Thursday 28 Mar 2024
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KUALA LUMPUR (Nov 16): Primary Industries Minister Teresa Kok has lauded the decision by a British regulator to disallow a local retail chain’s anti-palm oil Christmas television advertisement. 

In a statement today, Kok described frozen food retailer Island Food’s campaign as an “unfair, biased political propaganda”. 

She said the government will not be cowed by Island Food’s video campaign which, according to her, was a blatant attempt to safeguard its products at the expense of the palm oil industry in Asia. 

“We have reviewed the content of the video and the Good Morning Britain interview with Iceland’s managing director, and found the Iceland supermarket campaign to be not only a political propaganda, but one that shows the ethos of greed has taken over the Iceland management. 

“We will not be cowed or stand by idly, when advertisements such as the nasty one created by Iceland is allowed to wrongly influence the minds of the people in markets that are crucial to us. 

“We will fight back, and fight back we will, with facts from scientifically-researched data,” Kok said. 

She said her ministry welcomes the decision by Clearcast to ban the video for Iceland’s Christmas shopping promotion campaign and hopes there will be no reversal of the decision, despite pressure from certain quarters. 

Clearcast is the UK body for approving advertising material on British commercial television networks.

“The anti-palm oil campaign is unfair and misleading, with disputable and unproven claims. It is our belief that anti-palm oil campaigns like these, including by non-government organisations, are aimed at crippling our oil palm industry by using biased and unfounded information which ultimately leads to such unfair labelling practice,” Kok said.

She reiterates Malaysian palm oil plantations are developed on agriculture land, and not permanent forest reserve, and that more than 50% of the country’s land area is forest covered.

The country’s efforts in wildlife conservation is also internationally recognised through the Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre in Sabah and Semenggoh Wildlife Centre in Sarawak for Orangutans, she said.

In a 90-second animation produced for its Christmas television advertisement, Iceland Foods highlighted deforestation and the decline in orang utan population as a result of oil palm cultivation, and pledged to remove palm oil from all of its own-label products. 

A petition for the release of Iceland Foods's advertisement, which hit 4.5 million views on YouTube alone since its release last week, has now reached more than 944,000 signatures. 

Iceland Foods owns over 900 stores throughout the UK.

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