Are Orangutans Worth the Effort to Save from Extinction?
If you want to see the last remaining orangutans in the wild, you must travel to either the island of Sumatra or Borneo but you had better hurry as orangutans are in rapid decline. With only 6500 remaining on Sumatra, their numbers have dropped by 14% in the last four years according to a recent orangutan population study funded by The Great Ape Trust and conducted by Serge Wich, who warns that “unless extraordinary efforts are made soon, it could become the first great ape species to go extinct.”
Our closest ‘relatives’ in the animal kingdom sharing 97% of our DNA are critically endangered primarily because of the rapid expansion of oil palm plantations, which have drastically reduced their habitat. Hungry orangutans wander onto plantations to eat oil palm berries where they are often beaten or shot. If the oil palm industry’s growth pattern continues, 98% of the Indonesian rainforest will be lost in the next 15 years along with the entire species of critically endangered orangutans, tigers, elephants, rhinoceros and thousands of species of birds, plants, and insects that live only on Sumatra.
The 2008 Guinness Book of Records gives Indonesia the dubious honor of the world’s fastest rate of deforestation and Indonesia is the third largest emitter of green house gases. These records stem from the international oil palm industry’s lack of any long term sustainability goals. Currently new plantations expand by either logging primary forest or draining and then burning peatland releasing enormous amounts of stored carbon. Indonesia, the number one palm oil producer in the world, has a goal to double its current 6.5 million hectares (that’s about 10 million acres) under oil palm plantation in the next five to eight years – tripling it by 2020.
Orangutan survival then rests in the hands of the Indonesian government and the oil palm industry, an international conglomerate of companies from Indonesia, Denmark, England, China, India, Singapore, Malaysia, the United States and others. With demand for palm oil skyrocketing, what possible motivation can be found to stop these companies from continuing their expansion until only a small patch of rainforest remains insufficient to support orangutans or other endangered species. How can conservation ever become more important than profits and greed?
The Roundtable on Sustainable Oil Palm (RSPO) made up of oil palm growers, processors, traders, retailers, environmental and social NGO members, bankers and investors was formed in 2003 to study sustainability but in the last five years of meetings they have still not worked out any solutions. Though there may be individual sustainable plantations, there are currently no sustainable oil palm companies in Indonesia or Malaysia.
Oil palm trees take six years before they produce berries and then continue for another 25 years before becoming too tall to harvest the clumps of oil palm berries. The oil palm industry could stagger plantings yielding continuous harvests but prefers to buy virgin rainforest for instant logging money than wait six years for the income stream to begin. Their goal is expansion to increase profits. But there are millions of hectares available for plantations that are not pristine rainforest and some conservationists believe plantation permits are only a guise providing cover to strip the last stands of timber not already targeted by illegal loggers. In one corner of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, a mere 250,000 hectares of the 6 million hectares of forest allocated for palm oil by the government have actually been planted. “When you look closely the areas where companies are getting permission for oil palm plantations are those of high-conservation forest,” said Willie Smits, who set up SarVision, a satellite mapping service that charts the rainforest’s decline. “What they’re really doing is stealing the timber because they get to clear it before they plant. But the timber’s all they want; hit and run with no intention of ever planting. It’s a conspiracy.”
But though palm oil is now called an environmentally catastrophic ingredient, it never shows up on most shopping lists. Why then is it in such high demand? Though very few people have ever gone to the store to buy it, palm oil is an ingredient in 1 out of 10 items at your grocery store in items like toothpaste, shampoo, chocolate, biscuits, Pringles, Oreos, KFC, lipstick, makeup, Ben & Jerry’s, Earth’s Balance, cookies, Nutella, bread, soy milk and many other products. Because of a lack of transparency laws, the ingredient palm oil can be labeled as vegetable oil, cetyalcohol, dicetyl dimonium chloride, elaeis guineensis, E471, isopropyl palmitate, octyl palmitate, potassium palmitate, retinyl palmitate, vitamin A, palmitate, palmitic acid, palm kernel oil, palm kernel amide, DEA and MEA, palmolein, steareth-2, steareth-20, sodium palm kernelate and other names making your commitment to stop purchasing palm oil close to impossible.
As more and more consumers blindly purchase products containing palm oil, the demand for bigger plantations increases and the chance of rainforest survival diminish biscuit by biscuit. Because conservation has always faced one enormous stumbling block, where is the money in conservation? Who stands to make any money if orangutans and the forest are protected? Right now the short-sighted greed of governments, industry and business is in the driver’s seat encouraged by blind consumer consumption of oil palm, which may even become an ingredient in biofuel.
But who actually controls this battle? You --the consumer. What would happen if consumers refused to buy products that used non-sustainable palm oil and only supported companies that used sustainable palm oil? Right now your own country is using palm oil to make toothpaste, soap, biscuits and cereal and if you care about the extinction of orangutans, tigers, elephants and rhinos, it is time to make your move.
Conservation groups and individual efforts have begun to achieve positive changes resulting in companies switching to sustainable palm oil, a glimmer of hope for orangutans. The Body Shop now uses only sustainable palm oil from Columbia. Lush products removed palm oil from their products. Asda grocery stores owned by WalMart, has become Britain’s first supermarket chain to tell suppliers it will not accept products unless they can guarantee their palm oil is from sustainably run plantations and has banned palm oil sourced from the worst affected regions in Borneo and Sumatra. Within a year Asda hopes to have banned all unsustainable palm oil from 500 products. Unilever has said that their company would buy all of its palm oil from certified sustainable sources by 2015. But this change has not come without pressure. Ferrero, the Italian company that makes Nutella and Ferrero Rocher, and Unilever after GreenPeace staged a protest said that they are ready to support the moratorium on converting forest and peatland into oil palm plantations.
But more pressure and more consumer involvement is needed, more letters and emails to CEOS, more phone calls to Ministers of Government and more conversations with grocery store owners if orangutans are to be saved. The ball is definitely in your court. It’s your turn to act on your convictions. In learning about conservation issues, we sometimes feel both discouraged and disconnected from global problems as if our desires and our personal ethics would have as little effect on the greater scheme of things as the small trail of ants marching across the table affects our day to day living. Will anyone notice if you take a stand on rainforest conservation? Margaret Mead said it best. “A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
A moratorium on rainforest destruction and conversion to sustainable oil palm plantations are the only solutions. If we wait for the governments of the world and the oil palm industry to enforce sustainable standards, the rainforest and orangutans in the wild will be lost. A lack of international will, individuals choosing not to work together to preserve our very earth will have killed an entire species.
But rather than allowing governments and business to control the outcome, the collective wisdom of global citizens and the synergy of conservation groups working together can preserve the Indonesian rainforests. The critically endangered orangutans are worth the effort as is their habitat, the Indonesian rainforest. But first, international consumers must make a commitment to use only sustainable palm oil products and to actively support conservation efforts.
Joyce Major, author of “Smiling at the World” is volunteering with the Sumatran Orangutan Society (www.orangutans-sos.org) in Ubud. Email her at joycemajor1@hotmail.com for a list of products that use palm oil.
