Eat that ice cream, kill an
orangutan By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR - The orangutan is seriously
endangered by the dietary habits of his nearest
cousin, environmental activists say, explaining
that man needs vast quantities of palm oil to fry
his greasy foods and has been steadily turning
Southeast Asia's forests into palm plantations.
But the orangutan (man of the jungle) now
has friends in the enemy camp in the shape of
international non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) that have mounted a new campaign against
the felling of forests in Malaysia and Indonesia
to make way for large-scale cultivation of the
palm.
So ferocious is the campaign - which
holds that orangutans will go extinct by 2020 if
palm-oil plantations continue to replace
forests - that it
has shaken government officials and producers in
the two countries, which are the last refuge of
the animal that shares many human socio-biological
traits.
In Malaysia, currently the world's
largest producer of palm oil, officials and
producers worry that the campaign would affect
world demand for the product, the country's
second-biggest foreign-exchange earner after
petroleum.
And then there is competition.
Indonesia is expected to overtake Malaysia as the
world's leading producer shortly when new
plantations begin production.
Since the
Ape Alliance, a coalition of international NGOs
including Friends of the Earth, Borneo Orangutan
Survival Foundation and Nature Alert, launched the
worldwide campaign earlier this month there have
been quick and often blind rebuttals by Malaysian
agencies that promote palm oil and conduct
marketing search.
Unlike earlier
campaigns, the focus this time is not on stopping
deforestation and saving an endangered species but
on directly blaming Western consumers for the
decimation of orangutan populations.
The
campaign argues that if you buy common household
items such as crisps, ice cream, detergents,
bread, lipstick and soap that contains palm oil,
you are helping to drive orangutans to extinction.
The campaigners say that as the demand for palm
oil grows so does the felling of forests and in
turn the destruction of orangutan habitats and
exposure of the animal to poachers.
Processed-food manufacturers prefer palm
oil because it does not need to undergo the costly
process of hydrogenization as with other cooking
media. Its stability at high temperatures makes it
ideal for deep frying, it gives fried products a
longer shelf life and it has a bland taste that
brings out natural food flavors.
Malaysia
produced nearly 14 million tonnes of palm oil in
2004, half the global output, from 3.8 million
hectares of plantation area.
The anti-palm
oil campaign is centered in Britain, which imports
nearly a million tonnes of palm oil a year and is
therefore in a position to influence changes in
the industry.
Already slogans - such as
"Save orangutans from extinction when you next
shop" and "Put an end to the cruelty of palm oil"
- are having an impact going by the many queries
Malaysian missions have been receiving on palm oil
and the orangutan.
The campaigners
published their facts and arguments in the widely
distributed new report titled "Oil for Ape
Scandal", which contains gruesome photographs of
the gentle animal captured and ill-treated in the
plantations of Kalimantan.
Large
supermarket chains such as Tesco are being urged
by campaigners to certify that their palm-oil
stocks came from non-destructive sources, where no
forests were burned, only degraded land was used
for planting, local communities were respected
and, above all, where no orangutans were killed.
"We are not trying to put people out of
business," Sean Whyte, chief of Nature Alert and
co-author of the report, told IPS. "We are simply
asking that they do business without destroying
the environment.
"Already 90% of the
orangutan habitat in Southeast Asia has been wiped
out and what is left is fast depleting. If we do
nothing now our children will see orangutans only
in the zoos. Orangutans could become extinct
within 12 years."
Ian Redmond of Ape
Alliance said: "It is we who will have to explain
to our children that the orangutan became extinct
because of corporate greed in our time. Palm-oil
plantations are now the primary cause of the
decline in population of the orangutans in
Malaysia and Indonesia."
Experts estimate
that about 5,000 orangutans perish each year as a
result of habitat loss. Such claims are strongly
denied by the Malaysian Palm Oil Association,
Malaysian Palm Oil Board and Malaysian Palm Oil
Promotion Council, which hold that palm oil is a
strategic, well-planned agricultural industry that
supports the preservation of wildlife including
the orangutan.
"These allegations are not
well-founded and contain a number of factual
inaccuracies," they said in a joint statement last
week. "The industry is far-better regulated, and
the orangutan far-better protected than is
suggested in the report. We often preserve jungle
reserves and wildlife sanctuaries as part of
efforts to maintain the existing biodiversity
found in plantations."
Citing a "recent"
survey, the industry has tried to show that
"thousands" of orangutans remained alive and well
in and around the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary
in eastern Sabah state on Borneo Island, which is
shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
The Malaysian Palm Oil Association said
Malaysian palm-oil companies would, in the next
two years, adopt standards that would prove their
willingness to be transparent about the palm-oil
production process. Buyers would be able trace the
origins of the palm oil in a product and
ultimately to the estate where it was harvested,
they said.
But the truth is that Malaysian
and Singaporean capital, aided by European banks,
has bought up large tracts of Indonesian palm-oil
plantations that were going cheap following the
1997 Asian financial crisis.
Capital from
these countries is also opening up more
plantations in the same lowland forest in Borneo
and Sumatra islands, the only remaining natural
habitat of the orangutan.
According to
data from the Indonesian Forum for the Environment
(or Walhi), the Kutai National Park in East
Kalimantan - an ideal orangutan habitat -
consisted in 1934 of two million hectares but had
shrunk to 306,000 hectares by 1957. In 1997, the
park was down to 198,604 hectares, and Walhi
estimates it has since lost another 25,600
hectares due to illegal logging. There are
currently thought to be only 606 orangutans
surviving in the national park.
One
answer, say environmentalists, is the Kinshasa
Declaration, an action plan announced this month
to protect forest areas and save the great apes
from extinction. If the Malaysian and Indonesia
government sign this pact and implement it in an
open and verifiable manner, it would go a long way
to ease the fears of conservation groups
worldwide.
