Kicking your head to get rid of a headache: palm oil and the imminent extinction of the orangutan

Japan Focus: David McNeill

Borneo: Homeless, semi-paralyzed and blind in one eye, Montana faces an uncertain future. Even if his friends find somewhere for him to live, the 15-year-old has been weakened by years in assisted care. The lethal dangers of readjustment in his natural home include men like those who shot him out of a tree when he was a baby. But for the source of the greatest threat to Montana’s existence, say his supporters, look no further than your food cupboard.

The orangutan, the largest tree-living mammal on the planet, is in crisis. Once a mighty orange army of 300,000 that swung through the dense forests of South East Asia, conservationists say the population has dwindled to fewer than 25,000 concentrated on the two Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra. There, they cling precariously to existence on government-protected nature reserves under siege by developers of one of the world’s most lucrative commodities: palm oil.

Illegal logging, fires and clearances have decimated the tropical rainforest that is the exclusive home of the primates. A care centre near Pangkalan Bun in Central Borneo is crowded with over 320 homeless, orphaned and sick or injured orangutans, a number that grows by 20 percent a year, say the workers there. Montana peers unhappily from his cage; unlike 250 of his predecessors who have been relocated to the jungle upriver from here since this centre was set up in 1998, he is unlikely to ever leave.

“We just can’t find homes for all of them,” laments Birute Galdikas, the famed anthropologist who runs the care facility, after producing a long list of daily needs that includes nappies for the three dozen or so baby orangutans. “We are looking at the extinction of orangutans…in the wild.”

She estimates that without action, the primates – one of the four great apes along with gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, have perhaps 15 years left. The Borneo orangutan is listed as “highly endangered” by the International Conservation Union, one short stop on the ladder of extinction above its Sumatran cousin, which is critically endangered. “When it goes extinct, it will be a terrible loss,” says Dr. Galdikas. “I can’t tell you how urgent it is.”

To grasp how urgent, you have to travel from Pangkalan Bun up the chocolate-colored Sekonyer River to the heart of one of the world’s last great wildernesses, the Tanjung Putting Park, a 410,000-hectare nature reserve that is home to perhaps 6,000 orangutans along with proboscis monkeys, gibbons, macaques and crocodiles. The reserve is an oasis in a landscape pressured by the growing local population. Behind the thick canopy of mangroves and Pandanus along the Sekonyer, bald patches of cleared jungle can be seen from the boat. Guards posted along the river patrol for illegal logging and poaching: some orangutans are kept as pets or smuggled out of the country and sold to perform in Thai kickboxing matches or in circuses. But the “real issue”, say scientists, is palm oil plantations.

Actresses Julia Roberts and Joanna Lumley made this journey a few years ago, with documentary crews to film one of the only places in the world where orangutans can still be seen in the wild. Lumley is said to have been “horrified” to discover that her handbag was stuffed with cosmetics containing palm oil.

Extracted from the fast-growing oil palm tree, the commodity is now probably the world’s leading vegetable oil, surpassing its soybean alternative and used in a tenth of all supermarket products, including crisps, biscuits, toothpaste, margarine, detergents and cosmetics. 85 of percent comes from Malaysia and Indonesia – the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 producers respectively -- often from giant mono-crop plantations hewn from the tropical forests and run by agri-business concerns with powerful political support.

“Greed drives the industry,” says Galdikas. “The industry is tied with the political elite who are making bundles of money off this. You have to see these mansions in Jakarta to understand the money that is coming from it.” She describes the clear-cutting of central Borneo for plantations as a “scorched earth” policy.

Conservationists say many of the devastating 1997/8 fires that robbed the orangutans of perhaps 30 percent of their habitat in Borneo and helped blanket much of South East Asian in a dense smog were caused by forest-clearing for palm oil plantations. Those fires briefly drew attention to the plight of the Borneo and Sumatra orangutan, but Indonesia is still furiously converting land and has announced plans to raze an area half the size of the Netherlands to make the world’s biggest palm oil plantation, according to the UK-based Orangutan Foundation.

About 4-5 million Indonesians now depend on the plantations to survive, says Greenpeace in Jakarta, and the number is surging. Over six million hectares of land across the country is already under palm-oil cultivation, and the figure is growing by 350,000 hectares a year, much of it in Borneo. A couple of years ago, say local forest guides here, 2 km was shaved off the northern end of the Tanjung Putting reserve. “Nothing is safe,” says one, who explains that the valuable forest hardwood, including teak and mahogany is often sold to finance the plantations.

The reserve is dotted with elevated feeding stations, where the guides leave ripened bananas and milk to supplement the animals’ diet. As a small group of tourists wait in the sweltering tropical heat, the animals descend from the forest roof, mothers hugging their children, accompanied by the sound of creaking and breaking branches. With their bulk and powerful grip, the orangutans do considerable damage to the trees, but they also help spread the seeds or new growth in the dung they leave across the forest, a process of regeneration that has gone on for millennia.