The biofuel connection – transnational activism and the palm oil boom

Abstract

The 10 percent mandatory target for ‘renewable energy’ adopted by the European Parliament in December 2008 is fuelling a frenzy of investment in palm oil across Southeast Asia, leading in turn to the emergence of new, transnational campaign alliances. The specific dynamics of alliance building, political strategies and impacts of palm oil activism are shaped by the key role of the Indonesian environmental and agrarian justice movement, the broadening and radicalisation of groups in Europe and the ways in which these are interconnected by transnational activists. Campaigning has been successful in creating a transnational political debate around palm oil and biofuels and in influencing public opinion in Europe. Peasant activists have played an important role by combining issues of biodiversity and climate change with food sovereignty and by embedding the critique of biofuels within the global movement for climate justice. However, discontented palm oil smallholders and plantation workers are conspicuously absent at the transnational level. Building alliances between agrarian movements and plantation workers could strengthen the movement against biofuels by tapping into the potential offered by the transnational social and economic spaces which characterise the palm oil industry.