Remains of peat forests in Indonesia that were destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations. Photo: Aidenvironment, 2006. CC BY-SA 2.0

There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.

– Karl Jaspers

What’s the relationship between an emaciated, dying Wondiwoi tree kangaroo (whose small joey in her pouch is also condemned to death) and tooth decay or obesity in a kid in any European city? The world’s perhaps only fifty remaining Wondiwoi tree kangaroos are gorgeous marsupials with large eyes, sweet faces, thick burnt-umber coats, and strong claws for grasping tree branches. Human kids are also gorgeous creatures, often with large eyes, sweet faces, thick overcoats, and grasping hands (especially if there’s a KitKat in sight). But that’s the superficial connection. The underlying, truly dangerous relational bond is palm oil. Each individual, the cute animal and the cute kid, represents the horrors of an insane system of consumption that’s destroying everything it touches on both sides of the story, the kid’s and the tree kangaroo’s.

It’s no news that unhealthy items stack shelves at child-eye level in supermarket checkout queues. You’re waiting, have nothing to do but look at the last tempting offers, so you throw a couple of KitKats into your basket or buy one to quieten a whining kid. KitKats will sweeten your day. They also kill all sorts of beautiful rainforest creatures, and they displace and kill people who once lived on and with the land where their ingredients are now grown. If you buy cigarettes, the packet screeches, with ghastly illustrations, that you’re courting head or neck cancer, and that your smoking can cause fatal lung disease in nonsmokers. KitKat wrappers show no pictures of dying Wondiwoi tree kangaroos or caries in tender little mouths.

I’m singling out KitKats to represent the vast array of products made from palm oil and because it’s among several supposedly seductive products listed in a boycott recently called by more than ninety West Papuan tribes, political organisations, and religious groups. The other products and labels they name are Smarties, Aero chocolate, Oreo biscuits, Ritz crackers, Pantene, and Herbal Essences. But the boycott is about more than a few products that are damaging at both production and consumer ends of the scale. It’s about late capitalist corporate imperialism where industrialists lawlessly operate in boundless, rather than delineated parameters of space and time, aided by the global data (mis)information economy, which splatters its fraudulent spiel everywhere in worldwide linkups. Hence the connection of KitKat with a treeless, starving tree kangaroo.

After being betrayed by the United Nations more than sixty years ago, Melanesian West Papua, occupied by Indonesia ever since, is a particularly poignant case in point. In its increasingly militarised torture mode of governance, the Indonesian regime—now headed by Prabowo Subianto, notorious for his war crimes in East Timor—is the world’s biggest palm oil exporter, to the tune of 47 million tonnes of crude palm oil in 2023, and 54% of global exports. The industry accounts for 4.5% of Indonesian GDP and directly or indirectly employs 16.2 million people. The total area of Indonesian palm oil cultivation is about 25 million hectares (out of 29 million hectares globally, which amounts to approximately 6.7% of the size of the European Union), and plantations covering many million more hectares are planned. In 2023, industrial oil palm plantations in Indonesia expanded by 116,000 hectares, a 54% increase compared with 2022. The largest oil palm project so far is Tanah Merah, in Boven Digoel Regency. Seven companies control the area of 280,000 hectares of which more than 140,000 hectares of land traditionally occupied by the Awyu people will be taken for oil palm production.

In West Papua this destructive extractivism also entails violent social change for the country’s Indigenous peoples. It’s impossible to know how many people have been displaced in the name of “food security” (security for KitKat production) as the Indonesian government is understandably averse to providing statistics of the genocide it has been committing in West Papua for more than sixty years. The Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights calculates that there are between 60,000 and 100,000 internally displaced people. Mining, palm plantations, and logging by Indonesian and international companies are protected by the state transmigration programme which creates militarised buffer zones protecting the areas designated for Indonesian government “development” programmes. It’s calculated that Indonesian transmigrants outnumber West Papuans by about ten percent, and approximately 25% of the Indigenous population, or more than 500,000 people have been killed. Needless to say, the demographics represent atrocious human rights violations, including destruction of West Papuan languages and culture.

Taking rainforest land for palm oil monoculture also means taking water. In areas where these plantations are forcefully introduced, women are particularly affected. In West Papua and other parts of the world, they bring water to their villages for activities that sustain community social life and hence its reproductive cycle. When........

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