Recently we campaigned to persuade supermarkets to take action to ensure that the vegetable oils used in their food do not lead to rainforest destruction. Palm oil is widely used in food and is derived from the oil palm tree. Vast areas of rainforest have been cleared to grow oil palm plantations and the orang utan and many other species are threatened by the expansion of oil palm plantations. For more information about this see the Friends of the Earth report.
We had several stalls on this issues and together with other groups managed to persuade all the main supermarkets to join The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil Production, an organization aimed at ensuring that any palm oil used in the food industry comes from sources which do not lead to further rainforest destruction.
The expansion of palm oil plantations continues to pose a threat to rainforests and the threat has increased as now palm oil is one of the crops being promoted as a source of oil used to produce biofuels- See the section on biofuels.
Many tropical countries have called on developing countries to give them more money to help protect the world's remaining rainforests. There is a major climate change conference in Bali in November when there will be opportunity to come to an agreement with developing countries which would help to prevent deforestation and prevent the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide released by forest destruction. Please write to your MP and ask them to give better protection for the world's forests. They do have an internationally agreed target for cutting loss of biodiversity significantly by 2010 so this would help.
See http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=71385 for more details.
And http://forests.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=78900