Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com
October 23, 2007

Source: http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1023-palm_oil.html

While it is often argued that the economic benefits of oil palm plantations outweigh the environmental costs of converting biodiverse ecosystems to monocultures, new analysis suggests that the role of plantations in reducing rural poverty may be overstated.

Examining poverty rates and oil palm expansion in the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah on the island of Borneo, researcher Marc D. Bowden found that despite substantially lower coverage of oil palm plantations, Sarawak saw a greater reduction in poverty rates over the past three decades than neighboring Sabah. In Sarawak, where oil palm plantation cover expanded from 0.12 percent of the land area in 1976 to 4.08 percent in 2004, the proportion of the population living below the poverty line fell 85 percent from 51.7 percent to 7.5 percent in the same period. Meanwhile in Sabah, where oil palm plantation cover grew from 0.95 percent in 1976 to 15.81 percent in 2004, poverty rates dropped 55 percent from 51.2 percent to 23 percent.

“Proponents of palm oil development claim that their crop is a significant driver of development. But if this was true, one would expect a far greater reduced rate of poverty in Sabah than has occurred in Sarawak,” writes Bowden. “It would be unwise to assume that the palm oil industry has had no positive impact on reducing poverty in Sabah, but it is clear that any causal relationship is not as strong as is broadly assumed.”

Bowden says that rural populations in Sabah have failed to benefit from oil palm expansion partly because plantation owners primarily employ workers from the Philippines and Indonesia. He further notes that in 2005 only 6.3 percent of Sabah’s total palm oil estate was controlled by small landholders.

“It is often heard that if palm oil had not been established across eastern Sabah, an alternative crop would have. But would an alternative crop have monopolised as much land, had such a low impact on reducing poverty, or had such an adverse impact on rare and endangered species?” he asks, while noting that oil palm expansion has put Sabah’s most charismatic species at risk of extinction.

“Rapid palm oil development has also significantly impacted Sabah’s natural heritage as exemplified by its mammalian megafauna. Large, wide-ranging mammal species with low reproductive rates have been severely impacted by the unplanned development of palm oil in the state’s east. The ranges and habitat of three species in particular–the Bornean rhino (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis harrissoni), Bornean pygmy elephant (Elephas maximus borneensis), and the Orang-utan (Pongo pygmaeus mori)–have significantly contracted and/or been fragmented and/or been degraded over the past thirty years.”

Given the apparent failure of the palm oil industry to reduce poverty in Sabah relative to Sarawak, Bowden recommends several steps for future development, including improving oil yields per hectare from the present estate; clamping down on illegal immigration; providing universal primary and secondary education; reducing illiteracy rates among children and adults; encouraging greater government transparency by dealing severely with corruption involving government officials and employees; and improving rural infrastructure, including roads, water, sanitation, and electricity.

“Although the decline in both [Sabah and Sarawak] was concurrent with expansion of their respective palm oil estates, Sarawak converted less than half the area of land converted to palm oil in Sabah (493,000 ha as opposed to 1,095,000 ha), and in doing so monopolised less than a third of the proportion of total land area utilised in Sabah (4% as opposed to 15%),” writes Bowden. “Sabah’s progress toward poverty reduction is… significantly lagging behind every other Malaysian state.”

CITATION: Bowden, M. (2007). PALM OIL, POVERTY AND CONSERVATION IN SABAH. Unpublished.

Source: http://news.mongabay.com/2007/1023-palm_oil.html

10/23/07

Medan (ANTARA News) - The Association of Indonesian Oilpalm Farmers (Apkasindo) says the government had been lax in keeping abreast of foreign control over oil-palm plantations in the country.

Apaskindo Secretary General Asmar Arsjad said here on Tuesday the government had been off-guard with regard to foreign land ownership. “This will lead to a take-over of palm-oil fields by them as transactions are made illicitly,” he said.

Asmar said the inventory of land under foreign parties` control had now even become unclear following the implementation of regional autonomy.

He said Apkasindo estimated almost one million hectares of oil-palm plantations in Indonesia were controlled by foreign parties.

He expressed concern that the government did not have any accurate data on it. “Following the implementation of regional autonomy ownership of oil-palm plantations has become unclear because there was no record about it as ownership was gained through third parties,” he said.

He said he hoped the government would soon put the situation in order through implementation of a one-gate policy in the issuance of licenses to get authentic data.

According to Apkasindo the government had to pay attention to the problem because it was related with land availability for local oil palm plantations.

“We can accept the presence of foreign parties but the government needs to be careful with regard to land ownership by foreign parties,” he said.(*)

http://www.antara.co.id/en/arc/2007/10/23/foreign-firms-control-oil-palm-fields-in-ri-apkasindo-says/

Story by Tim Cocks, Reuters

KAMPALA - Uganda has agreed to scrap an unpopular plan to give a swath of protected rainforest to a sugar planter, the environment minister said on Wednesday.

Maria Mutagamba told Reuters the government had finally rejected a request by the privately owned Mehta Group to destroy a third of Mabira Forest and convert it to sugarcane.

“The idea of sugar growing in Mabira is no longer there. We are looking for money for other land,” she said.

Uganda’s cabinet suspended the proposal by President Yoweri Museveni to give 7,100 hectares (17,540 acres) or nearly a third of Mabira Forest to Mehta’s sugar estate in May, following a public outcry.

Three people died in violent protests against the plan, including an Indian stoned to death by rioters. Mehta is owned by an ethnic Indian family.

“A committee of cabinet was set up to examine the plan but did not get back to us. In the meantime, other land was identified,” Mutagamba explained.

Critics said razing part of Mabira would have threatened rare species, dried up a watershed for streams that feed Lake Victoria and removed a crucial buffer against pollution of the lake from two industrial towns.

Scientists estimate some 20 percent of net global emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that causes climate change, are the result of deforestation, because trees suck carbon from the atmosphere.

Experts say Mabira sinks millions of tonnes of carbon.

This was the second time the government has heeded public anger over plans to trash forests — in May, it withdrew a license to Kenyan company, Bidco, to bulldoze a protected forest on an island in Lake Victoria to plant palm oil.

A spokesman for President Museveni, Tamale Mirundi, said new land would have to be secured for the sugarcane.

Mutagamba said land had been spotted but the complex, semi-feudal system of land ownership meant the government would have to buy the land itself from small-holders.

“We want to encourage investors to do this kind of business. They can’t start negotiating with 30,000 farmers.”

The government is trying to draw up maps of land available to investors in Uganda for sectors like coffee, sugar, manufacturing or tourism that do not encroach on forests.

Source: http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/44876/story.htm

By Stephen Leahy

BROOKLIN, Canada, Oct 20 (IPS) - A raft of new studies reveal European and American multibillion dollar support for biofuels is unsustainable, environmentally destructive and much more about subsidising agri-business corporations than combating global warming.

Not only do most forms of biofuel production do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, growing biofuel crops uses up precious water resources, increasing the size and extent of dead zones in the oceans, boosting use of toxic pesticides and deforestation in tropical countries, such studies say.

And biofuel, powered by billions of dollars in government subsidies, will drive food prices 20-40 percent higher between now and 2020, predicts the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.

“Fuel made from food is a dumb idea to put it succinctly,” says Ronald Steenblik, research director at the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Biofuel production in the U.S. and Europe is just another way of subsidising big agri-business corporations, Steenblik told IPS.

“It’s (biofuel) also a distraction from dealing with the real problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he asserts.

Making fuel out of corn, soy, oilseeds and sugar crops is also incredibly expensive, Steenblik and his co-authors document in two new reports on the U.S. and the European Union that are part of a series titled ‘Biofuels at What Cost? Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel’.

Their analysis shows that by 2006 government support for biofuels had reached 11 billion dollars a year for Organisation of Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) countries. More than 90 percent of those subsidies came from the European Union and the U.S.

These subsidies will likely climb to 13-15 billion dollars this year the report estimates.

“More subsidies are coming as the biofuel industry expands,” says Steenblik.

In fact, countries will have to spend more than 100 billion dollars a year to get biofuel production levels high enough to supply 25 or 30 percent of transport fuel demands.

And those levels of annual subsidies will have to continue because the industry is dependent on them, he says.

It might be worth it if biofuels resulted in significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) but Steenblik calculates the amount of subsidies that goes into making enough ethanol to reduce emissions equivalent of a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) is between 2,100 to 4,400 euros (2,980 to 6,240 dollars) depending on the support programmes.

However, the European carbon trading markets sells a similar saved or sequestered tonne of CO2 for less than 25 euros (35 dollars) through various projects like planting trees or installing solar panels.

Various analysis that take the full environmental costs of growing, shipping and processing maize into ethanol show there is only a small reduction in GHG emissions over burning fossil fuels. Newer research shows some biofuels could even be far worse.

Rapeseed biodiesel and maize ethanol may produce up to 70 percent and 50 percent more GHG emissions respectively than fossil fuels, according to work published in September by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and University of Edinburgh colleague Keith Smith.

They found that growing biofuel crops releases around twice the amount of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) than previously thought. The N2O results from using nitrogen fertilisers.

About 80 percent of Europe’s biodiesel comes from rapeseed and in America the vast majority is maize ethanol.

“What we are saying is that growing biofuels is probably of no benefit and in fact is actually making the climate issue worse,” Smith has said in media reports.

Last January, U.S. President George W. Bush set a biofuel target of 35 billion gallons per year by 2017, more than five times the current production of less than 7 billion gallons.

However that target would leave some U.S. waterways polluted and some regions with severe water shortages the National Research Council (NRC) said in a report released this month. The NRC is the research arm of the US National Academy of Sciences.

The additional fertilisers used to grow all that maize will contribute to the overgrowth of aquatic plant life that produces “dead zones” like those in the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere, the report said.

Similar water warnings were issued by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Sri Lanka regarding India and China’s growing interest in biofuels. IWMI, part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, recommends in its October report that the two countries invest in cellulosic biofuel the so-called second generation biofuel technology that is still a number of years from commercialisation.

“Subsidies for ethanol are more about securing votes from the powerful agricultural lobby than bringing environmental benefits,” says Walter Hook, executive director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, an environmental NGO based in New York City.

Simple and cheap programmes like a congestion charge – an extra fee for driving in city centres – and the widely successful Paris, France free bike programme reduce air pollution and GNG emissions immediately at very low cost, Hook said in an interview.

Launched in July, Paris put thousands of low-cost rental bikes – the first 30 minutes of use are free – at hundreds of high-tech bicycle stations. A million trips were taken in just 17 days. “Absolutely amazing, every city should be thinking of doing this,” he said.

In Paris, an advertising company provides the bikes for free, runs the system, gives all the revenue to the city and pays 4.3 million dollars a year in exchange for exclusive control of the city’s advertising billboards.

Mobility – getting from A to B – with the minimum of GHG emissions is the core problem we should be addressing not finding greener fuels, says Steenblik.

Indeed, Canadian transportation analyst Todd Alexander Litman has demonstrated greener fuels and improvements in fuel efficiency result in people driving more because they can afford to. And that just makes “traffic congestion, accidents, road and parking facility costs, and the lack of options for non-drivers worse,” said Litman, director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, in British Columbia, Canada.

In his ‘Win-Win Transportation Solutions’ report released in September, Litman documents a variety of cost-effective transportation strategies that could reduce motor vehicle travel by 30-50 percent, produce substantial reductions in GHGs and bring a range of economic developments. His simple solutions include making urban areas more walkable, creating bike lanes, improving the quality of mass transit and a dozen more ideas. None involved producing more biofuels.

“Subsidising biofuels is just about the dumbest way to go,” Litman told IPS.

Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, uses stronger language: increasing biofuel production is a “total disaster” for starving people, he told a Swiss media outlet last week.

“There are serious risks of creating a battle between food and fuel that will leave the poor and hungry in developing countries at the mercy of rapidly rising prices for food, land and water,” Ziegler warned the UN General Assembly last August.

On Oct. 25, he will ask the UN General Assembly, to adopt a five-year global ban on the conversion of land for the production of biofuels.

Despite the growing evidence that biofuels are a huge mistake, governments will continue to pour billions more tax dollars into boosting production levels.

“Governments rarely phase out subsidies,” laments Steenblik. “We’re hoping that countries will come to their senses in the next few years.”

Source: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39740

Ridwan Max Sijabat, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta 19th October 2007

Instead of begging rich countries for forestry projects, the government should instead increase the Indonesian Military (TNI) and National Police budgets to stop rampant illegal logging.

Gandjar Pranowo, a member of the forestry and agriculture commission at the House of Representatives, and Elfian Effendi, executive director of Greenomics Indonesia, spoke to The Jakarta Post separately Thursday about illegal logging.

They said the government investigation into illegal logging in timber estates — allegedly involving pulp and paper mills — was carried out to cover up even worse illegal logging activities in conservation forests and national parks, particularly in Sumatra and Kalimantan.

“I agree with the idea of raising the TNI and police budgets to prevent any involvement in illegal logging practices in protected forests and national parks,” Gandjar said.

He said the financial losses from illegal logging amounted to some US$400 billion annually; a figure ample enough to increase both the defense and security sector budgets.

The government has raised the 2008 defense budget to Rp 40 trillion from Rp 32 trillion this fiscal year, but the figure is still far below the minimum budget of Rp 100 trillion.

The budget deficit has been worsened by the government take-over of all military business to develop the TNI into a more professional force, as mandated by the Law on Military.

Gandjar slammed both the government and the House for the lack of political innovation and breakthroughs to provide sufficient funding for the military and police force.

Elfian said with its vast conservation forests, Indonesia had become an environmental donor in neutralizing the large amount of carbon dioxide produced by industrialized countries, particularly by the U.S. and China.

“Indonesia, with a total of some 110 million hectares of forest area, including 26.5 million hectares of protected forests and national parks, donates $530 billion annually to absorb carbon dioxide, which has been blamed for global warming and climate change,” he said.

However, he said despite Indonesia’s strong bargaining power, the government was in a difficult position since illegal logging had made areas of the country prone to ecological disasters such as landslides, floods and forest fires.

Meanwhile, Muhammad Chalid, executive director of the Indonesian Environmental Forum, said the government should introduce a regulation in lieu of a law to halt illegal logging and prove to the world Indonesia was serious about preventing global warming.

“This is more concrete and realistic for Indonesia than hosting the global environmental summit in Bali in December, which many doubt will be able to provide concrete solutions to the issue,” he said.

Chalid said Indonesia’s top priority should not be supporting the carbon trade or the reduced carbon from environmental deterioration and degradation (REDD) program at the Bali summit.

He said saving people by preventing ecological disasters and forest fires was far more important than carbon trading.

Source: The Jakarta Post

Oct. 20th 2007

My name is Patrick, I’m a filmmaker dedicated to conservation. I’ve been in Nyaru Menteng for the last two weeks. The other day an orangutan broke into my room and ram sacked the place. It looked like in the movies when the bad guys trash an apartment because they didn’t find what they were looking for. At first I was upset and felt the unpleasant sensation that my privacy had been broken into, but as I was cleaning the place up I realized that everyday we, as humans, are destroying the orangutans’ homes in a much more devastating way. Most of the forest around here has been wiped out. Indonesia has the highest rate of deforestation in the world, the highest number of species threatened with extinction. Here I am feeling upset that my room was broken into but what can the orangutans possibly “feel” about seeing bulldozers trash there homes?

Nobody knows the answer to that question, but surely the orangutans are suffering. In the last two weeks, I have spent a lot time with Sandra, an adult female orangutan who was rescued from a palm oil plantation last year. She’s not doing well right now. She’s in the clinic. All the time I spend by her bedside, looking at her silently, I have the impression she’s going through a lot of pain, not physical pain, but something closer to “emotional” pain. As if she had nightmares, as if she had horrible things going on in her mind. I don’t know what goes in the mind of an orangutan, but the more I spend time with Sandra, the more I feel that another form of consciousness is looking at me.

If nothing is done, our generation will be responsible for the extinction of the last wild orangutans: a small error for man but a great shame for humanity. We are all responsible for this, so if we want to save the forest (and the orangutans) we must all act now. We must stop supporting the industries that thrive on deforestation: We must stop buying tropical hardwood, as well as plywood and paper made from tropical wood. We must stop consuming all products that contain palm oil from Indonesia or Malaysia. We must refuse the development of bio-diesel from palm oil. We must all do something.

For the last five years, I’ve been trying my best to help the forest through filmmaking. This is my way of doing something active. The last film I did in Indonesia is called “Losing Tomorrow” which was then screened in schools and villages in Sumatra. From these screenings I did another small film called “Dear Mr. President”, asking the president of Indonesia to do something about illegal logging and deforestation. Today, I have received confirmation that the President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yunodo, has indeed seen the film “Dear Mr. President”. I do not know how he reacted to the screening, or if his viewing the film will make the slightest difference for the forest of Indonesia, but at least the message was recorded, delivered and received.

If there are any of you who would like to screen “Losing Tomorrow” and “Dear Mr. President” in schools or any free assembly, please let me know and I will make sure to send you a copy. The more people become aware of the situation here, the better.

My mail: patrickrouxel@hotmail.com

Website: www.patrickrouxel.fr

Programme airs 20th and 21st October, on BBC World
http://www.bbcworld.com/Pages/Schedules.aspx?

World Challenge 2007 is a competition aimed at finding individuals or groups who have shown enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.

This global competition seeks out projects and businesses that not only make a profit, but also put something back into the community. The competition is all about rewarding individuals or groups that truly make a difference through enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.

The programmes will feature the twelve finalists whose innovative projects or ideas are benefiting communities socially, environmentally or financially.

Viewers will have the chance to vote online and pick the winner who will be featured on a special programme from the Awards ceremony shown on December 8th. The winner will receive a US$20,000 award to benefit their project, while two runners-up will each receive $10,000.

To vote for Dr Smits’s project, please go to http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/voteform.php and click on Steaming Ahead.

About the project: Steaming Ahead

Extracting the sugar from sugar palm requires a good deal of heat. For the farmers of Tomohon, a mountainous region of Indonesia, timber was the obvious source. Seeing the damage being done to his beloved rainforest, conservation expert Dr Willie Smits hooked the palm farmers up with a local geothermal power project. He established a factory that uses waste steam from the power plant to heat the sugar palm sap. The resulting high-quality product is now being successfully exported – with all profits going direct to the farmers’ cooperative. Some 6285 poor farmers and their families are now benefiting from the project, and around 200,000 square metres of forest have been preserved. Dr Smits believes his business model could serve throughout Indonesia as a sustainable alternative to the destructive Palm Oil trade.

Note from the Director of Orangutan Outreach:
If you care about orangutans, this project offers a solution that can not only impact the lives of orangutans but countless other species that depend upon the rainforest, including humans. Alternatives to the currently unsustainable production of palm oil are essential to saving the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, the only places where orangutans live in the wild. Please vote.

October 20, 2007

A YEAR ago, Australian-born Temara became the first zoo-bred Sumatran orang-utan to be released into the wild.

Along with others who have also been returned to the forest, she is part of a last-ditch attempt to save the critically endangered Sumatran orang-utan, of which there are just 7000 left in the wild.

Indonesia’s rainforests are being razed at an alarming rate and experts predict the red-haired ape and its habitat could be gone within 20 years.

It has been a year since Temara, who was born and raised at Perth Zoo, was transported to a release station close to Bukit Tiga Puluh National Park — a dense 144,000ha rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

She was coping, but had a lot to learn about surviving in the wild, said Sumatran Orang-utan Conservation Program project director Peter Pratje, of the Frankfurt Zoological Society.

Keepers monitor Temara from dawn to dusk.

Keeper Herman said she was the “most spoiled” orang-utan in the park, home to about 100 of the apes — many rescued from amusement parks and people who had taken them as pets.

Mr Pratje said Temara was thriving but still had things to learn.

“If she is getting in touch with the other orang-utans, she usually starts by giving them a slap. She has a kind of rough approach, so that scares the little orang-utans off,” he says.

He hopes Temara will find a mate and have a baby, although she hasn’t proven to be “very inviting” so far.

Because she was introduced to the park as an adult, at 14, she had a lot of catching up to do, he said.

–AAP

Photo caption/credit: Grabbing an orange, Australian-born Temara, the first zoo-bred Sumatran orang-utan to be released into the wild, has to develop her social skills. Picture: AAP
Source: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22615557-663,00.html

Story by Andrew Stern
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

The remaining 62,000 orangutans in the wild could be wiped out within decades as forests in their Asian island habitat are decimated by loggers and palm oil farmers, conservationists said on Thursday.

American zookeepers met this week at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo with conservationists working on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra to sort through problems faced by the red-haired Asian apes and find solutions.

“There are quick and easy things everyone can do,” said Ian Singleton, director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program on the Indonesian island, home to 6,700 of the critically endangered fruit-eating animals, distinctive for their thoughtful dispositions, strength, and lion-like mating call. Borneo, shared by Malaysia and Indonesia, is home to 55,000 orangutans.

“Don’t play into stereotypes when buying a (greeting) card with an orangutan with his hair teased up. Education is one of the strongest components and one of the best ways forward,” Singleton said.

Zoos can play a role educating the public to purchase foods or biodiesel fuel made only with sustainable palm oil, rather than from palm oil from plantations carved out of newly cut forests, Singleton and other experts said.

Do not buy furniture — even toothpicks — made from tropical hardwoods that is not certified, which could mean it was harvested illegally inside areas designated as “protected,” they said.

And drop a contribution into zoo collection boxes destined for underfunded conservation efforts, they said.

“American zoos receive 180 million visitors a year — an astonishing number of people. If all those people put in $1,” current funding of a few million dollars from The World Bank and other donors would be multiplied, said Serge Wich, who surveys orangutan populations for the Great Ape Trust.

ALARMING RATES

The decline of orangutan populations has been “rapid,” Wich said, though figures are hard to come by, and their remaining habitat is shrinking at alarming rates.

A report earlier this year from the United Nations’ Environment Program said Indonesia’s forest habitat for orangutans may be gone by 2022 without intervention.

According to conservationists, a license granted to cut down select trees is often followed by illegal clear-cutting, with palm oil planting close behind.

Male orangutans usually flee the area, but females, with their young, often stay behind and may be killed and their infants kidnapped for the pet trade. Hundreds of orangutans are rescued and taken to temporary sanctuaries, hopefully to be reintroduced into the wild.

Many attending the workshops expressed outrage at the exploitation for entertainment of the intelligent apes, which can grow to 300 pounds (136 kg) with a 7-foot (2.13-metre) armspan — which often triggers demand for orangutans as pets.

“Orangutans and other great apes are not the only thing we are trying to protect here. These species stand for integrity of forests and ecosystems,” Wich said.

The few hundred remaining Sumatran tigers, as well as elephants, languors, gibbons, and many other rare species are also threatened.

Wich said fires raged again last year over vast peat forests drained by canals that were dug on the islands a decade ago, further crimping orangutan habitat and releasing large storehouses of greenhouse gases.

Balancing the needs of impoverished local human populations on the islands against the animals’ needs is a challenge, the experts said.

But government officials at both the national and local level have taken up the environmental cause, though they often lack the tools to direct development away from forested land.

“They don’t have computers, they don’t have satellite imagery of their own areas,” Singleton said. “If you want them to not put palm oil estates on high-value forests, they have to know where they are.”

BROOKFIELD ZOO (Chicago) | Experts say rain forests cleared for popular product

October 19, 2007
BY ANDREW HERRMANN Staff Reporter

Studies conflict on the health benefits of palm oil, but experts meeting at the Brookfield Zoo said Thursday it’s bad for one species: orangutans.

The animals’ natural habitats, island rain forests in Southeast Asia, are being cleared in order to harvest the wood and make land available for palm oil production.

Palm oil — used in foods such as crackers, frozen dinners and popcorn, as well as some cosmetics — is high in saturated fat but has been touted as low in trans fat.

An estimated one in 10 supermarket products contains palm oil, and now there is a growing demand for the product for use in biofuels.

Rather than advising boycotts of products using palm oil, the experts meeting at the zoo touted firms that use the oil produced on environmentally sensitive plantations.

The world’s largest tree-dwelling mammals, orangutans are currently found only on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

Ian Singleton of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Program estimated there are only about 6,700 in Sumatra and 55,000 in Borneo — down from 83,000 and 230,000 respectively a century ago.

Orangutan males stand more than 5 feet tall and weigh more than 200 pounds. They use extra-long arms, which can measure 6 feet, and hook-like feet to move from tree to tree.

Finding those trees can be a problem.

Orangutans have lost about 80 percent of their habitat in the last 20 years, and some researchers believe that orangutans in the wild may face extinction in as little as a decade.

Serge Wich, an orangutan researcher from Sumatra and the keynote speaker at the Brookfield gathering, which drew more than 100 experts from around the world, complained of “cowboy operators” in Indonesia who unconsciously clear-cut forests to feed the exploding market for palm oil, which is made from the palm tree’s seeds and fruit.

Urging consumers to use “sustainable yield brands,” produced by firms that are careful in plantation operations, Brookfield Zoo conservation biologist Robert Lacy noted, “Orangutans can’t do a very job speaking for themselves.”

Forest-friendly brands
The Orangutan Conservancy touts these “sustainable yield brands” that use oil from environmentally sensitive operations:

FOOD
ACT II
Amora
Banquet
Becel
Bertolli
Birds Eye
Blue Band
Butterball
Cadbury
Schweppes
Chef Boyardee
ConAgra
Country Crock
Egg Beaters
Ferrero
Healthy Choice
Hebrew National
Hellmann’s
Hunt’s
Keebler
Kellogg’s
Knorr
Lipton
Newman’s Own Organics
Orville
PAM
Peter Pan
Ready Crisp
ReddiWip
Slim Jom
Slim-Fast
Snack Pack
Spectrum Organica
Swiss Miss
Van Camp’s
Wesson
Wish Bone
PERSONAL CARE
AXE
Dove
Pond’s
Signal
Sunsilk
The Body Shop
Unilever
Vaseline

Photo information:
A pair of Orangutans at the Brookfield Zoo. (By Rich Hein/Sun-Times)

Source: http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/610831,CST-NWS-orangutan19.article#