COMMENT | Malaysia’s palm oil persecution complex

COMMENT | The Malaysian palm oil industry wants you to know that it has a problem - and that it’s all someone else’s fault.

That’s the distillation of the country’s palm oil industry messaging in recent months following a slew of highly damaging revelations about human rights abuses on palm oil plantations. The industry complains that it is victim of an amorphous “no palm oil movement” that has fostered unfair public perceptions about the industry’s environmental and human rights impact that has created “a whole generation of citizens who believe palm oil is really bad.”

Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin last month lent some official weight to the palm industry’s persecution complex by bemoaning what he described as a “baseless” anti-palm oil campaign “that does not reflect the sustainability of the world palm oil industry.” It’s a victim narrative that depicts a Malaysian palm oil sector under unprovoked and unjustified attack from a combination of protectionist governments and non-governmental organisations in “the West” with a shared goal of “crippling the palm oil sector.”

What Muhyiddin and Malaysia’s palm oil sector elide in this shared narrative is the undeniable series of high-profile revelations of well-documented human rights abuses in the sector over the past seven months. Those revelations began with the Associated Press (AP) September 2020 exposé alleging major human rights abuses on...