Just after nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, an environmental activist named Bill Kayong was shot.and killed while sitting in his pickup truck, waiting for a traffic light to change in the Malaysian city of Miri, on the island of Borneo. Kayong had been working with a group of villagers who were trying to reclaim land that the local government had transferred to a Malaysian palm-oil company. A few days after the murder, the police identified Stephen Lee Kiang, a director and major shareholder of the company, Tung HuatNiah Plantation, as a suspect in the crime, but Kiang flew to Australia before he could be questioned by authorities. ( Three other individuals were eventually charged in the case. ) Around the world, environmental and human-rights activists added Kayong’s death to the tally of violent incidents connected to the production of palm oil, which has quietly become one of the most indispensable substances on Earth.The World Wildlife Fund says that half of the items currently on American grocery-store shelves contain some form of palm oil. The move away from trans fats in processed foods as a particular boon for the industry—semi-solid at room temperature, palm oil emerged as an ideal swap-in for the partially hydrogenated oils formerly used to enhance the texture, flavor, and shelf life of products like cookies and crackers. Since 2002, when a report from the National Academy of Sciences found a link between trans fats and heart disease, palm-oil imports to the U. S. have risen four hundred and forty-six percent, and have topped a million metric tons in recent years.Eighty-five percent of the palm oil produced today comes from Indonesia or Malaysia. Rising palm-oil exports have helped both countries make enormous economic strides in the past few decades, but the growth has come at a cost: deforestation rates in both places have been listed among the highest in the world. The habitat destruction brought about by palm-oil production has helped push scores of the region’s species, including orangutans and Sumatran elephants, rhinos, and tigers, to the brink of extinction. And, mostly thanks to palm-oil production, Indonesia can boast some of the world’s highest levels of greenhouse-gas emissions.Yet it is violence—against local populations, farmers, and activists—that has human-rights groups closely watching the palm-oil industry. The reports are often sad echoes of one another. In 2012, a human-rights lawyer named Antonio Trejo Cabrera was ambushed by gunmen while walking out of a church in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Trejo had been representing local peasant organizations in a fight against the palm-oil company GrupoDinant, and had recently won a handful of cases forcing the company’s plantations to be turned over to local residents.In September of last year, a twenty-eight-year-old Guatemal an schoolteacher named Rigoberto Lima Choc was killed on the steps of a courthouse in the city of Sayaxche. Choc had led a group of activists that had filed a criminal complaint against the palm-oil company Reforestadora de Palmas del Peten, S.
A. , known as REPS A, based on evidence that REPS A’s overflowing effluent ponds had triggered a large fish kill along a sixty-five-mile stretch of the Pasion River. Choc was shot the day after the judge overseeing the case ordered the six-month closure of REPS
A. The company, at the time, issued a statement rejecting “any link of the company with the murder”. Then, in June, it instituted a new anti-violence and intimidation policy, which pledges to “ promote safe and secure communities in which we operate”.I recently spoke by phone with Baru Bian, a Malaysian politician who was a friend of Bill Kayong, the activist killed in June. Just a few weeks ago, Bian told me, yet another man was killed during a protest at an oil-palm plantation in the town of Mukah. Meanwhile, Kayong’s family is still waiting to see if any of the individual charged in Kayong’s murder will be convicted. “They are left without their husband and father, Bian told me, “Still waiting for justice to be done. ”