Two US universities launched an unprovoked attack on the palm oil industry in September, peddling erroneous mortality statistics attributed to the haze event of 2015 in parts of Southeast Asia.
Since then, Greenpeace has used these figures to spread misplaced health-related fears, including at the European Palm Oil Conference in Warsaw, Poland, from Oct 5-6.
The study, a collaboration between Harvard and Columbia universities, attempted to quantify the number of deaths from the 2015 haze event. It claimed that 91,600 premature deaths in Indonesia, 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore were linked to this.
Immediately rejecting the claim, Malaysia’s Deputy Director-General of Health, Datuk Dr S Jeyaindran, said: “No such thing! We had no deaths last year directly related to the haze.”
The results were similarly rebuffed by the governments of Indonesia and Singapore.
Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency said the research “could be baseless or they have the wrong information”. Singapore’s Ministry of Health said the study was “not reflective of the actual situation”.
Let’s establish this from the start: there is zero doubt that haze events have an impact on public health. That is clear and inarguable. And there is zero doubt that, if the level of haze is reduced, there will be a reduction in these health impacts.
However, advancing good management of land-clearing fires or public health was not on the mind of the researchers. Rather, their goal was to advance an agenda that appeases their rich New York City donor class, at the expense of 300,000 hard-working Malaysian small farmers, among others in the oil palm industry. This must count as western greed and alarmism at its worst.
