

(Reporting by Marcy Nicholson; Editing by David Gregorio)

Can 'Sustainable' Palm Oil Slow Deforestation? - World Watch Institute

24/04/2009 (World Watch Institute) - Malaysia-based United Plantations marked the beginning of a new era for the controversial palm oil market last November with its first certified "sustainable" shipment.

The purchaser, Unilever, greeted the oil with a welcoming ceremony at the Dutch port of Rotterdam. A refinery in the United Kingdom received the palm oil a few days later, churned it into edible cooking oil, and shipped it to Sainsbury's, a leading UK grocery chain.

Oil palm plantations in Indonesia are also lining up for certification, hoping to demonstrate to buyers that ecologically rich tropical forests were not cleared to grow their crop. Industrial producer PT Musim Mas received the country's first certificate in February, and at least four other companies, such as Cargill-owned PT Hindoli, have followed.

More companies and governments, particularly in Europe, are requiring that the palm oil they source meet rigorous sustainability standards. Under a new European Union biofuel policy [PDF] finalized earlier this month, any palm oil biodiesel imported to the region must, over its full life cycle, demonstrate a 35-percent savings in greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuel diesel, and the feedstock cannot be grown in areas with high biodiversity value or a high stock of carbon.

These demands have led the main global certification body, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), to become a major player in the future of palm oil production.

Nearly 40 million tons of palm oil was produced in 2007, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Indonesia leads global production and is expected to supply more than half the palm oil that the world will demand in the coming years for cooking, cosmetics, and biofuel.

Despite the global recession, the country plans to establish about 1.4 million hectares of new oil palm plantations by 2010. This will likely require clearing additional large swaths of tropical forest, contributing to the loss of indigenous lands and further threatening the habitat of endangered species such as the orangutan.

It would also increase Indonesia's contribution to global climate change. The country already emits more greenhouse gases than any other nation besides China and the United States, due primarily to the clearing and burning of tropical forests.

Sustainability Criteria Remain Controversial
In response to these environmental and social concerns, conservation group WWF teamed up with the palm oil industry to launch the RSPO, a multi-stakeholder body, in 2004. One of the body's top mandates has been to define what "sustainable" palm oil production entails, and to develop a credible standard to reflect this. The standard was released in 2005.

To meet the new standard, growers and processors must apply eight principles, containing 39 specific criteria [PDF], to their operations. The principles include a commitment to transparency on environmental, social and legal issues; environmental responsibility with regard to waste, resource use, and climate; and responsible consideration for workers, individuals, and communities affected by palm oil production.

Producers are beginning to implement the RSPO criteria: as of last year, members included 72 firms worldwide, more than half of them from Indonesia. About 1.5 million tons of palm oil was certified last year.

Although relatively few companies have been certified, villagers and non-governmental organizations in Indonesia are already using the RSPO's criteria to demand better treatment for communities displaced by plantations, according to Norman Jiwan, a researcher with the Indonesian human rights group Sawit Watch. "By using the criteria, indigenous people in local communities can stop the companies' aggression on the ground," Jiwan said.

But the rules are not without loopholes.

New plantations are allowed to remove forest as long as the land is not deemed "high-value conservation forest." With RSPO members from the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific islands, the body has allowed each country to interpret "high value" based on its unique situation.

Instead, the RSPO plans in upcoming meetings to tighten its rules for how much greenhouse gas a new plantation may release. The maximum amount of gases released by new plantations would be based on the forest's original biomass. Areas with dense, old-growth trees or carbon-rich peat, would rank higher on the biomass standard than new growth forests.

"Defining a ‘high value conservation forest' is a vague process. It's subject to opinion," said Tim Killeen, who represents the environmental group Conservation International on the RSPO. "But a biomass standard is not going to be subject to interpretation."

The RSPO criteria also state that oil palm trees planted before 2005 are exempted. On average, the oil palm requires about seven years to bear fruit, so the "high value conservation forest" requirements do not pertain to the recent palm oil shipments that received RSPO certification.

The environmental groups Greenpeace International and Wetlands International argue that such loopholes allows palm oil firms to join RSPO and improve their image despite the fact that very little palm oil has yet been produced according to the sustainability criteria.

The Jakarta-based Center for Orangutan Protection has directly opposed the certification scheme. The group said last year that it found two RSPO member companies clear-cutting forests that were home to orangutans, sun bears, and Borneo gibbons. "It has been six years after RSPO was put into operation but forests are still cleared and orangutans are continually killed," said Novi Hardianto, the Center's habitat program coordinator, in a press release. "All criteria on sustainable palm oil and certification process are merely public lies."

For Killeen, the potential for oil palm to become an environmentally sustainable, high-income crop is too great to ignore. If the RSPO can address its shortcomings, the certification system can become a key tool in reducing deforestation across Indonesia, he said.

But without a larger share of the market demanding sustainable palm oil, any progress made by the RSPO may not halt the damaging effects of expanded oil palm production.

"The RSPO controls the market exporting to Europe, basically. China doesn't care. India doesn't care. Domestic consumption in Vietnam, Korea, they don't care," Killeen said. "Don't expect the RSPO to stop the problems."

Beyond Certification
In order for Indonesia to continue developing its lucrative oil palm industry without devastating tropical ecosystems, the industry will need to increase yields on land that has already been cleared, according to Michael Shean, a global crop analyst with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

On average, plantations yield about four tons of oil per hectare, but some producers, often larger commercial estates, have managed yields as great as 10 tons per hectare, Shean said.

"There need not be such a drive to open new acreage at the expense of tropical forests if the average Indonesian producer - that means both commercial and smallholders - were to actually invest a greater amount of capital in yield improvements," Shean said.

Without regulations that place strict limits on expanding plantations, however, producers do not have enough incentive to invest in boosting their yields, Shean said.

Proponents of international carbon offset programs view the successor climate change treaty to the Kyoto Protocol as an opportunity to finance yield improvements.

Negotiators will decide at December's U.N. summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, whether to include a policy that pays landowners to keep forests intact. Although specifics of the approach, known as "reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation," or REDD, remain undefined, Indonesia has applied for funds from both the U.N. and the World Bank for pilot projects that could pay oil palm plantations to avoid clearing dense forests.

The Nature Conservancy, one of several conservation groups exploring the use of REDD, predicts that an international carbon price of roughly $6 per ton would make conserving Indonesia's forests economically competitive with oil palm development.

"The strategy is to direct oil palm to areas already degraded," said Greg Fishbein, director of the group's conservation finance division. "The benefit of REDD is that you show up with a bunch of money."

A study in the journal Conservation Letters last month estimated that if REDD is included in a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions, payments for "avoided deforestation" could range between $1,500 and $11,800 per hectare, depending on when the carbon credits are allocated and sold. In comparison, the oil palm market was estimated to generate a net present value between $3,800 and $9,600 per hectare over a 30-year period.

The carbon market offers the potential to expand RSPO criteria to a larger share of oil palm plantations. But the success of the REDD approach depends on how the funding, which is expected to be significant, would be allocated.

"If REDD is spent providing for jobs in old, deforested landscapes, it might be effective," Killeen said. "If REDD is spent by NGOs or consultants or governments on silly things that are not investments in productivity [and] not investments in people, [then] people will still cut down the forest."

SUMMARY OF THE MALAYSIAN OIL PALM INDUSTRY 2009

SUMMARY OF THE MALAYSIAN OIL PALM INDUSTRY 2009

	Dec 08	Jan 09	Feb (r)	Mar (p)	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
PRODUCTION (TONNES)
Crude Palm Oil	1,482,769	1,330,195	1,187,381	1,275,736
Palm Kernel	385,802	353,352	318,601	345,477
Palm Kernel Oil	198,789	165,300	160,284	161,305
Palm Kernel Cake	217,977	183,050	176,073	178,153
CLOSING STOCK (TONNES)
Palm Oil	1,994,710	1,832,847	1,565,532	1,363,657
Palm Kernel	142,098	138,903	114,566	108,843
Palm Kernel Oil	349,171	357,555	334,211	309,624
Palm Kernel Cake	302,278	252,479	223,633	210,747
EXPORT (TONNES)
Palm Oil	1,614,720	1,353,726	1,257,482	1,260,380
Palm Kernel Oil	121,875	88,417	94,430	105,069
Palm Kernel Cake	239,327	230,694	203,075	180,029
Oleochemical	143,455	162,660	174,743	165,364
Biodiesel	20,186	12,732	16,330	19,888
IMPORT (TONNES)
Crude Palm Oil	77,589	27,397	18,840	3,671
Processed Palm Oil	694	2,467	8,584	12,022
Palm Oil	78,282	29,863	27,423	15,693
PRICE (1% OER) (Local Ex-Mill)
Fresh Fruit Bunches (1% Equivalent)	14.83	17.90	18.58	19.97

The Palm Oil Crisis

Supply and demand pressures are driving the production of palm oil up to an all-time high. Found in cookies, crackers, shampoo, skin care and beauty products, pet food, and many other products, palm oil is now the second most widely produced edible oil. It is also found in a wide array of products sold in natural food stores. And it is being investigated as a possible fuel alternative.

The increased demand for palm oil, which is obtained from the fruit of the oil palm tree and can be grown only in tropical environments, is fueling destruction of the rainforest habitat of Sumatran and Bornean orangutans, pushing those endangered species even closer to extinction. Estimates show that if something isn't done soon to stop the spread of palm oil plantations into the forests that harbor these orangutans, they will be extinct in ten years.

Understand how palm oil farming affects indigenous people

The increase in demand for palm oil has far-reaching implications for the indigenous people of Borneo and Sumatra.

• Millions of people rely on the palm oil industry for their livelihoods. A boycott of palm oil to preserve orangutan habitat could be devastating for these people. (That is one reason Cheyenne Mountain Zoo does not support a boycott of all palm oil.)
• The land for new plantations is often forcibly taken from the indigenous people who traditionally owned the land, resulting in violent conflicts.
• Local people can and should be trained in environmentally sustainable agriculture (including palm oil and other food sources) and other sustainable trades, crafts and professions.

Whats Being Done - Get to know the RSPO and the certified sustainable palm oil process.

The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a multi-stakeholder group with many members from businesses, social organizations and government institutions, was formed to combat the effects of increased palm oil production.

In November 2007, the RSPO launched a certification system, establishing a definition and criteria for certified sustainable palm oil (SPO). The RSPO projects that evidence of certified SPO on the market could be seen as early as the first quarter of 2008.

This is encouraging news, and we ask you to work with us in this critical conservation effort.

What Can You Do?

If you are concerned about the effects of increased palm oil production on orangutan habitat, we encourage you to:

1. Educate yourself and everyone you know about the palm oil crisis. (An education handout pdf)
2. Read product labels to become familiar with companies that use palm oil in their products.
3. Write to these companies about the importance of obtaining palm oil from certified sources. Encourage them to participate in the RSPO's certification process. (See Speak Out for letter suggestions.)
4. Write to your favorite supermarkets to educate them on the importance of carrying products that contain only certified sustainable palm oil (when it becomes available).
   

Source: http://www.cmzoo.org/conservation/palmOilCrisis/

Malaysia and Oil Palm

Oil Palm Tree

The single crop can literally lift a developing country out of poverty all by itself. The most famous example of this is of course Malaysia, the world's largest palm oil producer. In the early years after independence from Britain, the country was still very much an underdeveloped, poor nation, with per capita incomes of less than US$ 400 per year (in 2005 dollar terms).

But today, Malaysia has become one of the strongest Asian economies, with continuous growth and a current per capita GDP of over US$ 11,000. GDP incomes grew 31% in the sixties, and an amazing 358% in the seventies led primarily by export-oriented industries. Palm oil contributed in the sense that the crop became the centre-piece of agricultural reforms included in the so-called Second Malaysia Plan (1971-1975), which turned the country into an export-driven economy. Palm oil production was increased massively as the result of the vast program. Today in Malaysia, palm oil brings export earnings worth US$ 6.2 billion, only trailing crude oil exports. But compared to crude oil, palm plantations create considerably more jobs, currently employing around 14% of the countries entire workforce. Around half of all palm oil is still produced by smallholders, that is, by individual farming families. In short, the Malaysian economy and society as a whole benefits immensely from the African palm.

Given these numbers, it is not difficult to understand why many developing countries are looking into replicating Malaysia's success story. With Peak Oil around the corner, and continuously rising energy prices, the temptation to massively use one's land to cultivate the energy crop is strong.

Source: The Guardian - 28/04/2009