You are currently browsing the Orangutan Outreach archives for March, 2008 .
Solenn Honorine is a French journalist based in Jakarta. She’s the correspondent for Radio France Internationale there, as well as for the French daily newspaper Le Figaro. She met with Lone Droscher Nielsen last October when she was working on a piece about orangutans. Listen to the interview here or here.
Source: http://jaksnaps.blogspot.com/2008/03/orangutan-life.html
By Paul Eccleston
19/03/2008
The Telegraph
Garden centres and online suppliers are unwittingly helping fuel the illicit trade in timber from threatened rainforests, an undercover investigation claims.
Convoy of log trucks wait to cross the Laos-Vietnam border (top) and Laos customs officials watch convoy of illegal logs cross border to Vietnam
Log trucks wait to cross the Laos-Vietnam border (top) and Laos customs officials watch illegal logs cross border to Vietnam
Vietnam has become a clearing house for illegally logged hardwood timber from neighbouring Laos which it claims ends up as outdoor furniture in Britain.
Despite public pledges by governments to crackdown on the trade it is still ‘business as usual’ for criminal gangs who are stripping precious tropical forests for a quick profit.
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), which is dedicated to exposing crimes against wildlife and the environment, and its conservation partner Telapak, claim Vietnam’s wood processing industry is threatening the last intact forests in the Mekong region, especially those in neighbouring Laos.
Since the mid-1990s, Vietnam has taken steps to conserve its remaining forests but at the same time has hugely expanded its wooden furniture production industry. Last year the industry was worth $2.4bn - a staggering 10-fold increase since 2000.
The EIA report says illegal timber constitutes “a significant part” of the imported raw materials supplying Vietnam’s furniture factories with traders from Thailand and Singapore also involved.
And until important markets in the EU and US clean up their act and shut their markets to wood products made from illegal timber the loss of vital tropical forests will continue.
advertisement
As some traditional wood-producing countries like Indonesia took steps to combat illegal logging the trade in stolen timber had shifted and Vietnam - which in the late 1990s was caught importing illegal timber from neighbouring Cambodia - has become the new hub of the trade.
New evidence from the EIA/Telapak investigation reveals that Vietnam is exploiting the forests of neighbouring Laos to obtain valuable hardwoods, such as yellow balau and keruing, for its outdoor furniture industry in direct contravention of laws in Laos banning the export of logs and sawn timber.
Some Vietnamese businesses also continue to buy illegally exported Indonesian logs from Malaysian dealers who can arrange for paperwork declaring the logs to be Malaysian.
Last year undercover investigators visited numerous furniture factories and found the majority to be using logs from Laos.
In the Vietnamese port of Vinh, they witnessed piles of huge logs from Laos awaiting sale. At the border crossing of Naphao, 45 trucks laden with logs were seen lining up on the Laos side waiting to cross into Vietnam.
EIA/Telapak estimate that at least 500,000 cubic metres of logs move from Laos to Vietnam every year.
A logging tuck loaded with illegally cut timber
A logging tuck loaded with illegally cut timber
The report alleges the plundering of Laos’ forests involves high-level corruption and bribery and investigators met with one Thai businessman who bragged of paying bribes to senior Laos military officials to secure supplies of timber worth potentially half a billion dollars.
The cost of the illicit trade was being borne by poor rural communities in Laos who were dependent on the forests for their traditional livelihoods. They gained nothing from the trade with the money going instead to corrupt officials in Laos and businesses in Vietnam and Thailand.
EIA’s head of Forests Campaign, Julian Newman, said: “The ultimate responsibility for this dire state of affairs rests with the consumer markets with import wood products made from stolen timber.”
“Until these states clean up their act and shut their markets to illegal wood products, the loss of precious tropical forests will continue unabated.”
EIA/Telapak called for better enforcement by the timber-producing and processing countries and new laws banning the import of products and timber derived from illegal logging in the EU and US.
The report names the Blackpool-based Transcontinental group as an importer of garden furniture which it supplies to garden centres, retailers and internet traders under the ‘Suntime’ brand. It says that while the company mainly trades in certified eucalyptus outdoor furniture it also sells keruing garden products.
Investigations in Vietnam revealed that Transcontinental are supplied with wooden furniture by Hoang Phat Co., Ltd., where staff informed EIA that they bought keruing round logs smuggled illegally out of Laos.
The company’s Marketing Manager, Mr David Jones, said: “We don’t have our own people in Vietnam but we are FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) accredited and we spend a lot of time making sure our wood comes from the right sources.”
And sales manager Andrew Fox said: “We can refute absolutely what is being claimed. We only take a eucalyptus product from Hoang Phat and not the keruing and balau which EIA is claiming. We have full chain-of-custody which we are happy to show.”
One of the internet companies named in the report, www.Greenfingers.com of Livingston, Scotland said they would never knowingly source products from illegally logged wood and always sought out sustainably sourced timber.
General Manager Moira Peterson said: “Specifically with Transcontinental we have significantly reduced the wooden product ranges we run with them. We had, however, received verbal assurances from them of the Chain-of-Custody of the products we continue to run.
“Before 2006 they were one of our principal suppliers of wooden furniture but now provide us with a only a tiny fraction of our range. If these allegations are true and the timber is illegally logged, then we will immediately remove the products from sale.”
Another internet company named - BBQs2go based in Ware, Hertfordshire, said they had not sold any furniture supplied by Transcontinental since July last year.
Managing Director of parent company Deans Furnishers Ltd Dean Ambridge, said: “If these allegations are true we will remove the products from ourwebsite. We wouldn’t supply any furniture that came from unsustainable sources.”
Mr Stephen Thorp Managing Director of another internet company named in the report, Your Price Furniture.co.uk Limited, of High Peak Derbyshire said:
“As a tiny family run business buying only five or six containers per year, we are under the impression that the FSC chain of custody certification system is there to ensure that the timber used in manufacture originates from renewable resources.
“We have to rely on the relevant authorities’ and organisations such as the FSC to provide certification that the factories we buy from are operating responsibly in their timber sourcing.”
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/03/19/eaviet119.xml
In December 2007, a spokesperson for the Forestry Ministry told The Jakarta Post that since the 1970s, about 3,000 orangutans had been killed every year.
Government departments when dealing with this issue are notoriously economical with the truth, so it is fair to say their estimate is likely to be on the low side.
That is about 100,000 orangutans and countless millions of other animals and birds sacrificed in the name of progress, or to me more precise to make a few people very, very rich.
A good start would be for the government itself to immediately stop selling licenses to palm oil companies permitting them to cut down rainforests and in doing so, kill orangutans, a legally protected species.
Mr. President, the world is watching you. Do you really want to be remembered as the President who could have taken action to stop orangutans, Indonesia’s most famous and revered species, from becoming extinct, but who chose not to?
Is it also not about time your government began to enforce the Kinshasha Declaration for Great Apes, an agreement you entered into in 2005 but have so far totally ignored? If you cannot be trusted to implement that agreement, why should anyone trust anything you said in Bali last December?
SEAN WHYTE
Chief Executive
Nature Alert
England, UK
Source: The Jakarta Post
Gibbons need love, too! A number of species of gibbons face extinction throughout the dwindling forests of South East Asia. Efforts to protect the gibbons and the orangutans go hand in hand in securing the biodiversity of this region. ~ Rich
By Arwa Damon
CNN - 18 March 2008
CNN’s Arwa Damon visited a national park in West Java, part of Indonesia, on March 7, and reports on her experience with scientists working to save the habitat of the endangered gibbon species.
WEST JAVA, Indonesia (CNN) — Primatologist Dr. Jatna Supriatna scans the treetops in a national park on the island of Java, looking for gibbons. This area is home to about 150 of the remaining 4,000 Java gibbons. These highly acrobatic creatures are easy prey on the ground and live well above it in the jungle canopy.
“They like the trees here, the fruit from the trees, so sometimes they are here,” Supriatna says softly, as we trek through the natural beauty with midday light streaming through the foliage.
“This is keystone to the gibbons. You can’t kill the trees” he continues emphatically, pointing out the dainty figs that are a staple part of the gibbons’ diet.
But that’s exactly what’s going on. Indonesia has the shameful distinction of holding the “highest deforestation” title in the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records, destroying an estimated 300 soccer fields of forest every hour.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, these shy and elusive creatures are the most endangered of all ape species.
“They don’t have any too big a natural enemy, but encroachment,” Supriatna explains.
Through the foliage we can see the electrical towers from the human communities, slowly eating away at what’s left of this protected land.
Baby gibbons are also subject to illegal poaching because they are considered cute pets and, according to Supriatna, selling for thousands of dollars on the black market.
“They kill the mother because they want to have the baby,” Supriatna says. “So if they kill the mother, there is no chance for survival of the population, of the gibbon.”
In a project run by Conservation International, primatologists are trying to rehabilitate gibbons they saved from people’s homes. UuUu, a 7-year-old female, is tranquilized and gently moved to the “introduction cage.”
Because gibbons live in family groups, her only chance of survival in the wild is with a mate. As she sits hunched over in a corner, drooling and smacking her lips from the effect of the drugs, in the neighboring cage, Kiss Kiss, a male, emits low whimpers, a visible sign of his agitation. VideoWatch the effort to get the pair to mate »
UuUu slowly shakes off the drugs and groggily clambers on the fencing.
“They will spend at least a week watching each other,” Supriatna explains laughing. “Not like humans. They have to invest a lot in the pairing because when they are in nature, they have to find the right guy for the female because their entire life, they will be there. It’s not like they can choose one and just move to the other.”
For this species, there are no one-night stands. And Kiss Kiss can attest to just how picky female gibbons can be. He was already rejected by a female he spent six months with.
In the five years since this project began, there have only been three successful couplings, between the 16 gibbons at the center. So far no couples have been introduced back into the wild. Not only do the primatologists have to get the pairs to mate, but they also have to teach them vital lessons about their diet. For these gibbons that were snatched from the wild, nature can be poisonous.
This makes preserving those already there even more important. Gibbons are a vital part of this already fragile ecosystem, crucial to seed distribution and the health of the ecosystem. Supriatna warns that changing the balance of nature will cause disasters.
In the distance, as the afternoon rains start to roll in, we can hear the gibbon’s melodic song. Supriatna’s picks out the male-female duet.
“Listen, the female [is] usually singing a little bit longer and louder.”
The haunting melody gets louder, but the gibbon pair it’s coming from isn’t close enough for us to see. But its easy to imagine them deftly swinging through the canopy. And the realization sets in, that the gibbon song, like the nature we hear it in, risks being a thing of the past.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/03/16/java.gibbon.impact/index.html
By Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery
web posted March 17, 2008
Please visit the source of this article: Source: http://www.enterstageright.com/
The World Food Program is preparing to ration food aid for the world’s hungriest poor. Why? Primarily because we’re burning food in our automobiles. The rich-country mandates for biofuels have doubled and tripled world food prices in less than three years.
The World Food Program’s costs are rising by millions of dollars per week and the donations aren’t, warns WFP executive director Josette Sheeran. The WFP is trying to feed more than 70 million people in 78 countries with voluntary contributions—but now can’t afford to keep its agreed-upon commitments.
World corn prices are above $5 a bushel, up from $1.86 three years ago. Prices for wheat, soybeans, rice and even cotton are rising as they’re crowded out of field space by biofuel crops. Pakistan says it will reimpose food rationing for the first time since the 1980s. China’s food inflation rate is 18.2 percent, and the Chinese have blocked further expansion of their fledgling biofuel program.
Oxfam points out that the poor in the Third World must often spend 60-80 percent of their incomes for food, so the price increases are a drastic threat to their well-being.
In Yemen, the prices of mostly-imported bread and other staples have nearly doubled in recent months, with at least a dozen people killed in food riots.
The underweight proportion of the world’s children under five had dropped by 20 percent since 1990—but that vital progress may now be reversed by the biofuel subsidies. Meanwhile, while U.S. and European officials stubbornly insist that burning millions of tons of corn, sugar and palm oil in our gas tanks has nothing to do with the soaring prices of farm commodities.
“The fundamental cause is high income growth, ” claims Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute. He blames increased meat consumption in such high-growth nations as China and India. But both those big countries have largely supplied their own grain and meat increases over the past 15 years.
The commodity-savvy Financial Times is more realistic. “Biofuels will not feed the hungry,” it warned in a recent editorial. “. . . the biggest structural change [in food pricing] is biofuels. In the space of a few years, the U.S. has diverted about 40 million tonnes of maize to produce bioethanol—about 4 percent of global production of coarse grains. That rapid growth is largely the result of subsidies—which must halt. The environmental benefits of maize biofuel are ambiguous at best and it should not be favored over growing maize for food.”
The same should be said, of course, about the EU’s new commitment to provide 10 percent of its transport fuel from land-hungry biofuels, grown both in the EU countries and imported from such species-rich environments as Indonesia and Thailand. One of the great apes, the orangutan, is directly threatened by palm oil plantations because the apes love to eat the palm seedlings. Thousands of orangutans have been captured and killed because the palm oil plantations are an “attractive biofuel nuisance.”
U.S. corn farmers raised a record amount of grain last summer—but one-third of it is going into ethanol plants to “cure our addiction to foreign oil.” That corn will produce perhaps 10 billion gallons of ethanol—but nets out to just 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre. That’s after subtracting the nitrogen fertilizer, the diesel fuel, the process heat for the ethanol plants—and ethanol’s 35 percent fewer Btu’s of energy per gallon.
Match 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre against America’s annual demand for 135 billion gallons of gasoline! If we doubled corn yields, we’d still not achieve much “energy independence.” Nor would we feed the hungry.
Dennis T. Avery is a senior fellow for Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and is the Director for Center for Global Food Issues (www.cgfi.org). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. Alex A. Avery is the Director of Research at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues.
Source: http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0308/0308biofuel.htm
Dominic Monaghan talking to Lana Parilla, star of ABC’s “Lost”, and NBC’s “Boomtown” and “Windfall”.
13 March 2008
LOST star DOMINIC MONAGHAN has embraced his artistic side by opening his own photography exhibition.
‘Happy Accidents’, which will be on display from today in West Hollywood, features pictures of his famous co stars from LOST and the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy.
Recognisable faces in the shots include MATTHEW FOX and JOSH HOLLOWAY, who play Jack and Sawyer in LOST, ELIJAH WOOD, SIR IAN MCKELLEN and BILLY BOYD - who played Monaghan’s fellow hobbit Pippin in the three LORD OF THE RINGS films.
Speaking about his exhibition, Monaghan told Ireland Online: “Happy Accidents refers to those moments where you don’t expect what is going to happen, but it ends up being something good.”
Monaghan is currently filming scenes for the upcoming Wolverine movie.
He plays Barnell Bohusk - a mutant with the ability to manipulate electricity who befriends HUGH JACKMAN’s Wolverine.
Meanwhile, the actor recently announced that he is planning an expedition to the African jungle in a bid to locate the world’s largest spider - the Hercules Baboon.
If he is successful he will earn himself an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Reptile and insect-lover Dominic plans to take along a crew of people for the adventure.
The Hercules baboon has not been seen since the early 1990s when it was spotted in Nigeria.
20% of the proceeds from the exhibition will go to support the Nyaru Menteng project.
Source: http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/lost%20star%20exhibits%20photos%20of%20co-stars_1062530
A private London-based art collection has bought 22 works from orangutans at the Krefeld Zoo in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Sita, Tilda, and Sandra, three female orangutans from the zoo painted the works of art, which sold for a total of €3,200, according to a statement released by the city of Krefeld on Monday. Two-thirds of the proceeds will go to the zoo for the construction of a new €1-million primate habitat.
Düsseldorf art agency Fundart-21 markets the paintings as a fundraising project called “affenBRUT,” said agency founder Heinz Hachel. The agency actively engages the question of whether art created by primates actually deserves to be called “art,” but Hachel says the works are, at the very least, an expression of “rudimentary aesthetic competence.” The fascination for these paintings, Hachel said, lies in the way they exhibit the roots of human aesthetics and creativity. Each painting sells for between €100 and €900, and some 40 have sold since October, 2007.
The contemporary art collection wishes to remain anonymous, which, according to the statement, “is not unusual in these circles.”
For people who have had the pleasure of seeing an orangutan in real life it is no surprise – but now scientists have made it clear: Feelings and responses like empathy, laughter and imitation do not only belong to humans but also our red-haired relatives.
Observations of orangutans made by scientists at the University of Portsmouth show that orangutans’ way of interacting with other relatives remind us so much of ourselves that there is good reason to believe that the apes had the feelings first.
For Lone Dröscher Nielsen the discovery is not new; it is a daily experience at the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Center.
”Deep down I believe that people always knew it,” Lone says. “If they closed their eyes. If they admitted that the orangutans have feelings like humans, they would not be able to live with their fate and what we humans do to them”.
The empathetic abilities of the red apes are clearly seen in Lone’s daily routine.
“If one of the orangutan girls is being bothered by one of the male ‘bandits’ they all gang up to help the victim. Not a long time age Yasmin was captured by Hamlet and then they all joined together to save her. And the interesting thing was that the females were the most aggressive – as if they could imagine how Yasmin was feeling. A sort of woman-to-woman-thing,” Lone says with a laugh.
That animals are working in groups is not new, but for orangutans it is not quite normal. They are by nature not group animals. Their social ability of familiarizing themselves makes it possible for them to put themselves in somebody’s place and empathize with them.
The studies from University of Portsmouth show that distinct expressions were picked up and copied by 25 orangutans at four different places.
Lone Dröscher Nielsen also experienced this. “If a young one watches another young one doing something getting people laughing, it imitates the first one. Exactly like small children,” she says. “And they also laugh when they are being tickled.”
Source: Borneo Orangutan Survival
Photos © Borneo Orangutan Survival
By the Mercury News
03/15/2008
Remember the old days, when cell phones didn’t have cameras and couldn’t surf the Web? Maybe you have a drawer full of those useless antiques.
Happy Hollow Park & Zoo would be happy to take care of those phones, and your pagers, too. And on one day in April, it will accept other electronic waste.
Happy Hollow recycles the phones and pagers, and all proceeds are donated to the Orangutan Conservancy, said Vanessa Rogier, events manager.
Happy Hollow has collected more than 11,000 phones and raised more than $13,000 for orangutans since the program started in 2003.
Rogier said orangutans are critically endangered. Recycling the phones also helps reduce electronic waste.
Phones can be dropped off at the Happy Hollow entrance from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily or mailed: Happy Hollow Park & Zoo, Cell Phone Recycle Program, 1300 Senter Road, San Jose, Calif., 95112.
On April 5, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., the zoo will have a free electronic waste collection. Proceeds will be sent to Wildlife Direct, which works to save mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic Congo from extinction.
Items that will be accepted include computers, computer monitors, keyboards, DVD/VCR players and copiers. For more information, call (408) 277-4193 or go to www.hhpz.org for a map to the collection site.
Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/homeandgarden/ci_8583190?nclick_check=1
OfficeMax provides a good night’s sleep for Auckland Zoo orangutans
Friday, 14 March 2008, 1:58 pm
Press Release: OfficeMax
Orang utans Madju and Melur are enjoying a great night’s sleep on fresh shredded paper this week thanks to a commitment to paper recycling by OfficeMax.
The office supplies company has begun donating its shredded paper to Auckland Zoo, where the primates are housed.
As part of its commitment to environmental sustainability, OfficeMax has been analysing its waste management and has embarked on some creative recycling strategies for its shredded paper.
Madju and Horst are part of a group of nine Bornean orang utans that range in age from two to 30 years, who got to try out their OfficeMax super-soft paper beds last week.
“Our orang utans make ‘nests’ every night with the paper. This replicates what they would do in the wild with plant matter, and is an important natural behaviour we like to encourage,” says Auckland Zoo’s primate team leader, Amy Dixon.
“We were aware of how much shredded paper we were generating and we decided to look in to what we could do with it,” said OfficeMax Managing Director Kevin Obern.
“Initially we thought we would give the shredded paper to a local pet shop, but we found that once the paper had been used it was thrown out - we wanted to find an even more sustainable, long term use for the paper. After the orang utans have used the paper, the zoo sends it to a specialist waste management company where it is treated to enable it to be included in a fertiliser, so the paper is completely recycled,” said Kevin.
“And what’s more, we have reduced our total amount of shredded waste by approximately half, so everyone wins.”
OfficeMax is one of a number of organisations which donate their shredded paper to Auckland Zoo.
OfficeMax also has its own worm farm on-site as part of its commitment to reduce digestible waste going to landfill and improve the environment. OfficeMax prides itself on its commitment to stocking paper products from environmentally sustainable sources. In addition, the majority of paper and paper products stocked by OfficeMax is either recycled or carries the Forrest Sustainability Council (FSC) logo.
OfficeMax New Zealand is actively working toward developing good environmental practices within their organisation to enable consumers to make environmentally friendly purchasing decisions, already selling more than 700 products with sustainable attributes.
The organisation plans to erect pictures of the orang utans near their shredders to remind employees to take the time to shred their old documents for the zoo instead of just throwing them away.
###
About OfficeMax:
OfficeMax is one of the top three office products companies in the world, employing 41,000 people worldwide including 900 in New Zealand.
A key global player, OfficeMax New Zealand prides itself on its local focus.
OfficeMax believes in integrity, total quality and safety. It prides itself on the depth of industry knowledge possessed by its workforce and confidently boasts the most skilled personnel in the office products industry.
OfficeMax New Zealand is working toward developing transparent environmental practices to enable consumers to make purchasing decisions that put environment and community first. The company values its ongoing partnership with the Ministry for the Environment as it seeks improvement in the office products arena.
About the Forest Sustainability Council:
The Forest Sustainability Council (FSC) provides a globally recognised chain of custody certification system for tracing, verifying and labelling timber, wood and paper products that come from FSC certified forests. It was established in 1993 and has a mission to promote environmentally appropriate and socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.
