The Genocide of Palm Oil
By 
Lest you think what is going on in the United States is the only thing that matters, let’s remember that American companies and the products we buy from other companies were causing pure hell for people around the world long before Donald Trump moved into politics. Let’s take a look at Indonesia here, where the endless demand for palm oil from food corporations means widespread displacement from land for indigenous people and ecocide as whole ecosystems are turned into monocultures.
West Papua’s Indigenous people have called for a boycott of KitKat, Smarties and Aero chocolate, Oreo biscuits and Ritz crackers, and the cosmetics brands Pantene and Herbal Essences, over alleged ecocide in their territory.
All are products that contain palm oil and are made, say the campaigners, by companies that source the ingredient directly from West Papua, which has been under Indonesian control since 1963 and where thousands of acres of rainforest are being cleared for agriculture.
More than 90 West Papuan tribes, political organisations and religious groups have endorsed the call for a boycott, which they say should continue until the people of West Papua are given the right to self-determination.
aki Ap, a spokesperson for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua, which is overseeing the call, said: “These products are linked to human rights violations, in the first place, because West Papuans are being forced, with violence, to get off the land where they’ve lived for thousands of years, which has now resulted in ecocide.
“This is a signal to the countries who are dealing with Indonesia, especially those in the Pacific region, to take notice of who they’re dealing with and how they are basically allowing Indonesia to continue the colonial project in West Papua, the human rights violations, and also ecocide.”
West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, home to the world’s third-largest rainforest. It is rich in natural resources, including the world’s largest gold and copper mine as well as extensive reserves of natural gas, minerals and timber.
It was part of the Dutch East Indies for a couple of centuries, but in 1963, in controversial circumstances, the territory was handed over to Indonesian control. As a result, say the campaigners, West Papua’s Indigenous Melanesians have not benefited from this wealth. They have been under occupation by Indonesia since 1963, facing repression the ULMWP describes as a “hidden genocide”.
This is targeting the always vile Nestlé, which is not an American corporation, but that hardly matters in a globalized world. Of course these companies will say they are buying this on the open market, as if capitalism itself wasn’t a key part of how a genocide like this works.
In any case, it would be useful for us to remember that the problems with America go so, so, so much farther than Donald Trump and maybe if we tried to deal with some of these larger issues when we can, we could solve some of these more systematic problems. It’s not as if we don’t already have laws on the books regulating the conditions of production for some products entering the United States. The issue here is more than we don’t care what happens so long as we can get our Kit-Kats without thinking about it.