Palm Oil Monitor co-host and esteemed agronomist in the Palm Oil field, Pierre Bois d’Enghien, writes in Contrepoints that it is “more and more obvious that European Union officials and Members of the European Parliament, in particular, are content to blindly follow NGOs, obsessed with their fight against palm oil, demonstrating their total lack of technical knowledge.”
Pierre Bois d’Enghien continues: “Oil palm cultivation has the least impact on land use ( it requires 10 times less land area than soybean for equal production); it sequesters the most carbon (1.6 ton of C / ha / year) of any oilseed; it hosts the most animal and plant biodiversity; and oil palm uses the least amount of fertilizers and phytosanitary products: 0.4 kg of pesticides per ha / year compared to 5.8 on a soybean crop, which corresponds to 100 times less pesticides applied for the same amount of vegetable oil produced.”
Yet, according to the European Commission, Pierre Bois d’Enghien writes, “palm oil is ‘higher-risk’ (as the EU’s RED Directive now states) than other, similar, oilseeds…” a situation which is “factually and scientifically incorrect. Actually, it is absurd. European crops such as rapeseed and sunflower are low-risk, despite lagging far behind palm on all of the aforementioned data points.”
As the EU embarks on new measures against palm oil (Renewable Energy Directive Delegated Act revision, Forests Reports, CVD), Pierre Bois d’Enghien invites the EU to take into account the progress made by palm oil producing countries, such as Indonesia, in the areas of biodiversity protection and conservation, and consider whether new EU policies will have unintended consequences for the planet and the EU’s 2030 climate agenda.
You will find original French version here
And the opinion editorial in English here