Extinction Trade: Endangered animals are the new blood diamonds as militias and warlords use poaching to fund death.

By Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK
Mar 1, 2008

The marauders galloped into Zakouma National Park in Chad, the last refuge of that country’s once thriving elephant population. Rather than bother with the few remaining elephants, the attackers last May were after the 1.5 tons of ivory—worth as much as $1.3 million—that Chadian officials had seized from poachers over the years and stored in a strongroom at park headquarters. Neither the audacity of the attack nor its brutality—the raiders killed three park rangers—shocked wildlife officials: some 100 rangers, outgunned and outmanned, are killed every year defending Africa’s wildlife. Rather, the shock was the identity of the attackers.

In an ominous sign of how the killing of endangered animals has evolved from a crime committed by small bands of unorganized, mostly poor operators, these attackers were Janjaweed, the militia that has carried out genocidal attacks in Darfur. Lured by easy money, the Janjaweed have expanded their killing fields to endangered species. In the past two years, they have butchered hundreds of elephants around Zakouma, say Chadian authorities, carrying the tusks back to Sudan, where they are secreted on ships bound mostly for Asia—or traded for weapons.

For the Janjaweed, killing elephants is the least of its atrocities. But the militia’s move into ivory poaching signals a terrifying turn in the world’s efforts to save vanishing species. The battle is no longer just about the elephant’s trumpet never again echoing over the African savanna, or the Bengal tiger’s roar being heard only in memory. The threat posed by the contraband wildlife trade is now also about the money it generates—wave upon wave of it—that is being used by very bad people to do very bad things. “Earnings from the ivory trade is sustaining the Janjaweed,” says Michael Wamithi, former head of the Kenya Wildlife Service and now director of the elephant program for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “It’s untraceable money,” much like the “blood diamonds” that bankrolled brutal wars in Sierra Leone. On March 5, the House Committee on Natural Resources will hold a hearing on the new twist in illegal wildlife trade.

Three nights after the Janjaweed killed the Chadian rangers in their assault on the ivory (the surviving rangers drove them off before they got their hands on the stockpile), heavily armed Somali poachers marched in lockstep so precisely that a dozen men made the sound of a single footfall. Reaching the bank of Kenya’s Tana River, they fired 300 rounds from their assault rifles and killed three Kenyan rangers before losing four of their own and fleeing. The poachers, says IFAW’s Wamithi, were traced to a Somali warlord, one of many whose private armies have destabilized that nation for decades. The link didn’t surprise experts. If you have to equip, feed and pay a few thousand soldiers, asks William Clark, who chairs Interpol’s Working Group on Wildlife Crime, “where does that come from? You need money to pay for civil war.”

The State Department estimates that the market value of illegal ivory (the most commonly trafficked contraband, at $400 a pound), tiger parts ($7,000 for a set of bones), rhino horn (up to $25,000 per pound of bone), shark fins, exotic birds (up to $90,000 for a Lear’s macaw), reptile skin, bushmeat and other illegal wildlife products has reached $10 billion a year and possibly twice that. China is the largest market, with the United States a close second.

The tip-off that contraband wildlife is being moved by organized syndicates is in the pattern of the seizures. Authorities intercepted an average of 92 illegal shipments of ivory every month in 2006, found Tom Milliken, director of the Africa program for Traffic International, a global network formed in 1976 to monitor wildlife trade. That is not much changed since the 1990s, but one thing is: the number that weighed one ton or more doubled from 1997 to 2006. That rise, says Traffic’s Richard Thomas, “is certainly evidence of increasing organized criminal gangs … Moving a ton of ivory is not a trivial undertaking.” Recently seized shipments of coral, snakeskins, conch shells, ivory, shahtoosh (the hair of endangered antelopes) and abalone have all been the largest-ever of their types, says Interpol’s Clark, another sign that this is not the work of small-time crooks.

It is not size alone that points to the involvement of large syndicates, but the sophistication of the smuggling. In a 2006 seizure in Hong Kong, a ship that had sailed from Cameroon was found to have three containers with false compartments, each filled with ivory. The compartments had been deftly made and camouflaged with sophisticated metallurgy. The suspected trafficker, a Taiwanese man, has not been extradited because of Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation; prosecution is unlikely. But an investigation by Hong Kong authorities revealed that he had shipped at least 15 containers along the same route with the same declared contents—timber planks—in the past few years. All 15 got through with what Interpol suspects was 40 tons of contraband ivory.

That represents 4,000 killed elephants, an indication of how brutally effective the new poachers are. A DNA analysis revealed that the ivory in the Cameroon shipment all came from elephants in eastern Gabon and the neighboring Congo, which suggests that contractors “receive a ‘purchase order’ for a specific quantity of ivory,” says Clark. They organize teams of poachers to kill a set number of elephants in a specific area, then arrange for transport to the coast.

The consequences for wildlife have been devastating. The highly endangered northern white rhino was making a comeback in Garamba National Park, on the border of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A population of 13 in 1983 had rebounded to 32 by 2003. But late that year Janjaweed militias armed with AK-47s began arriving, and the slaughter began. In a typical raid, says conservation biologist Emmanuel de Merode, who has worked in East Africa for two decades, some 20 horse-mounted militiamen do the killing, while scores of others camp on the edge of the park with large caravans of donkeys providing supplies for the days-long journey from Sudan and back. The poachers remove the rhino horns, which are prized as dagger handles in the Middle East and for purported medical properties in Asia. As of last year, there were two rhinos left in Garamba, a death sentence for that population. “There may have been some local poaching, too,” says de Merode, “but it was the Janjaweed that killed them off.” In another case of militias’ financing atrocities through poaching, armed men believed to be members of the FDLR, Hutu extremists tied to the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, abducted and killed two baby gorillas from Congo. Although some black-market buyers prefer the primates alive, stuffed ones can bring enough for a nice haul of assault rifles.

The State Department and some members of Congress suspect a link between illegal wildlife trafficking and terrorism, but admit that “the evidence is anecdotal,” says Claudia McMurray, assistant secretary of State. “But with the amount of money it would provide terrorist groups, even anecdotes are a huge cause for concern.” One focus: domestic separatist groups and Islamic militants based in Bangladesh. Indian wildlife officials suspect them of sponsoring the poaching of tigers, rhinos, elephants and other vanishing breeds in India’s Kaziranga National Park to support terrorist activities, police sources in India tell NEWSWEEK. One group is suspected of carrying out a string of bombings in India beginning in 2004.

Just as the ultimate blame for drug lords who murder the innocent lies with users, so the blame for a wildlife trade that sustains organized crime and genocidal militias lies with the buyers. “There is a vague awareness in America that some things, they shouldn’t be buying,” says McMurray. “But the psychology seems to be that if it’s in a store [or online] it must be OK.” Americans who buy ivory carvings (easily available online), Japanese who collect the ivory signature seals called hankos and Chinese who clamor for “medicines” made from tiger bone are not supporting some lone poacher who’s trying to feed his family. They’re putting money into the coffers of the Janjaweed, warlords and possibly even worse actors. With the new wildlife traffickers, it’s not only animals whose lives are at stake.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/117875

Those of you who watched Orangutan Island know that the biggest danger for an orangutan (besides humans) is a snake. Cha Cha unwisely decided to swing a coral snake like a lasso, Nadi was bit by a tree viper and Chen Chen tried to knock a python out of a tree– causing Hamlet to quickly scamper away… This article speaks directly to this instinctual fear… ~ Rich

(AP) Two University of Virginia researchers believe that humans are genetically predisposed to be deathly afraid of snakes.

Judy S. DeLoache, a U.Va. professor of developmental psychology, said she has a snake phobia, but wonders why. “The question was, where did that fear come from?”

She believes it’s because snakes would have posed a significant threat to our ancestors, so a fear of snakes remains hardwired into human brains today.

DeLoache said an experiment she conducted with graduate student Vanessa LoBue proved that adults and preschool children have an extraordinary ability to quickly pinpoint snakes amid harmless distractions.

They conducted three experiments with 24 adults and 24 3-year-olds. Both groups were shown a large touch-screen computer monitor that displayed nine color photographs.

They asked half of the people to find the single image of a snake among non-threatening pictures of caterpillars, flowers or frogs. The second group was told to find the single photo of a single non-threatening item among eight images of snakes.

The researchers found that adults and children were much faster at discovering snakes than they were at locating non-threatening flora or fauna.

The finding that children saw the snakes as rapidly as adults is particularly fascinating, LoBue said, because preschool children tend to be fearless and are less likely to have had a negative experience with snakes.

DeLoache’s and LoBue’s findings will be published in the March issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

LoBue said she has found similar results when testing for an innate fear of spiders. Much like snakes, some spiders would have posed a deadly threat to pre-humans. That study is currently under peer review, she said.

“It’s really neat,” she said. “We have an evolutionary bias against snakes and spiders.”

Virginia is home to three types of venomous snakes - copperheads, canebrake rattlesnakes and timber rattlers.

Julia Dixon, spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, thinks snakes have a bad rap, and said her agency spends time defending snakes.

“The general public out there thinks that the only good snake is a dead snake,” Dixon said. But she notes that snakes are a key piece of the food chain because they eat mice, rats and other snakes.

Dixon said the easiest way to identify dangerous snakes in Virginia is to look into their eyes. Virginia’s venomous snakes have vertical pupils, similar to a cat’s eye, and harmless snakes have round pupils.

Either way, it is usually best to leave the snake alone, she said.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/29/tech/main3892530.shtml

Gwladys Fouché and Truls Brekke follow the endangered Sumatran Orangutan from rescue to rehabilitation in the rainforest of northern Sumatra. Enjoy the beautiful images of Mother Jeki and her baby boy Dharma…. 

For information on traveling to Sumatra to see them for yourselves, please contact us.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,2257984,00.html

A comparative study has demonstrated an evolutionary link between food availability and brain size in living apes.

Orangutans are the only big apes from Asia. Their habitat is strictly limited to the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Northern Sumatra. Adult males - twice larger than females - are about 4.5 ft (1.4 m) tall and up to 82 kg in weight.

Scientists found that orangutans living in northeastern Borneo, Pongo pygmaeus morio (photo above right), where food supplies were more limited, have smaller brains than those from the rest of Borneo and Sumatra. “Temporary, unavoidable food scarcity may select for a decrease in brain size, perhaps accompanied by only small or subtle decreases in body size,” said Andrea Taylor, from Duke’s departments of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, and Carel van Schaik, director the University of Zurich’s Anthropological Institute.

“To our knowledge, this is the first such study to demonstrate a relationship between relative brain size and resource quality at this microevolutionary level in primates,” they said.

Their finding supports the “expensive tissue” hypothesis. “Compared to other tissues, brain tissue is metabolically expensive to grow and maintain,” Taylor said.

“If there has to be a trade-off, brain tissue may have to give.”

“The study suggests that animals facing periods of uncontrollable food scarcity may deal with that by reducing their energy requirement for one of the most expensive organs in their bodies: the brain,” van Schaik added.

“This brings us closer to a good ecological theory of variation in brain size, and thus of the conditions steering cognitive evolution. Any adaptive benefits from a larger brain must exceed the extra energy required to grow and maintain the larger brain tissue. Such a theory is vital for understanding what happened during human evolution, where, relative to our ancestors, our lineage underwent a threefold expansion of brain size in a few million years.”

Indivduals of Sumatran orangutans, Pongo abelii, (photo below right) differed most from morio subspecies, one of the three living in Borneo. Sumatra has rich volcanic soils, best for growing the fruits that the orangutans need, and have a more stable rainfall pattern. The morio subspecies lives in the northeastern Borneo, where soils are poorer and El Niño, a meteorological event that brings drought, can have a more significant impact; these are all factors that “converge to produce an environment for orangutans of eastern Borneo that is at times seriously resource-limited”.

During fruit shortage, the morio orangutans have to “resort to fallback foods with reduced energy and protein content, such as vegetation and bark,” they added. The morio form has stronger jaws adapted to tougher food than other orangutans. “This improved feeding efficiency, coupled with a relatively small brain, would enable such animals to adapt to their conditions by both maximizing their resources and conserving energy,” she said.

It also seems that Borneo subspecies bears offspring more frequently than Sumatra subspecies. “Such relatively short intervals between births could themselves be tied to smaller brains in such higher primates as orangutans. Larger-brained apes have slower-paced life histories. Assuming selection is acting on brain size, life history is prolonged because development of larger brains require more time.” researchers said.

“We see greater anatomical differences amongst the Bornean populations than we see between the Bornean and Sumatran populations,” Taylor said.

“The effects of El Niño on tropical rain forest composition and diversity are more marked in eastern compared to western parts of Borneo”

The team used for their measurements 226 adult skulls from museums and other sources, belonging to the four distinct subspecies occupying Sumatra and Borneo. Pongo pygmaeus morio “consistently exhibit the absolutely and relatively smallest cranial capacity,” the researchers concluded.

The brain reduction was more statistically significant for females. Morio females are notably smaller than morio males and pregnancy, lactation and their smaller homes ranges might put them under a higher nutritional stress. “The general scenario supported by these results, then, is that an increase in the frequency of uncontrollable periods of low energy intake in one part of the orangutan’s geographic range selected for a reduction in brain size,” the researchers said.

“Similar evolutionary pressures within resource-poor environments also may explain the smaller-than-normal brain size of a controversial 18,000-year-old skull recently found on the Indonesian island of Flores”.

But strong evidences rather suggest a modern human with microcephaly, a genetic disorder characterized by an abnormally small head and usually an underdeveloped brain.

Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Your-Brain-Size-Might-Be-Determined-by-What-You-Eat-38680.shtml

A new hope
By TAN CHENG LI

A new piece of legislation promises to stem illicit trade of endangered wildlife.

THINKING about buying the pretty star tortoise for a pet? Think again. Under newly passed laws, you face a fine of up to RM100,000 for having one of those reptiles. Same goes for other exotic pets such as the Madagascar radiated tortoise, African leopard tortoise, pig-nosed turtle, Madagascar tomato frog, South American poison arrow frog and Indonesian yellow-crested cockatoo.

Trade in these animals are either barred or regulated by range countries and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites, an international treaty to stop illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade) but they still end up in local pet stores and zoos – reason being, wildlife authority Perhilitan cannot act against traders because these species are not protected under local laws, namely the Protection of Wildlife Act 1972 (PWA).

This has now changed with Parliament passing the International Trade in Endangered Species Bill 2007 last December. The long-awaited Bill promises to stem unbridled sale of wildlife as it specifies the wildlife allowed for trade and imposes licensing requirements. It essentially enables Malaysia to fulfil Cites obligations and enforce Cites wildlife trade rules.

The Cites secretariat had threatened to suspend commerce of all Cites species in Malaysia if it did not improve its national wildlife laws to curb illicit and uncontrolled trade in wildlife. Many species of amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, insects, invertebrates and plants suffer a fate similar to that of the star tortoise because they have been left out of the PWA.

In the Bill, the list of wildlife runs over 60 pages and covers terrestrial and marine mammals, birds, lizards, snakes, turtles, tortoises, crocodiles, iguanas, spiders, butterflies, snails, conches, clams, mussels, sea cucumbers, corals, freshwater and marine fish, plants (including orchids, cycads, ferns and pitcher plants) and timber species. It bodes well for species heavily traded for pets, medicine, private collections, zoos, theme parks, curios and ornaments, but which are not shielded by the PWA – species such as the moon bear, bumphead wrasse, sharks, marine turtles, tortoises, tarantulas, macaws, parrots and cycads, among others.

A strong feature of the Bill is its coverage for “derivatives” of protected plants or animals – so products ranging from ivory carvings to snake skin shoes, stuffed animals, dried medicinal roots, eggs, claws, chemical compounds and potions will need approvals and permits before they can be traded. The PWA is silent on “derivatives”, thus hindering Perhilitan from restraining sale of curios, ornaments, accessories, jewelleries and medicines made from Cites-controlled wildlife.

The Bill not only covers importers and exporters but also retailers and the general public as it is an offence for anyone to possess, sell, offer or advertise for sale, or put on display any wildlife and derivatives that have been imported without a permit. So, pet owners would be wise to vet their purchases for legality or risk running foul of the law. It is also an offence to breed wild animals or artificially propagate plants without approval.

High hopes

Wildlife conservationists are optimistic that the legislation, expected to be gazetted and enforced by mid-year, will help curb wanton exploitation of many endangered species.

“The strong part of this Bill is that it’s a Cites-specific legislation which will meet the overall goal of the convention, which is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild fauna and flora does not threaten the survival of the species traded. The Bill fills huge gaps in the current law, such as on derivatives,” says Preetha Sankar, policy co-ordinator of World Wide Fund for Nature.

Preetha says provisions in the Bill on protection of informers will help curb illegal trade of wildlife. “When some form of protection and reward is offered to informers, they would be more willing to step forward with information.”

Since protection of wildlife is now split among several government bodies, the Bill rightly parcels the job of overseeing wildlife trade to different management authorities: Perhilitan (terrestrial fauna in the peninsular), Fisheries Department (fish, marine animals and marine plants), Malaysian Timber Industry Board (timber), Agriculture Department (terrestrial and freshwater plants), Sabah Wildlife Department (animals and plants), Sabah Fisheries Department (fish, corals and marine plants) and lastly, Sarawak Forest Department and Sarawak Forestry Corporation (animals and plants).

“We now have one harmonised law involving different departments. Previously, the Protection of Wildlife Act involved only Perhilitan and applied only to Peninsular Malaysia. Furthermore, it excluded many species such as plants and fish,” says Noorainie Awang Anak, programme officer of wildlife trade monitoring body, Traffic.

The proffered punishment is another boon – a fine of up to RM100,000 for each animal, plant, part or derivative smuggled by an individual, and up to RM200,000 if a company is involved.

“It is great that the penalty is higher for corporate buyers, and individuals in a company can be held liable too, and that an ‘offer for sale’ is considered an infringement of the law,” says Dr Melvin Gumal, director of Wildlife Conservation Society-Malaysia Programme (WCS).

And by imposing a blanket coverage based on genus (a group of closely related species) for many animals and plants, the Bill plugs a loophole that allows wildlife species, if not listed, to escape legal scrutiny. This ambiguity was exploited in the 2005 discovery of seven smuggled Sumatran orang utans. Perhilitan had said that it could not punish operators of the zoo and theme park where the primates were seized from as the PWA only lists Pongo pygmaeus (Borneon orang utan) as totally protected and not Pongo abelii (Sumatran orang utan).

Doubts

Wildlife conservationists, while generally pleased with the Bill, do have niggling fears. Differences between the new legislation and state laws is one. For instance, some species are allowed for trade under Cites, but are totally protected under state laws.

“Sarawak does not allow export of any wildlife. But with the Cites Bill, it appears that one can export, with permits. There is a need to see if any provisions in the new Bill contradict state laws,” says Traffic director Azrina Abdullah.

There is also a danger of relying too much on the Cites Bill because in some instances, it is weaker than state laws. For instance, Cites allows controlled trade of many species of orchids but these floras are totally protected only in Sabah and Sarawak, not in Peninsular Malaysia. Thus trade might prove detrimental to the orchids. Likewise, ramin trees are protected in both eastern states but not in the peninsula.

“Some local species deemed as very rare are not within the Cites law and yet, gets little protection under national laws. The naked bat, for example, is protected in Sarawak but not in Peninsular Malaysia,” says Gumal of WCS.

“And how does one deal with the disparity in fines between this supranational law (new Bill) and the state laws? For example, if one were to illegally export a proboscis monkey out of Sarawak, the fines would be substantially lower in Sarawak’s Wildlife Protection Ordinance as opposed to the Cites law. A way out is for the management authority to check with Sabah and Sarawak.”

The new Bill regulates captive breeding for trade but Gumal is troubled by the silence over what constitutes “captive-bred”. Cites, like Sarawak, allows trade only of second-generation offspring but this is not spelt out in the Bill. Gumal fears that traders might exploit the lack of specifics, especially for animals notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, by claiming wild-caught animals as captive-breds. Similarly, it would be difficult to differentiate a cultivated orchid plant from a wild one.

And what of protected animals illegally brought in prior to the Bill? One possibility is amnesty to register such animals but this has its ills; traders might claim newly imported plants and animals as old stocks. Azrina is also wary of Section 36 of the Bill which allows for the return of seized animals. “What are the criteria for the release? What if there is abuse?” she queries.

And with the Bill being silent on minimum penalties, there is a fear of the courts meting out light sentences. “In past seizures of highly prized species, offenders have been fined only RM1,000. The judiciary must be made aware of the seriousness of wildlife crime and impose the appropriate fine,” says Azrina.

Lam Hoi Chean, general manager of pet store chain Pet Family, agrees that offenders should be duly punished with the maximum fine: “Anything below RM10,000 will not be a deterrent.” He believes restrictions imposed under the Bill will drive the trade underground and cause price hikes; hence there is a need for stricter policing. Such checks, he adds, should not overlook trade conducted by hobbyists.

Indeed, several pet store operators claim that while they conduct their business by the book, such is not the case with hobbyists and collectors, who buy and sell protected species among themselves and even to foreigners. The trade, usually done through the Internet, is hard to detect.

WWF’s Preetha highlights training needs. She says enforcement staff must be taught how to identify goods made from protected wildlife, while agencies tasked with setting quotas for exported species and advising on the impact of trade must have such capabilities.

Meanwhile, the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry should also start a road show to inform businesses involved in wildlife trade about the new legal requirements. Most are still ignorant of the Bill.

The ministry recently held a workshop for traditional medicine practitioners. Thong Choong Khat of Tradimedi Enterprise in Segamat, Johor, insisted that the new Bill was pointless for folk medicine specialists, and claimed that they no longer use protected wildlife in their remedies since such products would not be approved or registered by the Health Ministry.

And while the Bill holds much promise in checking international commerce in wildlife, it does nothing for native wildlife traded domestically. Stemming the flourishing sale of endangered plants and animals within the country calls for an overhaul of the PWA, which is grossly deficient in protecting the country’s wildlife.

Source: http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2008/3/4/lifefocus/20486368&sec=lifefocus

Cosmetics account for 7-8% of palm oil usage. A traditionally cheap, versatile and plentiful oil, it is used in everyday items such as soap and moisturiser.

But palm oil production has often involved highly destructive practices in places such Malaysia and Indonesia, where forest is cleared to make way for land to grow the profitable crop.

So the cosmetics industry is being urged to find alternatives.

Cosmetics producer Lush says it believes manufacturers of soap and other toiletries need to start acting fast. It has set up a forum for beauty companies that are seeking alternatives to palm oil.

And last November, Lush introduced “Greenwash”, its first soap without a palm oil base. Within the next few months, all soaps at Lush’s 500 stores worldwide will use a mixture of coconut, rapeseed and sunflower oils in their base instead of palm.

Lush says the forum will be called Actively Seeking Alternatives to Palm (ASAP), and has already attracted interest from a handful of small soap and food businesses. It is hoped that major retailers will engage with the forum too.

To date the big manufacturers appear to have no intention to drop palm oil. Instead, the likes of Unilever, Tesco, Boots, Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer want to continue working with the industry-led Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to gain access to less destructive sources of the oil.

The roundtable, set up in 2005, is due to start stamping products with a sustainable mark of approval at the end of the year. The stamp was due out at the beginning of 2008, but has been delayed.

Joanna Keohan, a spokewoman for Tesco, says the company attended the last two RSPO general meetings in Singapore and Kuala Lumpar and will be working on introducing the sustainable mark into its products as soon as possible.

However, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Lush do not believe the measures offered by the RSPO are sufficiently “aggressive”, primarily because they will still allow the clearing of aged forests, and will be difficult to enforce.

Andrew Butler, campaigns manager at Lush says: “We looked at joining the RSPO, but it is not being aggressive enough in dealing with the problems. We could have taken the Body Shop route and moved to Colombia, where palm oil production is less intensive and more ethical at the moment, but we saw that this might just be shifting the problem.

“If everyone reduced their use of palm oil by 50% and boycotted any biofuels using it, then it could be a sustainable oil. There’s not enough time to sit and pontificate - the public need to put pressure on manufacturers now,” urges Butler.

The company’s soap base supplier, Cay’s, already works with other multinational companies and is willing to provide those with alternatives to palm oil for toiletries.

Andrew Jenkins, sustainable products development manager at Boots, says: “We were one of the first to join the RSPO in 2005, ahead of the Body Shop and the Co-op. We don’t use vast quantities of neat palm oil, but it is in the palmates and glycerine we use. Boots wants the whole industry to be more sustainable, and we do take the point from Friends of the Eearth and Greenpeace on the deforestation.”

Jenkins says that some palmates – a binding ingredient in soap - can be made from vegetable oil, but in other instances, palm oil is the only ingredient it can use.

Alternatives in some cases, he explains, could include soya oil, but he is wary of “jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire” by choosing another oil that becomes unsustainable.

Trevor Gorin, a spokesman for Unilever – which helped establish the RSPO – says the company has been looking at the sustainable palm oil issue for many years. Unilever has reduced the amount of palm oil it uses, and does source some sustainable palm oil, he says. “Six years ago, we used 1.7m tonnes of palm oil a year. Now it’s 800,000 tonnes.” Gorin attributes this reduction to using different oils, changing product lines, and new production methods.

But Ed Matthews, a Friends of the Earth campaigner who’s worked on palm oil issues for a number of years, says that because there is a danger of shifting the problem to other oils, the best solution to this problem, as with many other environmental issues, is once again to “consume less”.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/03/ethicalliving.forests?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

(Jay Ullal is the photographer in the upcoming book The Thinking Ape by Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation Founder, Willie Smits)

After photographing human suffering in conflict zones, Jay Ullal is now focussing on wildlife

MUMBAI: If you ask photographer Jay Ullal, author of a recent book on the Orangutans of Borneo, about his most memorable moment with the primates, he invariably refers to the story of Uce.

On one of his many trips to the Borneo rainforest, while shooting for the book, Ullal came across a female ape that had been rescued and then released into a private sanctuary in Kalimantan. Uce, as she was nicknamed, roams the forests, but often comes back to visit her rescuer, conservationist and collaborator on Ullal’s book, Willie Smits. On one such visit, Ullal shot a few Polaroids of Uce and then handed them to her. “I was amazed at her reaction,” says Ullal, still overwhelmed by the experience.

“As the prints developed, I could see the wonder on her face. She looked at the photos for a long time, and then turned around to playfully show it to her baby. Her reactions were so human.”

No amount of cajoling could get the photos back, but before she ran off, Uce went up to the security guard and tucked them into his pocket. “I hear she often comes back to see the pictures,” says Ullal. “She shows up at the camp and heads straight for the guard’s pocket. They’ve even laminated the photographs so they don’t get ruined with all the handling.”

In case readers think this is simply Ullal’s anthropomorphic notions running wild, he’s dedicated a short series in the book - due out in India in March - to this episode: Uce holding the photos (remarkably, the right side up), peering at them, and then holding them out to her baby.

It was enough to make a convert of Ullal, an award-winning photojournalist who has covered every possible war and trouble-torn area on the planet, from the Bangladesh War of 1972 to Bosnia, Iraq, Lebanon, Rwanda and many others. His close shaves and dogged determination to return to the scene of strife, made colleagues at the German magazine Stern dub him “the man with seven lives”. He has been attacked so many times in different parts of the world, and had so many near-misses that his wife Rajni says it’s a miracle he’s still alive. But in October 1998, after more than three decades of chasing wars, Ullal, now 74, finally hung up his Canon D1. Though not for long.

“I decided I wanted to shoot other kinds of pictures,” he says. And that’s when wildlife “just happened” to him. Shortly before he retired that year, Ullal was deputed to cover several wildlife stories for Stern: A cover on the Royal Bengal Tiger and another on elephant culling in Zimbabwe. It was only after his third wildlife assignment on the Borneo Orangs that a publisher friend put the idea of a book into Ullal’s head.

Many trips to the Indonesian island (to document the apes during the different seasons) and more than 20,000 shots later, the book is finally out in Germany. In India it will hit the shelves next month, tentative titled The Thinker of the Jungle - a reference to the benign, almost contemplative manner of the Orangs and their amazing ability to sit and observe things for hours.

But the book is anything but a warm and fuzzy coffee-table study on the moods and manners of Orangs, with its tight close-ups and doublespreads (though it has some of that too). Ullal says he’s no conservationist, but his book quietly makes the point about poaching and some fairly outrageous customs - killing female apes to sell the babies, serving up severed Orang heads as a dinner delicacy, or trying to humanise them by keeping them as house pets and trying to teach them to play piano - through photographs and other graphics, like satellite images of a shrinking habitat.

“When I shot wars, I never photographed the dead,” says Ullal. “I always tried to capture human suffering; men, women and children who were in peril or in pain. Now that I have moved on to wildlife, I want to document suffering among animals. It’s the least I can do.”

Ullal needn’t worry on that count; as readers will soon discover, each of his 327 pictures speaks more than a thousand words, sending out exactly the message he wants.

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1153477

Famed geneticist creating life form that turns CO2 to fuel

A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.

Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing “fourth-generation fuel” project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference in Monterey, California.

“We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy,” Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page.

“We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2 as the fuel stock.”

Simple organisms can be genetically re-engineered to produce vaccines or octane-based fuels as waste, according to Venter.

Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step is life forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste, according to Venter.

“We have 20 million genes which I call the design components of the future,” Venter said. “We are limited here only by our imagination.”

His team is using synthetic chromosomes to modify organisms that already exist, not making new life, he said. Organisms already exist that produce octane, but not in amounts needed to be a fuel supply.

“If they could produce things on the scale we need, this would be a methane planet,” Venter said. “The scale is what is critical; which is why we need to genetically design them.”

The genetics of octane-producing organisms can be tinkered with to increase the amount of CO2 they eat and octane they excrete, according to Venter.

The limiting part of the equation isn’t designing an organism, it’s the difficulty of extracting high concentrations of CO2 from the air to feed the organisms, the scientist said in answer to a question from Page.

Scientists put “suicide genes” into their living creations so that if they escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves.

Venter said he is also working on organisms that make vaccines for the flu and other illnesses.

“We will see an exponential change in the pace of the sophistication of organisms and what they can do,” Venter said.

“We are a ways away from designing people. Our goal is just to make sure they survive long enough to do that.”

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080228/ts_afp/scienceusitgenetics_080228205717;_ylt=AnvmIGM.2JJR0cfx8VPLMzys0NUE

Source: AP via The Star (Malaysia)
By MICHAEL CASEY

Turning trees into tradable securities can be a way out to preserve the world’s rainforests.

FOR decades, a flood of aid and an army of conservationists couldn’t save Indonesia’s rainforests from illegal loggers, land-hungry peasants and the spread of giant plantations. Now the world is looking at a simpler approach: up-front cash.

Whether it was arming forest police or backing schemes to certify legal logs, no tactic could silence the chainsaws or douse the intentional fires
that each day destroy another 50sqkm of Indonesia’s rainforests, and an estimated 285sqkm elsewhere in the world’s tropics.

The problem was pure economics: neither local authorities nor the rural poor, in Indonesia and elsewhere, have a material incentive to keep their
forests intact.

That could now change because of a decision at December’s UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to negotiate a deal, as part of the next
international climate agreement, under which countries would be rewarded for reducing their galloping rates of deforestation, a big contributor to global warming.

The cash might come directly from a fund financed by richer northern nations, or through “carbon credits” granted per unit of forest saved. The credits could be traded on the world carbon market, where a northern industry can buy such allowances to help meet its own required reductions in emissions of global warming gases.

Indonesia and other tropical countries backing the “avoided deforestation” concept hope this carbon price will outpace what landowners could get from logging the forests or clearing them for palm oil, rubber, soybean or other plantations.

“There will be a lot of money going in there,” said Benoit Bosquet, head of a World Bank project to prepare poorer countries to take part in the new initiative, known as REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.

“You will see actors currently converting forest to plantations and cattle ranches saying, ‘Wait a minute. If I get more money to preserve my forest than to produce beef, then of course I will keep my forest standing.’” – AP

The Jakarta Post, 25 Feb 2008:
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta post, Jakarta

Environmental activists insisted Saturday on rejecting a regulation imposing a new scheme of forest exploitation fees on non-forestry firms, despite the government’s assurance it was meant to save forests.

They demanded the revocation of the regulation, saying it would only encourage more companies to exploit forests, thus further destroying them.

The activists accused the government of lying to the public when President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Forestry Minister Malam Sambat Kaban said Friday the regulation would apply only to the 13 mining companies already licensed to operate in protected forests.

“It is not true. In fact the regulation also sets fees for companies involved in oil and gas exploration and radio, television and telecommunications networks in protected and production forests,” Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam) director Siti Maiminah said.

For operating in protected forests, the regulation requires annual per-hectare payments of Rp 1.5 million, including for oil and gas exploration. In production forests the annual fee is Rp 1.2 million.

According to a copy of the regulation made available to the press, for companies with open-pit mines in protected forest areas, a per-hectare fee of Rp 3 million applies.

“The regulation is legally flawed and must be withdrawn,” Rino Subagyo, executive director of Indonesian Center for Environment Law (ICEL), told The Jakarta Post.

“The regulation is an acknowledgement from the government that the 13 firms can operate open-pit mining in protected forests as long as they pay.”

A key 1999 forestry law prohibits open-pit mining in protected forests because of the massive environmental destruction such mining can bring about.

However, under a 2004 in-lieu-of-law regulation issued by the government, 13 companies received the go-ahead for open-pit operations in protected forests.

When environmental activists challenged that regulation, the Constitutional Court ruled the 1999 forestry law remained applicable to mining firms that engage in feasibility studies and exploration.

The result of the court’s decision, according to Rino, is that “six out of the 13 firms are not allowed to operate open-pit mines in protected forests”.

The Forestry Ministry has acknowledged having issued “principal permits” to three mining companies for open-pit mining activities in protected forests.

Greenomics Indonesia agreed that the new fee-scheme regulation should be revoked.

Greenomics director Elfian Effendi said it would disrupt efforts to protect the country’s dwindling forests and represented an error on the part of President Yudhoyono to bring non-forestry firms into the picture.

“Allowing open-pit mining in protected forests is the biggest blunder made by the Megawati Soekarnoputri government.

“And imposing nominal fees for forest use in protected lands is President Yudhoyono’s biggest mistake.”

Elfian said the regulation would also hurt economic development in 25 regencies with protected forest areas, threatening the well-being of the seven million people there.

He said he was shocked to hear the government had not conducted thorough research before setting the exploitation fees, which are considered too low.

The Forestry Ministry admitted the fee scheme was arrived at on the basis of a computer simulation.

“It shows the government had no forest management plan,” said Elfian.

“This is (a matter of) compromising fees between the government and businesses.”

He calculated the state would bring in only around Rp 2.78 trillion per year from open-pit mining on the basis of the new fee scheme, far less than the estimated cost to the state — as much as Rp 70 trillion per year — resulting from the ecological destruction.

Source: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/

Virgin’s ‘biofuels flight’ was a PR exercise, but like the fuel itself, it may do more harm than good

February 25, 2008 11:30 AM
By Leo Hickman

I doubt many of us had probably heard of babassu oil before a Virgin airline test flight, partly powered by biofuels, made the short hop from London to Amsterdam yesterday.

The oil, which is produced from a palm native to the Maranh�o Baba�u forests in the eastern Amazon, is typically used as a cooking oil, but is also used to make medicines and soap.

Well, if test partners Virgin, Boeing and General Electric get their way, this versatile oil will be able to add another string to its bow: propelling humans around the globe at 900km an hour.

Along with coconut oil, babassu oil was blended - 20/80 - with traditional aviation-grade kerosene and fed into just one of the Virgin test plane’s engines. The other engines were powered normally and we can assume the test went well because there were no big splashes reported in the North Sea.

If this test flight had taken place about five years ago, I’m sure it would have received near universal praise. Back then, biofuels were being touted as the great “green” alternative to fossil fuels. But in recent years, the more we have examined biofuels, the more problems have appeared - particularly in relation to their claim to being “carbon neutral”.

Branson, a master of PR, doesn’t seem to have timed this latest high-profile stunt very well. Just last week, the UK government was putting the brakes on biofuels by ordering a review of their environmental and economic damage. In recent weeks, Science has published several damning papers about the effectiveness of using biofuels to reduce emissions. And just hours after the test flight landed safely, the Financial Times was reporting that the UN’s World Food Programme is considering rationing food aid to the world’s most needy because of spiralling food costs which are, in no small part, being driven up by the demand for biofuels - which, at present, are largely made from food crops.

Feeding a starving child, or powering a flight to New York? It should never be a contest, but, following Virgin’s test flight, it now is. The very thing that the critics of biofuels feared is now becoming a reality. (I wonder if the crew of Virgin Galactic’s sub-orbital spacecraft will be pointing out the biofuel plantations below to space tourists when the first flights take off in the next couple of years?)

One of the reasons environmentalists and others are crying foul over this test flight is because Virgin originally stated that it wouldn’t be using a “first-generation feedstock” (most of which are produced from food crops such as corn and palm oil) to produce its biofuel. In the build-up to the test flight, Virgin had been suggesting that the feedstock would be derived from algae instead. But as many biofuel producers know all too well, it’s much cheaper and more convenient to produce biofuels from food crops.

Rather than wait until an algae-derived biofuel was ready - which would probably be something to herald - Virgin felt the need to jump the gun so it could still claim to be the first airline in the world to trial a biofuel. As a result, it will now justly get the flack for using a feedstock that should be feeding people instead.

The hunt will go on, though, for a “drop-in” replacement for kerosene - one that doesn’t require a huge and costly change in refuelling infrastructure. If the aviation industry is to keep growing at its current pace, and yet still manage to reduce its emissions burden, it is clearly going to need to keep trialling new fuels. And the key hurdle is finding one that can meet kerosene’s “high energy density” - in other words, its oomph. A hard task, indeed.

But even if someone did manage to produce, say, an algae-derived aviation fuel, we are still a long way from it ever being used to power commercial flights for the simple reason that the aviation industry, by necessity, is a highly risk-averse industry. No one wants to risk the lives of 300 people travelling at 30,000ft. Therefore, it would take at least a decade before any such fuel was passed as safe by regulators. It’s for this reason that most industry commentators see kerosene remaining the dominant aviation fuel for at least the next two to three decades - a period for which a continued fast growth in aviation emissions is predicted. So will its arrival be too little, too late?

Personally, I welcome research into new aviation fuels, but worry greatly that the current focus means that we’ll end up with an alternative fuel that ultimately presents more problems than solutions. The one solution that just doesn’t seem to be able to fly at present is simply reducing the number of planes we send up into the atmosphere. But that would require a political fuel no one has yet seen the likes of.

Source: The Jakarta Post - February 22, 2008
By Rizal Harahap, Pekanbaru

Members of the Indonesian Forest Protection Committee and the Riau chapter of the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi) rallied Thursday at Riau Police Headquarters here demanding the immediate prosecution of illegal logging suspects.

Riau Police named six regional heads and dozens of executives from 23 forestry and plantation companies as suspects in illegal logging cases in early 2007, but none of these suspects have been brought to trial.

“We handed over data and facts from the field between January and April 2007 to help the police in their investigations. It has been a year now, but the illegal logging cases have not yet been resolved. We hope Riau Police chief Sutjiptadi keeps his promise to settle the cases,” Riau Walhi executive director Joni Setiawan Mundung said during the rally. He cast doubt on whether Riau Police had investigated the six officials who issued forestry licenses critics say sped up the destruction of the province’s forests.

“We were initially very impressed by the actions taken by Sutjiptadi, who expressed his commitment to combat illegal logging in Riau, especially when we were told the National Police had asked for the President’s permission to question the regional heads in Riau on Sept. 27 last year.

“Sixty days have passed but there is has still been no reply from the President. The police should have immediately questioned the officials, who have been identified as suspects. Surprisingly, the Riau Police have yet to question them, with the police chief instead issuing a statement saying they won’t be examined,” said Mundung.

Riau Police spokesman Adj. Sr. Comr. Zulkifli declined to comment on the charges.

“Please ask the Riau Police chief about the illegal logging issue,” he said.

The police also have not completed 15 case files on illegal logging suspects returned by prosecutors in December last year, preventing the cases from moving forward.

Prosecutors are also very careful about handing over cases to the courts, especially after a number of illegal logging suspects were acquitted.

“We don’t want to be blamed by the public if we lose in court due to a lack of evidence,” said Riau Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Darbin Pasaribu.