A palm oil company, a group of US financiers, and the destruction of Peru's rainforest

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

66% : Over the past 30 years, the rise of the palm oil industry in Peru has been directly stimulated by the United Nations and by the US Agency for International Development, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars there funding organizations that work to redirect coca farmers toward alternative crops.
60% : In 2022, the UN approved a resolution prioritizing biodiversity protection in its development work.
59% : Then, in 2022, Peru's comptroller general released three audits, concluding that, despite the agency reversals Spoor had orchestrated, Ocho Sur's plantations could never be brought into compliance with existing laws.
58% : "That November, he repeated the theme when he gave a talk in Lima organized by the UN, along with his business partner Bill Randall, the managing director of Pacific Agri Capital, a private equity firm that Melka founded in 2008 to fund his Malaysian plantations.
57% : Doldourov, who drove Spoor and me around during my visit, had also worked at the UN, and built roads for United Oils before joining Ocho Sur.
56% : Rivera's son Julio also came on board, as did another UN employee, Maria Teresa Trigoso.
54% : The first oil palm project, spearheaded by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in 1991, helped 270 families in Ucayali -- largely refugees fleeing Shining Path guerillas -- to establish 3,000 acres of oil palm along a highway near Pucallpa.
52% : In 2019, the state government granted Santa Clara de Uchunya a chunk of forest adjacent to Ocho Sur, which tripled the community's size to 1,544 acres.
51% : "His biggest problem was that most available land on Borneo and other parts of Indonesia and Malaysia was controlled by Indigenous people or held in state forestry concessions.
50% : Rolf Wachholtz, an economist hired to evaluate one of the UN's coca-eradication programs in 2010, praised it for improving the livelihoods of farmers but stressed that the UN needed to "focus more on environmental issues," including deforestation.
47% : one of the sons of Alfredo Rivera, the manager Melka hired after his decades with the United Nations, told a group gathered near Zanja Seca, according to a transcript by a researcher who attended the meeting.
42% : Diane Farrell, the US deputy undersecretary of international trade, even attended a launch event at Ocho Sur's nursery.
37% : Outside conservation areas and Indigenous communities, much of the Peruvian Amazon was in the hands of regional governments: Undivided, untitled, and unclaimed, it was controlled by a glacial bureaucracy in a country where government corruption was widespread.

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