Kuala Lumpur (AFP) – A British supermarket chain’s viral commercial about an orangutan left homeless because of deforestation from palm oil planting was slammed as a cheap publicity stunt by a major industry body on Friday.
The Christmas ad — which features a cartoon orangutan telling a little girl that its jungle home had been destroyed — has racked up millions of views on social media and sparked the trending hashtag #NoPalmOilChristmas on Twitter.
The multi-billion-dollar palm oil industry was not impressed by the Iceland ad, dubbed “Rang-tan”, which calls for consumers to be aware of the environmental impact of the world’s most widely used vegetable oil.
vCard.red is a free platform for creating a mobile-friendly digital business cards. You can easily create a vCard and generate a QR code for it, allowing others to scan and save your contact details instantly.
The platform allows you to display contact information, social media links, services, and products all in one shareable link. Optional features include appointment scheduling, WhatsApp-based storefronts, media galleries, and custom design options.
“Banning palm oil is not the solution. Boycotting is not the solution,” Darrel Webber, chief executive of the Malaysia-based Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), told AFP on Friday.
“Retailers’ margins are very small these days. The cheapest way to get publicity is the best way for them,” he added.
Frozen food specialist Iceland has previously announced it would stop using palm oil, found in everything from margarine and biscuits to soap and shampoo, over concerns that it causes widespread environmental destruction.
“We have not removed palm oil from our own label food as ‘a marketing gimmick’, but to raise public awareness of the continuing destruction of the rainforest,” Iceland managing director Richard Walker said in an email to Bloomberg News.
“By doing so we hope to apply pressure to the palm oil industry to deliver the genuinely sustainable product that it has long been promising.”
A petition with almost one million signatures is calling for the ad to be aired on British television after it was blocked for being too political.
The supermarket chain is now reportedly planning to release a life-size animatronic orangutan on Britain’s streets to draw attention to the issue.
Firms in Malaysia and Indonesia, which dominate global palm oil production, have been routinely accused of deforestation and using slash-and-burn forest clearance that destroys the habitats of under-threat species, including orangutans.