Something has changed over the last 8 weeks. It appears our protest by 3,082 people from 78 countries, in which 101,611 protest emails were sent, seems to have deeply embarrassed the Malaysian government. Immediately after our alert launched, references to plans by Malaysia‘s federal land agency to establish up to 100,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the heart of Brazil's Amazon rainforest were systematically removed from FELDA's Internet servers. And Streamyx, the monopoly Internet service provider in Malaysia, stopped delivering emails referring to Malaysia's global rainforest for oil palm land grab.

Subsequently it has become known that Sime Darby, a Malaysian palm oil producer, plans to invest $800 million for 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of palm oil and rubber plantations in Liberia. FELDA already has large holdings at the expense of rainforests in Papua New Guinea, and oil palm biodiesel plant investments in the U.S. Please send/resend the updated protest email, asking for confirmation that FELDA will no longer consider developing oil palm in the Amazon or Papua New Guinea rainforests, and will stop private Malaysian industry from doing so as well.

TAKE ACTION NOW:
http://www.climateark.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=amazon_oil_palm

ORIGINAL ALERT:

Malaysia‘s Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) will soon break ground on a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to establish 30,000-100,000 hectares (ha; 75,000 – 250,000 acres of oil palm plantations in the heart of Brazil's Amazon rainforest. Similar oil palm development continues to devastate Asia-Pacific's rainforests, and increasingly the world, with some thirty square miles of carbon and biodiversity rich habitat being cleared a day to provide cooking oil and transport biodiesel. Oil palm agrofuel is heralded as a climate change mitigation measure, yet the initial rainforest clearance leads to much more carbon release than its production and use avoids.

Large scale biofuel production runs counter to urgently addressing climate change and threatens to cause more deforestation, hunger, human rights abuses, and degradation of soil and water. Global ecological sustainability and local well-being depend critically upon ending all industrial development in the world's remaining old forests -- including plantations, logging, mining and dams. The amount of primary and old growth forests that have been lost has already overshot the carrying capacity of Earth. Globally there are not enough old forests to maintain climatic and hydrological cycles, meet local forest dwellers' needs, and to maintain ecosystems and the biosphere in total. Local peoples must be assisted to fully protect, restore and benefit from intact, standing forests.

TAKE ACTION NOW:
http://www.climateark.org/shared/alerts/send.aspx?id=amazon_oil_palm