Orangutan Outreach Website - Saving the Orangutan

LOS ANGELES, May 15 — The American Palm Oil Council (APOC) today announced that the Malaysian palm oil industry, together with the Malaysian government, has launched the Malaysian Palm Oil Wildlife Conservation Fund (MPOWCF). APOC is a U.S. association representing the Malaysian palm oil industry.

The MPOWCF is a $6.4 million revolving fund dedicated to studies, efforts and initiatives in conserving the wildlife and the environment. The Malaysian palm oil industry and the government provided equal funds to create the MPOWCF, which was officially announced last month at the International Palm Oil Sustainability Conference in Malaysia.

“For years Malaysia has been working to develop and implement policies and practices that result in palm oil that can truly be considered sustainable and we hope that this fund will further support those efforts,” said Mohd Salleh Kassim, Executive Director of APOC. “Especially given the worldwide concerns about the environmental impact of biofuels, we must do everything we can to ensure the protection and conservation of wildlife and biodiversity.”

The MPOWCF has already funded a number of research projects. The fund provided a grant to establish a Jungle Patrol to protect wildlife in forest reserves bordering oil palm plantations in collaboration with the Sabah Forestry Department. It also approved a grant for the Borneo Conservation Trust, Sabah Wildlife Department and the NGO HUTAN to survey the orangutan population in Sabah. MPOWCF provided the funds to the University Malaysia Sabah to perform a biodiversity conservation study on ox-bow lakes in oil palm plantations.

Application for research funding is open to universities, institute of higher learning, research institutes, government agencies and NGO’s. Research projects should examine the impact of the palm oil industry on wildlife, biodiversity and environmental conservation in a scientific and factual manner.

The American Palm Oil Council, a U.S. association representing the Malaysian palm oil industry, works to educate the American public about the benefits of palm oil, which is used around the world in food applications, biofuel, soaps, candles, and other products.

Source: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/american-palm-oil-council-announces,395722.shtml

Our friends at the Center for Orangutan Protection (COP) and Nature Alert inform us:

Indonesian Forestry Minister Kaban has agreed to give permission to 5 new palm oil companies to open a palm oil plantation in the border of Tanjung Puting National Park. This means they might open/ extend the plantations into the National Park.

Don’t forget, this is the same Minister to whom UNEP has just given a “Certificate of Global Leadership” award. Minister Kaban no doubt feels increasingly empowered to sell off forests - now he has the blessing of UNEP.

If you wish to write to the head of UNEP and tell him what you think, his name is Mr. Steiner: executiveoffice@unep.org. Please be respectful.

Stars support graft fight

The Jakarta Post

The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) on Wednesday received additional backing for its anti-corruption campaign from TV personalities.

A delegation from the Indonesian TV Drama Actors Association (PARSI) came to KPK office on Jl. HR Rasuna Said, South Jakarta, to back the fight against corruption.

“The KPK has been doing an astonishing job against corruption. We fully support their efforts,” said PARSI chairman and veteran actor Anwar Fuady.

On behalf of Indonesian actors, Anwar said he expected the KPK to intensify its anti-corruption campaign.

The delegation of eight celebrities - including dangdut singer Inul Daratista, who is known for her gyrating dancing, and sinetron (TV drama) players Ririn Dwi Arianti, Gusti Randa and Asti Anantawere welcomed by KPK chief Antasari Ashar and deputy chairman Chandra Hamzah.

Antasari said the anti-graft body was thankful for the support and expected the celebrities to help the KPK spread the anti-corruption message across the archipelago.

“We hope that celebrities, as public figures, will help project our campaign against corruption to people all over the country,” he said.

The celebrities’ visit Wednesday afternoon transformed the KPK office into a hive of anti-corruption gossip with dozens of infotainment reporters at the event.

“There are a lot of beautiful faces here today. This doesn’t happen every day,” said a security officer at the KPK office.

The KPK continues to gain popularity in the public eye with its extensive investigations into corruption cases involving members of the House of Representatives and officials of regional administrations.

One of the cases involves lawmaker Al Amin Nasution of the United Development Party (PPP) in an alleged bribery case over the conversion of protected forest into an office complex in Bintan.

Last month, Slank visited the KPK building and performed several songs taken from their Slank Antikorupsi CD. However, one of their songs, “Gosip Jalanan” (Street Gossip), had some lawmakers reaching for their lawsuits and they threatened to sue the band for defamation. The lawmakers dropped the idea after Al Amin was arrested by the KPK.

The popularity of the KPK has created a rumor that Antasari might run for vice president in the 2009.

Jeremy Hance
Source: mongabay.com
May 15, 2008

Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Forestry Week in Vietnam, keynote speaker Dr. Norman Myers stated: “I’m going to give you my bottom-line message right now, up front, this is a super crisis that we are facing, it’s an appalling crisis, it’s one of the worst crises since we came out of our caves 10,000 years ago. I’m referring of course to elimination of tropical forests and of their millions of species.”

Dr. Myers continued, stating that when he first went to school “across the tropics there was a bright rich green band denoting tropical forests” on his atlas. “I put to you that we have lost half of all that green band and unless we start to do a far better job than we have been doing than by the time my children and so on, so on and my grandchildren are in school than they will have atlases than they will see not a bright green band across the tropics but the might have to color those atlases a dirty brown color to show that was once there has now disappeared. And what was once there, it says something super special, it is the most exuberant and colorful, and diverse expression of nature that has ever graced the face of this planet in many millions of years. That is what is at stake here.”

Dr. Norman Myers is a well-known and renowned British biologist. Currently, an Oxford professor, Myers has had a long history of pointing out large environmental issues before accepted by other scientists, such as the current mass extinction, the pace of tropical deforestation, and perverse subsidies which go against both the environment and the economy. Some of his books include The New Consumers: The Influence of Affluence on the Environment and The Sinking Ark: A New Look at the Problem of Disappearing Species.

In looking at the reasons for current deforestation, Myers pointed to four major contributors in his speech. According to his statistics, 5 percent of deforestation was due to cattle ranching, 19 percent to over-heavy logging, 22 percent to the growing sector of palm oil plantations, and 54 percent due to slash-and-burn-farming.

Myers stated that the percentage due to cattle ranching was the one bright spot, since it used to be a much larger driver of deforestation. While Myers stated his approval of industrial logging in tropical forests, he warned that his approval only extended to those operations that are “done sustainably”. In regards to palm oil, Myers argued that he would like to see products which contain palm oil reflect the true cost of their production, i.e. taking into account the loss of forests in South East Asia.

But the biggest shift in deforestation, according to Myers, was in slash-and-burn farming. Myers stated that slash-and-burn-farming used to be undertaken by the “shifting cultivator”. These cultivators would deforest small areas for subsistence farming and then move on when the soil’s richness gave out in a few years. Myers called such slash-and-burn farming a “form of exploitation of tropical forest that has been entirely sustainable”. For one thing, worldwide, shifting cultivators were numbered at 30 million. But now, Myers said that we are seeing what he calls the “shifted cultivator”. They are “the displaced peasant, who finds himself, let’s say in southern Brazil, who finds himself landless, jobless, no prospect of getting on, getting supper on the table, so he feels in his desperation he picks up a machete, a matchbox and heads off to Amazonia where he torches the forest.” There are an estimated 300 million shifted cultivators worldwide, leading to deforestation on a massive scale, which cuts deeper into the forest and does not allow once-exploited forest to regenerate.

Although Myers recognized that a lot had been done in conservation of tropical forests, he acknowledged that none of efforts had slowed the tide of tropical destruction. “Despite all the money that we put into tropical forestry, and all the science and technology we put into it, and all the public attention we have had, and all the government emphasis that we’ve had, things have nevertheless been getting worse and worse year by year, and I further believe that if we continue to operate within our present policy framework that even if we had five times as much amount of money, and five times as much scientific understanding, and so on and so on, that we would still find things going down the tubes.”

Despite the overwhelming nature of the crisis, Myers still has hope: “We still have time, just enough time, to save the remaining forests and all their species.”

The conference where Myers spoke was put on by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The April conference had an estimated 600 participants from over 50 countries, including forestry officials from 33 regional nations.

According to Patrick Durst, a senior forestry officer with FAO, the week covered numerous topics: climate change, indigenous people, invasive species, poverty alleviation through forests, the REDD program, illegal logging and trade, forest markets, and forestry research. In an interview on the FAO website, Durst sees “more and more desire to link the global forestry dialogue with regional mechanisms and the action that’s happening in the regions, and so we are looking forward to Forestry Week taking an important step forward to that, people working in the region, working on the ground, have a lot of practical experience that we want to feed into the global dialogue”.

By Hyginus Hardoyo , The Jakarta Post

With help from the Indonesian Ecolabelling Institute (IEI) and the European Union, the government is developing an executive body under the Forestry Ministry to be responsible for the certification of sustainable wood products and production system.

“The executive body will be at the same level as a directorate general within a ministry,” IEI executive director Taufik Alwi said on the sidelines of a seminar on wood legality in Yogyakarta on Wednesday.

The IEI is a quasi-government body now temporarily in charge of issuing sustainable forest certification in the country with many of its members scholars or players in the forestry industry.

The IEI, he said, would formulate the wood certification standard for the proposed body, while the European Union would provide expert advisory and funding, although he refused to specify amounts.

Alwi said in order to ensure product certification compatibility and access to most international markets, the body would adapt a verification system used in 10 major green wood importing countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, New Zealand and Australia.

He also said the executive body would have the authority to issue certification for independent wood certification agencies.

He said while no deadlines had yet been set, the IEI sought to complete a draft of the certification standard soon.

The creation of an international standards-compliant body, he said, would result in an exponential increase in Indonesian wood products, which currently only account for 5 percent of the world market, entering major markets, particularly in Europe.

“Even though Indonesia has declared some of its wood products legal and made from sustainable harvested materials, buyers are not yet comfortable with the existing system’s ability to verify product legality,” he said.

The new system, he said, would be credible and efficient in that it would not require additional funding.

The existing system is subject to a large number of costly inspections by agencies both from central and regional administrations.

“Imagine, a business entity can be inspected up to 50 times per year on various subjects ranging from wood yields to boundary matters,” Taufik said.

He said the IEI’s existing program had already certified 1.1 million hectares of production forest, and aimed to expand to 2 million hectares by the end of the year.

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/05/15/govt-eyes-wood-products-certification-body.html

The Center for Orangutan Protection writes: “Forestry Minister Kaban has received an award from UNEP for ‘planting’ trees whilst Ministry of Forestry personnel are being investigated (against Minister Kaban’s wishes and despite his objections) for numerous alleged corrupt logging practices and he sells (legally) licences to cut down protected forests inhabited by equally protected orangutans. Can this be the same UNEP who in February 2007 produced a scathing report on deforestation and the demise of orangutans? How can UNEP justify this award? What next? Maybe a special Nobel prize for Orangutan Conservation or, perhaps a job for the Minister in UNEP New York? It’s (almost) beyond belief that UNEP could do this. Let’s hope GRASP picks up on this and enlightens us all as to why UNEP chose Minister Kaban rather than any one of the ‘really’ hard-working, dedicated NGOs in Indonesia who, I suspect a lot of us believe are far more deserving of such recognition.”

Orangutan Outreach adds: “So they’re awarded for planting trees but go unpunished for destroying an entire ecosystem, killing orangutans and altering global weather patterns… Shameful at best!”

Adianto P. Simamora , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Thu, 05/15/2008 12:35 PM | National

The United Nations awarded First Lady Any Yudhoyono with a special certificate for her role in promoting tree planting in Indonesia to support the global war against climate change.

The UN’s Environment Programme (UNEP) also honored Forestry Minister Malam Sambat Ka’ban with the “Certificate of Global Leadership” for his support of the billion-tree planting campaign.

“The award is an encouragement for Indonesia to work harder and intensify tree planting activities to prevent natural disasters, such as floods and landslides, which often hit the country,” Dana Kartakusuma, a staff expert to the environment minister at the UN headquarters in New York said as quoted by Antara.

Dana received the awards on Tuesday on behalf of Any and Ka’ban.

The government said at the climate change conference in Bali in December last year it had planted about 86 million trees in 2007. The conference resulted in a roadmap urging forest nations to end deforestation to reduce carbon emissions.

Indonesia has the third largest forest area in the world, with about 120 million hectares.

UNEP said the billion-tree planting campaign had catalyzed the planting of two billion trees in just 18 months.

“When the billion-tree campaign was launched at the Climate Convention meeting in Nairobi in 2006, no one would have imagined it could flow so fast and so far. Rather, it has given expression to the frustrations, but also the hopes, of millions of people around the world,” UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said in a statement.

“Having exceeded every target that has been set for the campaign, we are now calling on individuals, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments to evolve this initiative onto a new and even higher level by the time of the crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen in late 2009.”

Yes, it’s real. Please view the original post here: http://www.vibrantsea.net/orangutan4_anilao29.htm

Photo © 2008 by Jeffrey Rosenfeld

They’ll return items dropped into their exhibits - if the price is right

By Lamor Williams
Thursday, May 15, 2008

LITTLE ROCK — Rok the orangutan is smart. He knows that sooner or later, someone will drop something into his enclosure at the Little Rock Zoo. And, he really understands that it will likely be something the visitor wants back.

So Rok waits. And he watches. A few times a month, he or one of the other great apes is rewarded. As cell phone technology has advanced, zookeepers have found more and more ofthe devices accidentally dropped into exhibits by people - usually those leaning over railings - trying to take photos with their camera phones.

So how does one get a cell phone back from a large male orangutan that can be as strong as eight adult men?

Bribe him. But choose the offering carefully.

Rok (pronounced Rock), the zoo’s dominant orangutan, knows that the phones are valuable. He won’t give them up for peanuts - not unless the peanuts are covered in chocolate and caramel.

“One day Rok brought a cell phone in intact. The people were waiting to get it back,” said Daphne Pfeiffer, a great ape keeper at the zoo. “He took the rubber faceplate off first. I got a frozen candy bar out of the freezer, but I couldn’t break it to trade a piece for the faceplate. So I tried to reason with him. I told him if he gave me the whole phone, I’d give him the whole candy bar.”

The outcome wasn’t good.

“He got mad. He looked right at me, put it in his mouth and crunched it,” Pfeiffer said. “And that’s exactly what it sounded like - crunch!”

Ann Rademacher, another ape keeper at the zoo, noted that the increase in dropped cell phones hasn’t led to a corresponding decrease in the usual items found in the exhibits, such as cameras, prescription glasses, sunglasses,babies’ shoes and car keys.

“We found a battery just this morning,” she said Wednesday about 10 a.m. “It has teeth marks all over it. Somebody had to have dropped it yesterday. It was probably in a device, we just couldn’t find it.”

Zoo spokesman Susan Altrui, said she wants zoo visitors to be aware that beyond the health risk to animals that swallow such dropped items, people should be more careful.

“It’s never a good idea to hold your child over an exhibit. That’s usually how the shoes get into the exhibits,” Altrui said.

Transmitting germs is also a major health concern, Rademacher said.

“All the things we put in there are disinfected and veterinarian-approved,” she said. “Even something as benign as an ice cube from your cup can cause problems. They can get all the things that humans can get, like chickenpox or measles.”

Fortunately, the crafty orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees in the three great ape exhibits aren’t particularly interested in eating what they find. But they fight among themselves for the bargaining power the items hold, Rademacher said.

To illustrate the point, Pfeiffer recalled the time she lost her keys in the chimpanzee exhibit.

“One of the little boy chimps had them,” she said. “Dad saw him and took the keys from him. He knew I had grapes. He knew the keys had value.”

The orangutans and chimpanzees are most aware of the bargaining power of foreign objects, the keepers noted. So much so that sometimes the animals try to use simple objects like rocks and sticks to barter with keepers for a few pieces of cereal.

The keepers said they will often trade the orangutans for the sticks because the animals have figured out how to use the objects to poke out light bulbs in their enclosure. The lighting is covered by a grate, but the animals know how to find slim sticks to hit the bulbs.

“Chiquita [a female orangutan] brought in a stick once and the keeper wasn’t paying much attention,” Rademacher said. “Then she [Chiquita] threatened to poke the bulb out. She stood there with the stick pointed at the bulb, and the keeper figured out: ‘Oh, you want a treat.’”

By far though, keepers say, Rok is the shrewdest bargainer.

He often dismantles items and trades one piece at a time for one whole treat at a time. He recognizes the red-and-white Coca Cola label and won’t trade items such as cell phones and cameras for “regular” food, the keepers said. Soft drinks and candy bars are the top-tier treats, followed by frozen fruit such as grapes and strawberries, they said.

“If an all-out camera with all the fittings and things went in there, the price would go way up,” Rademacher said, laughing at the thought.

Pfeiffer agreed, admitting that on “Some days, we’re definitely not the smartest primates in the building.”

Source: http://www2.arkansasonline.com/news/2008/may/15/zoos-apes-know-buttons-push-20080515/?subscriber/national

Publicly listed PT Bakrie Sumatera Plantations plans to add 50,000 hectares to its oil palm plantation by 2010 with an investment of US$260 million.

“Thirty-million dollars will be financed by equity from Bakrie Sumatera’s new subsidiary PT Bakrie Sentosa Persada (BSP), $80 million from an international consortium equities and the remainder with bank loans,” president director Ambono Janurianto said Wednesday.

Bakrie Sumatera established the palm oil producer BSP in June 2007.

Ambono said the expansion area, located in Central Kalimantan and Riau, Sumatra, was expected to contribute a profit of $100 per hectare, totaling $5 million per annum.

Bakrie Sumatera now operates 87,415 hectares of plantation, with 67,745 hectares for oil palm and the rest for rubber.

Ambono said the holding company aimed to expand its plantation area to 200,000 hectares by 2011.

Bakrie Sumatera, the country’s fifth-largest plantation owner by value, booked a 794 percent increase in its first quarter net profit to Rp 18.5 billion (US$1.99 million) over the same period last year.

“The year 2007 was really a great year for palm oil and natural rubber as prices surged to levels never reached before,” said president commissioner Soedjai Kartasasmita.

In 2007, the world crude palm oil price reached $600 to $800 per ton up by 100 percent from 2006.(rff/**)

Source: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/05/14/bakrie-expand-oil-palm-plantation-area.html

Source: http://jungaling.com/Malaysia/?p=199

His lithe frame at full stretch, an orang-utan attempts to spearfish in a river on Kaja Island, Borneo, mimicking what he has watched humans do.

Time and again he plunges his “spear” - a simple stick - into the murky water. When his exertions prove fruitless, he changes tack, using the implement to pull in nets, then making off with the fishermen’s catch.

Elsewhere on the island, an orang-utan plunges into the river, swimming to the opposite side to steal fruit. His extraordinary feat - orang-utans have only recently learned to swim - was captured by photographer Jay Ullal for Thinkers Of The Jungle, a grim examination of the plight of the hairy red ape.

But while the Indian photojournalist captured the images and German journalist Gerd Schuster penned the words, the man at the heart of this emotional journal is conservationist Dr Willie Smits.

In 1980, aged 23, Smits went to Indonesia where, over the next years, he became guardian to the orang-utans, which for millions of years existed in South-East Asia but now survive only on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

The Dutchman formed Borneo Orangutan Survival International (BOS) in 1991. The organisation is credited with saving 1500 of the creatures, which face extinction because hunters prize them and illegal logging, climate change and fire have ravaged their habitat.

The United Nations Environment Program estimates that 98per cent of the natural rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo could be destroyed by 2022. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources expects that within three decades, the orang-utan could be categorised as extinct.

“In the animal kingdom, the orang-utans range among our closest relatives,” Smits says. “Genetically they are about 97per cent identical with us - they are highly intelligent, thoughtful and inventive.

“They possess culture and a sense of beauty and they take after us in facial expressions, gestures and in many other respects. They are far more ‘humane’ than human beings and, it seems, therefore, they are too good for this world.

“They are incredibly strong yet they don’t defend themselves against poachers or the logger gangs of the [palm oil] companies - and they are slaughtered without mercy.”

BOS has introduced satellite technology to track illegal loggers - a significant step towards preserving the orang-utan and its habitat. But it is not only the orang-utan which is endangered. The Dayak tribe, which lives around Kaja Island, is also fighting for its very existence, says tribal chief Sina Sinam.
“Today we are almost finished,” Sinam says. “The forest in which our people [have lived] since time immemorial has disappeared. The [BOS] gives us work … as they try to save the numerous homeless orang-utans wandering around aimlessly in the palm oil plantations. Three of my children [are] employed by the BOS. The work helps us very much and the BOS now protects some of our island.

“We used to hunt the orang-utans and cut off their heads to use for our rituals. Now we realise that the orang-utans and we are fellow sufferers. We too will not survive without the rainforest. We still hope that our gods will help us.”

Smits’s work equips him to bring the orang-utan’s plight to a global audience. His tales include that of a female orang-utan who stumbled from a burning forest with her child. She waited until a human drove by then remained deathly still as the man raced from the car, rescued her baby and drove away.

“Only when she saw her child was in the hands of humans did she turn around and clumsily go back into the smoke of the burning forest,” Smits says.

“I recalled a story from the Old Testament - the mother who loved her child and wanted to save it, so renounced it, just like the female orang-utan did.

“Please do not think now that apes are unable to estimate their situation realistically, because that would be completely wrong. Animals stricken by such catastrophe know exactly that their world is disintegrating and that there is no more chance for them.”  Willie Smits arrives in Australia tomorrow for a four-day book tour.