Outside the Amsterdam office of Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, there is a lone orang utan in a nest 11 metres off the ground with a red and white banner which reads “Give me a break” and looks strangely like a KitKat bar except the name has been replaced by the word “Killer”.
The orang utan is in fact a Greenpeace activist. The action is part of Greenpeace’s campaign against Nestlé’s continued use of palm oil produced by the Indonesian company Sinar Mas.
Greenpeace is not opposed to the production and use of palm oil – it can be found in two-thirds of all supermarket products – but Sinar Mas is known for systematically cutting down the rain forest to create palm oil plantations. It works this way rather than use existing farmland because it also makes money from the felled trees.
According to Greenpeace campaign leader Michiel van Geelen:
“By doing business with Sinar Mas, Nestlé is speeding up the extinction of the orang utan. Nestlé must really take action now and not keep putting off decisions. Consumers want to be sure that the rainforest is not being cut down for their KitKat bars.”
Last year the Anglo-Dutch food giant Unilever ended its contract with Sinar Mas. In mid-March Nestlé announced it was ending its direct contracts with Sinar Mas but that changed little: the majority of the Sinar Mas palm oil reaches Nestlé indirectly through distributors.
