Serbian Animals Voice (SAV)

This week, the German Minister of Economic Affairs, together with other European ministers, will decide on Europe’s bioenergy policy and thus on the eradication of orangutans!

A video * goes these days around the world: It shows an orangutan in Indonesia, on an almost cleared tree trunk in front of woodcutters and desperately trying to get past the shovel of an excavator, which stands in his way.

Animal rights activists have put the film sequence on the Internet to draw attention to the destruction of the habitats of the orangutans. Palm oil plantations are increasingly eating their way into the rainforest areas in Southeast Asia.

The local orangutans are killed or displaced during deforestation work. Surviving animals often wander helplessly around the clearings and starve to death.

If the destruction of the rainforest is not stopped immediately, many other animals, such as forest elephants, Sumatrans and Javan Rhino, are threatened with extinction in the wild next to orangutans.

A total of 7.7 million tons of palm oil was imported by EU countries in 2017, the highest amount ever. The cultivated areas for EU biofuel correspond with 8.8 million hectares of the size of Austria!!!.

Two thirds of them are outside the EU.

In Southeast Asia, palm oil plantations for EU biodiesel are expanding to 2.1 million hectares!

There, orangutans, tigers and rhinos lose their habitat. Elephants looking for food on the plantations even die of poisoning. In Borneo, the orangutan population has fallen by 100,000 animals within 16 years.

Since yesterday, hundreds of farmers in France are blocking installations belonging to the oil company Total. They are protesting against planned imports of palm oil, which they see as competing with domestic vegetable oils. At Marseille, Total is building a huge biofuel refinery, where the raw material is mainly tropical vegetable oil.

It is not too late yet: the EU is currently negotiating the future bioenergy policy.

In 2017, the European Parliament decided with an overwhelming majority to end the import of palm oil and the production of biofuel from rainbow clearing vegetable oils.

The European Commission was asked to ban the use of palm oil for biofuel by 2020 at the latest.

Already in January 2018, the European Parliament decided by a large majority that palm oil should be phased out as raw material for the production of biofuel and fuel in power plants in 2020.

But!…. Some EU countries – especially France, Italy and Spain – want to prevent this. Together with Indonesia, Malaysia and the palm oil Mafia-industry, they engage in intensive lobbying in Brussels.

This week the EU negotiations are entering the presumed final and decisive round.

We now have the opportunity to end the fatal biofuel admixture. The Commission, the Parliament and the Council of Ministers are actually negotiating bioenergy policy until 2030.

Please sign the petition: To: EU Commission, EU Parliament, EU Council of Ministers and the governments of the 28 member countries.

https://www.regenwald.org/petitionen/1111/gequaelt-und-getoetet-fuer-die-eu-energiepolitik?mtu=332691963&t=3701

The Federal Government should ensure that the EU eliminates palm oil from the EU Renewable Energy Directive.

Palm oil would then no longer be counted towards the legally prescribed blending targets, biofuel quota and subsidies.

Translation: Venus

* You can automatically see the video when you click on the petition

Filed under: GENERAL NEWS - International / National / Regional |