Palm Oil vs Orang Utans  

Plenty Magazine has a look at the steady replacement of orang utans (and their home forest) with palm oil plantations in Indonesia - Orangutans and palm-based biofuel don't mix.

I have come to northern Sumatra, an island in the Indian Ocean covered with twisting dirt roads and steep green mountains, to report on the orangutans because there isn’t much time. Experts say the world’s 30,000 remaining orangutans will go extinct in 3 to 20 years. The last of the hairy apes live on the islands of Indonesia and Malaysia, where they spend most of their time in the trees, eating fruits and leaves.

Here in Indonesia, their forest home is being leveled at a rate faster than 300 football fields per hour, according to Greenpeace forest campaigner Hapsoro, primarily to make way for palm oil plantations, vast expanses of non-indigenous palms where the trees’ fruit is harvested for its rich oil. The oil is found in sundry products, from snack foods to beauty products, and is increasingly being used in biofuel production. The rainforest is disappearing so quickly that there is not enough food left for the orangutans to forage. In the Bukit Luwang national Park, they are hand fed bananas from park rangers to supplement their diet.

“The future for the orangutans is in the hands of the humans now,” said Dharma Bhodi, a park ranger at Bukit Luwang who was born and raised in this remote region. As Bodhi talks, an adolescent male orangutan hangs lazily by one arm in a tree above us. He looks down occasionally, gives a bored look, and reaches for a handful of leaves to chew. “Humans have been cutting down the forest for plantations. I have seen the places that used to be rainforest and now are plantation, you can’t recognize it anymore,” he said. “Neither can the orangutans."

Palm oil has long been a staple in Indonesia. There (and in products the world over) it’s used in everything from soap to ice cream. Over the last year and a half, crude palm oil has become even more valuable in the global rush for environmentally sustainable biofuels: In fact, due to rising demand, the price for the oil has increased by 88 percent. Poor countries like Indonesia, the world’s leading palm oil producer, are clearing thousands of acres of pristine rainforest to plant the crop.

Plantation proponents say that palm oil is environmentally superior to fossil fuel because it doesn’t add to the earth’s over-all carbon dioxide levels. Instead, carbon dioxide created when the biofuel is burned is absorbed by the plant itself. Another boon is the economic growth for small landholders and family farmers.

Critics say those benefits aren’t worth the ecological costs of palm oil production. Destruction of rainforest to make room for plantations releases huge amounts of carbon dioxide: clearing land produces some 400 mega-tons of the greenhouse gas annually in Indonesia. Meanwhile, orangutans and other species that call the rainforest home are left searching for food, water, and shelter in a barren mudscape.

But some in Indonesia are working to stem the spread of the seemingly unstoppable palm industry. Hardi Baktiantoro founded the Centre for Orangutan Protection in Indonesia, a Jakarta- based non-profit. He, his wife, and her brother wear matching T-shirts that say “Palm Oil Kills.” Together, along with his two toddlers, they take frequent trips to document decimated rainforest areas. He takes photos while she shoots video for use on their website, in reports, speaking engagements, and direct-action events. They are trying to save what’s left of the rainforest for the orangutans.

“I find dead orangutans, they have starved to death. There is no food, no water,” he said. He tells me that on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo), more than ten orangutans are starving to death each day because of palm-oil driven deforestation. “The situation for orangutans today is very, very critical. The experts say the orangutans will be extinct in 2015. The orangutans will be extinct in next three years unless the government takes extreme action to save them. But instead they are planning convert 455,000 hectares of forest [in Kalimantan] into new plantations, mostly palm oil,” he said.