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Massive local and international protest has stopped a Malaysian company’s plan to grow oil palms on nearly all of a pristine Papua-New Guinean island.
The PNG agriculture minister, John Hickey, who first approved the plan has now confirmed that it’s been dropped. The palm oil was to be exported for agrofuel production.

The Malaysian Vitroplant Ltd. had intended to clear away 60,000 hectares of rain forest on the island of Woodlark, which lies about 280 kilometres from Papua New Guinea and has a total area of about 85,000 hectares.

The 6,000 islanders would have lost their culture, their hunting grounds and their lands for growing food. The palm plantation would have destroyed almost all the still intact flatland rain forest of the island and with it a breathtaking biodiversity. Marine life along the island’s coasts would also have been destroyed by wastes produced by the palm oil project.

Almost without exception the islanders resisted the plan, backed by pressure from environmental activists around the globe. Almost 8,500 people sent protest letters just through the Germany-based “Rettet den Regenwald” (Save the Rain Forest) website ( http://www.regenwald.org).

Rettet den Regenwald has started another protest campaign asking for letters to demand that the European Union give up its plan to mandate 10% agrofuels in transportation by 2020.

Even the EU’s Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, conceded in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation on 14 January 2008: "We have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were. So we have to move very carefully."

A draft internal report gives the EU Commission a scathing assessment of the European agrofuel plans and warns of devastating ecological and social problems resulting from them.

On 23 January 2008 the Commission intends to present a climate and energy package of which the agrofuel quota is a core element.

For more on the devastation caused by palm oil see http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/protest-against-palmoil-german-cand....