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Twelve Greenpeace activists latch onto Hong Kong ship

A dozen Greenpeace activists lashed themselves to a cargo ship in New Zealand yesterday to protest its shipment of animal feed produced at palm plantations that they blame for massive deforestation.

Greenpeace claims millions of hectares of rain forest are being cut down to make way for the plantations, destroying animal habitats and seriously impacting on the climate.

The protesters boarded the Hong Kong-registered East Ambition from a motorized dinghy while the ship was anchored off the Port of Tauranga, chaining themselves to cargo cranes in an attempt to stop the cargo of palm kernel from reaching shore.

Police later boarded the ship and arrested two protesters.

The activists say the palm kernel animal feed is from Indonesia and is headed for New Zealand dairy farms. The country’s dairy industry imported 1.1 million tonnes of the feed last year.

Greenpeace campaigner Simon Boxer called on New Zealand Prime Minister John Key to halt imports of the product and address intensive dairy farming in the country. After tourism, the dairy industry is New Zealand’s second-biggest foreign currency earner, and dairy exports represent 24 percent of all New Zealand’s export income.

“We have no hope of slowing climate change if we continue to raze and burn the world’s remaining rain forests,” Boxer said.

Activist Jo McVeagh accused Key and Fonterra, the country’s biggest dairy cooperative, of contributing to rain forest destruction. Protesters who boarded the ship held up a banner that read “Fonterra Climate Crime.”

John Lea, chief executive of Fonterra’s merchandising company RD1, said the East Ambition was not carrying a palm kernel feed shipment for the cooperative. He said a recent World Bank audit found that RD1’s feed supplier was managing its operations according to World Bank principles.
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