Hunter-gatherers in Borneo blockade roads to keep oil palm companies off their land. . . the World Bank freezes loans to oil palm companies. . . and now the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has banned a ‘misleading’ advert calling oil palm the ‘Green Answer.’

‘The ad must not appear again in its current form,’ the ASA concluded.

The advert, placed by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council, claimed that accusations against Malaysia’s palm oil industry ‘of rampant deforestation, unsound environmental practices, unfair treatment of farmers and indigenous people’ were ‘protectionist agendas hidden under a thin veneer of environmental concern’ and ‘based neither on scientific evidence, nor, for that matter, on fact.’

Try telling that to the Penan, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Malaysian part of Borneo.

First, companies chopped their forests down for timber. Now they’re planting new ‘forests’ of oil palm.

‘When the logging started, we thought we had a big problem. But when oil palm arrived, logging was relegated to problem number two,’ a Penan man told one of my Survival colleagues recently. ‘Our land and our forests have been taken by force. Our fruit trees are gone, our hunting grounds shrunk, our rivers polluted.’

Penan armed with blowpipes block road as logging trucks owned by the Shin Yang company approach. © Survival

‘They clear the forest where we look for our food,’ said another Penan man. ‘They destroy our fruit trees, they bulldoze our land, and they use chemicals which run into our rivers and kill the fish. A lot of our food resources have been destroyed by oil palm plantations.’

Does that sound like the ‘Green Answer’ to you? Like ‘fair treatment’? ‘Sound environmental practice’?

It seems to me the ASA aren’t the only ones who would find the banned advert ‘misleading.’

The author of Survival’s ‘most racist article’ of 2009 now says he was ‘exaggerating’ when he suggested bombing Peru’s indigenous population with napalm.

‘When I wrote that I didn’t mean it literally,’ Andres Bedoya Ugarteche retorts in his column in Peru’s Correo newspaper. ‘When you tell someone that he or she’s f**king you, or that you’re going to ‘beat the shit out of them’, you don’t really mean it.’

Indeed. The question is, when isn’t he exaggerating? It’s difficult to know. After all, he describes ‘all human rights NGOs’ as ‘blood-sucking leeches’, and Survival as ‘communist excrement’ and ‘f**king communist swine’ who ‘worship’ the British royal family and want indigenous people to ‘remain in ignorance and misery’ so they ‘can be breastfed by them.’ Other pearls of wisdom: ‘Either we’re all indigenous or no one is’ and ‘When the Egyptians were building their pyramids, there were only llamas in Peru.’

Why should protesting against human rights abuses – in this case, the systematic theft of land, the destruction of eco-systems and livelihoods, and the failure to recognise and respect peoples’ rights to self-determination – make you a communist?

It doesn’t. That’s an old, tired claim that has been trotted out by certain kinds of people ever since fear of the ‘Red Tide’ swept around the globe last century. It wasn’t true then – and isn’t true now.

More importantly, racist descriptions of indigenous people in the media, whether ‘exaggerated’ or not, make it easier for governments and companies to justify taking their land and ‘developing’ them without their understanding and consent – in ways often catastrophic to them. This has happened all over the world: it has led to poverty, disease, shorter life-spans, and the destruction of entire cultures and ways of life.

That’s why Survival’s ‘Stamp it Out’ campaign was launched. That’s why there’s an annual award. And that’s why Bedoya Ugarteche’s article is this year’s worthy winner.

The gist of his article, published in the aftermath of the protests and violence at Bagua earlier this year, is:

‘Peru’s indigenous peoples belong in the past!’

‘They’re stupid and can’t think for themselves!’

‘They have savage customs and ridiculous names and clothes!’

Most of this is music to a government’s ears – especially one like Peru’s that is hell-bent on exploiting as much indigenous land as possible.

In fact, the similarities between Bedoya Ugarteche’s caricature and the government’s, particularly President Garcia’s, is uncanny.

He says the protesters are ‘primitive’, ‘from the pre-agricultural age’ and ‘palaeolithic’. Garcia says they want to take Peru ‘back to a primitive age’.

He says they’re ‘savage’. Ditto Garcia.

He says they were fooled into protesting by a ‘pseudo-native’. Ditto Garcia.

He says they were fooled into protesting by ‘communists’, opposition politicians, and foreign interests. Ditto Garcia.

He says they’re ‘policemen-murdering wretches’. Garcia accuses them of ‘police genocide’.

Even animals come into it. Bedoya Ugarteche brands indigenous leader Alberto Pizango a rat. Garcia has likened them to dogs.

Bedoya Ugarteche even takes exception to the fact that some of the protesters were wearing ‘Lacoste shirts’ – a detail also, rather oddly, noted by Peru’s Embassy in Italy. ‘Some demonstrators took to the streets wearing Lacoste shirts,’ Mr Felix Denegri Boza told Italian media, as if that had anything to do with why they were protesting or the government’s response to it.

Might we suggest that Bedoya Ugarteche, Peru’s diplomatic corps and President García worry less about what shirts the protesters were wearing, and rather more about what they were protesting about?