Palm oil puts squeeze on Asiaâs endangered orangutan
Gillian Murdoch
PALANGKARAYA: Bound hand and foot, dishevelled orangutans caught
raiding Borneoâs oil palm crops silently await their fate as a small
crowd of plantation workers gather to watch.
Lacking only hand-cuffs and finger-printing to complete the
atmosphere of a criminal bust, such âape evictionsâ have become part of
life for Asiaâs endangered red apes.
Thousands have strayed into the path of international commerce as
Indonesia and Malaysia, their last remaining habitats, race to convert
their forests to profitable palm crops.
Branded pests for venturing out from their diminishing forest
habitats into plantations where they eat young palm shoots, orangutans
could be extinct in the wild in ten years time, the United Nations said
in March. Fighting against this grim prediction is the Nyaru Menteng
Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) centre in Central Kalimantan, which
rescues orangutans and returns them to the wild at the cost of US$3,000
per ape.
âThey will kill the animals if we donât go ... Itâs cheaper to kill
the orangutan than put up a fence or snares,â said Lone Droscher-Nielsen,
the Danish-born founder of the centre.
While harming the apes is illegal, her centre has amassed a slew of
photographs of the grisly fates of some plantation trespassers: Apes
with their hands cut off and slashed to death with machetes, and others
with bullets through their foreheads.
With dozens captured this year, cages are full, and finding secure
land for releases is a constant challenge for the centre.
âItâs not just orangutans â bears, gibbons â everybody is losing
their home,â said Droscher-Nielsen.
âIf it was only the orangutan, people just say: âWell itâs only one
species thatâs going to go extinctâ. But itâs not just one species.
Those forests have millions of animals in them that are all going to go
extinct if we continueâ.
Indonesia and Malaysia together produce 83 percent of the worldâs
palm oil. Made by crushing fresh fruit, the reddish-brown oil is riding
high in the commodities charts, with crude prices up over 15 percent
this year after rising 40 percent in 2006.
Used in cookies, toothpaste, ice cream and breads it is the worldâs
second most popular edible oil after soy.
Demand is also soaring for palm oil-derived biofuel, despite
objections from critics who slam the âgreenâ alternative to pricey crude
oil as âdeforestation dieselâ because of the destruction wreaked on
forests to make way for palm plantations.
Of 6.5 million hectares cultivated in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2004,
almost four million hectares was previously forest, environment group
Friends of the Earth calculated. For orangutan, the clearances are a
matter of life and death.
âYou can see how desperate the situation isâ, said forestry
department official Sugianto, 43, as he gestured at row after row of
palms in the apeâs last stronghold, Central Kalimantan.
âThe company knows the orangutan has a protected status ... if they
have a permit to clear 60,000 hectares they clear 60,000 hectares,
orangutan or not. They only care about their profitâ.
Caught and reported to the Borneo Orangutan Survival centre by
plantations who say they are trying to be responsible stakeholders,
healthy animals are re-released deep in the forest. Those too injured or
too young to survive alone join 600 others at the rehabilitation centre.
Forty local Dayak women look after the current crop of 18 palm oil
âorphans,â whose mothers have been killed; bottle-feeding them milk,
administering medicine and supervising their climbing and nest-building.
Reuters
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