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December 2011
Greenpeace’s PKE rant ‘an insult to intelligence’ By Hugh de lacy Greenpeace is insulting its own intelligence by its latest attacks on the New Zealand dairy industry for using palm kernel expeller (PKE), the waste product from palm oil processing, to feed cows, according to Ashburton dairy farmer and Federated Farmers dairy spokesperson Willie Leferink. In its latest on attack on New Zealand’s annual importation of around 1.4 million tonnes of PKE from Malaysia and Indonesia, Greenpeace alleges the stock feed’s carbon footprint should be expanded by up to 8.9 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year, the equivalent of 12% of this country’s total emissions. The attack is based on a study Greenpeace commissioned from France-based British scientist Rob Carlton to highlight the environmentalist group’s claims — that indigenous forests are being cleared to make way for palm oil production. Leferink told Canterbury Farming he can’t see where Greenpeace is coming from. “We’re turning something that has a negative footprint into something that is a high-nutrient food for human beings. “The carbon footprint might be a little bit enhanced by transporting [PKE] to
New Zealand, but palm oil is not produced from plant kernel expeller — it’s just the leftovers,” Leferink said. Federated Farmers has taken up the cudgels to defend giant New Zealand giant dairy co-operative Fonterra, the prime target of the Greenpeace attacks, whose members pay around $400/tonne for PKE, the material left over in the press when the palm oil has been extracted. The oil itself represents 98.8% of the value of palm oil production, with the byproducts — including the waste product PKE — accounting for just 1.2%. Expeller is worth only a few dollars a tonne to palm oil producers, and without the PKE export trade to the likes of New Zealand it would be left to rot or burned to produce electricity for local industry and consumers. Federated Farmers stresses that PKE is a waste product rather than a by-product. Landed in New Zealand with the exporters’ mark-up, it’s worth about $220/tonne, to which the cost of transport, screening, storage and biosecurity clearance have to be added before it gets to be used as a high-protein stockfeed. Leferink said he doubted PKE was even included in the palm
oil producers’ calculations of their own carbon footprint. “Those operators don’t even consider the fate of the waste product,” he said. “What we pay for it here is a different price from what they get for it there. “It’s worth a lot less over there than it is there because of the increased transport and the margin on it. “I’m not unsympathetic to all [Greenpeace’s] ideas, but with this one I think they betray their intelligence. “If they really want to do something [useful] they should help stop the human population from growing.” Leferink said Greenpeace’s campaign against PKE is a regular summer one that “you can almost set your watch by. “You are left with the impression Greenpeace’s questioning of our carbon footprint has an anti-trade dimension to it,” and the Carlton report “could be seen as economic vandalism. “If Greenpeace is truly about the environment, why aren’t they protesting against oil-based carpets?” Federated Farmers figures show that on a tonnage basis, PKE represents as much as 11% of the palm kernel industry, but by value it is only 1%.
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A federation spokesperson told Canterbury Farming that little if any of the land being turned over to palm kernel production in Malaysia is indigenous forest: most of it is land whose use has been changed from rubber plantations. Indonesian PKE represents some elements of deforestation, but by no means all, the spokesperson said. The federation has also pointed out that the David Caygill report on the country’s Emissions Trading Sheme (ETS) earlier this year revealed that New Zealand agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions per unit of production have been falling by 1.3% a year since 1990, or by nearly 30% since the trigger date of the Kyoto Protocol. “That’s an environmental positive, I would have thought,” Lefrink said. Greenpeace was undermining
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its own credibility by making “such a fuss” over a waste product from one industry being used in another’s high quality food production, especially given recent United Nations projections of population growth and the challenge of feeding current and future generations. “Can you honestly say in a world of food scarcity the recycling of PKE as an animal feed is the number one environmental issue, especially if the high value product Greenpeace claims it to be is either left to rot on the ground or burnt as fuel?” Leferink said. Fonterra has largely ignored the latest Greenpeace attack, other than to say it has commissioned an update of the carbon footprint calculations it released two years ago following work by AgResearch and Scion in New Zealand, and the University of New South Wales in Australia.