Stopping the chainsaws

By Michael Bachelard
March 29 2014 - 4:00am

In November last year, Scott Poynton was on the verge of convincing the owner of the world's biggest palm oil company to clean up his environmentally catastrophic business. Poynton, an Australian raised on the hard-scrabble outskirts of Melbourne, thought Kuok Khoon Hong, the chief of palm oil giant Wilmar, should agree to stop his company and its suppliers from cutting down tropical forests for land to produce his ubiquitous product. But other, more belligerent industry players disagreed, and the man who controls 45 per cent of the global trade was pulling back, nervous about going it alone.

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