I know, I know – after the past couple days, Halloween seems like it happened about three months ago. But I wanted to share my excitement with you about last week’s Halloween Stickering Week of Action.
When my colleague Bria and I sent out action alerts to the Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign’s grassroots activists a few weeks ago, asking them to participate in our Halloween Stickering Week of Action, we had no idea that almost 1,000 people – in 43 states and 5 Canadian provinces – would sign up! We had ordered 20,000 stickers, reading “Warning: May Contain Rainforest Destruction.” Those quickly ran out, and we had to rush-order another 10,000.
Between October 27 and 31, these 1,000 rainforest defenders went to their local supermarkets, and stickered palm oil-containing Halloween candy made by Hershey and Nestle. These two massive corporations buy their palm oil from ADM, Bunge, and Cargill – three of the world’s most notorious rainforest-destroyers – and they’ve spent the last several months doing everything they can to avoid signing our pledge to commit to helping us end the massive destruction of rainforests for palm oil production.
ADM, Bunge, and Cargill are expanding palm oil plantations into tropical rainforests on a massive scale – threatening thousands of species, displacing Indigenous communities, and accelerating climate change. Right now, Indonesia produces more greenhouse gases than any other country in the world except the U.S. and China – and the vast majority of those greenhouse gases come from burning rainforests. And if the palm oil industry gets its way, things are only going to get worse: the Indonesian palm oil industry plans to expand its plantations by over 40,000 square miles by 2020 – an amount of rainforest the size of Kentucky.
It’s so incredibly inspiring to see that so many people across the country care enough about the destructiveness of palm oil that they’re willing to take time out of their lives, and join RAN’s Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign in taking action to help stop the spread of ADM, Bunge, and Cargill’s destructive palm oil production. Their actions send a clear message to palm oil-using corporations like Nestle and Hershey: we demand more responsibility from our corporations, and we’re going to hold them accountable for the destruction caused by the palm oil that they’re putting into our food.
This reportback comes from Colby, who stickered at grocery stores in Encinitas, CA:
It was super fun! This time we went to Target. A few people showed interest. I was talking to them and telling them about Palm Oil. I gave them literature and they walked out palm oil-free.
RAN’s power comes from our grassroots – and, by that measure, it seems like we’re doing pretty good.
Thanks so much to everyone who participated! Y’all rock.