Prices for cereal, cookies and hundreds of other items in your grocery store depend increasingly on an oil harvested half a world away.

By MATT McKINNEY, Star Tribune
November 30, 2008

ORO PROVINCE, PAPUA NEW GUINEA – Ezekiel Asimba’s 25-acre farm lies deep within a tropical rainforest, within view of an active volcano, but the palm oil that he and other growers produce will leave this remote island on cargo ships owned by Minnetonka-based Cargill Inc., destined for grocery store shelves around the world.

The quest for cheap food has helped transform palm oil from an inexpensive cooking oil used mostly in developing nations to an all-but-invisible staple of the western diet. But with an ever larger portion of our food now coming from the farthest corners of the globe, the price we pay at the grocery store is more and more tied to events beyond our control.

That was made especially clear in 2008, when sharp increases in the price of palm oil and dietary staples such as wheat, rice, corn and soybeans seemed to herald a new era of higher food prices. In U.S. supermarkets, it meant the biggest rise in grocery bills in nearly two decades. Elsewhere, food riots broke out and the Haitian government fell as suddenly higher prices unleashed a desperate scramble for food.

Some blamed the global crisis on demand from China and other fast-growing nations. Others faulted government-imposed biofuel mandates, which encouraged farmers to take some crops out of the food chain. And still others directed their ire at hedge funds and financial speculators, who had turned food into an investment, or at food companies such as Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge and Cargill, which booked record profits as others starved.

All those forces came into play in the price of palm oil this year. And while prices for it and other commodities have retreated from summer highs, most experts worry that higher food costs and shortages may become more frequent in the coming decades. A U.N. estimate warns that the world must grow 50 percent more food by 2030 just to keep up with global population.

Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil in the world. It’s found in Nabisco’s Oreos, General Mills’ breakfast bars and Brach’s Maple Nut Goodies made by Round Lake-based Farley’s & Sathers. U.S. consumption of palm oil has tripled from 324,000 tons in 2005 to 1 million tons today. By one estimate, one in 10 products in a U.S. grocery store contain palm oil.

“It’s pretty ubiquitous,” said Duke Seibold, technology director for General Mills. “It can be used in ramen noodles, croissants; it has a very wide application.”

Besides food, it’s a source of biodiesel, industrial cleaners, soaps, toothpaste and cosmetics.

Its use in processed food doesn’t require hydrogenation, a process that produces trans fat, an unsaturated fat linked to heart disease.

But it’s chief virtue is that it is cheap. The oil palm trees that produce the plum-sized drupes are a wonder of biology. They produce more vegetable oil per acre than any other crop, by far. Coconuts produce about half as much oil per acre, and canola and soybeans a mere tenth of that amount.

That high yield is a primary reason why palm oil usually costs a quarter to a third less than soybean oil.

This year, the world’s farmers are on track to produce more than 43 million metric tons of palm oil, with more than 80 percent coming from a thin crescent of islands between the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Cargill has grown oil palms — the trees that produce the fruit from which palm oil comes — for more than a decade in Indonesia, where since 1995 it has had a single plantation on the island of Sumatra. Then in 2005, Cargill bought the British government’s palm oil operation, which included three massive plantations and a processing plant in Papua New Guinea.

From the air, Cargill’s plantations form a checkerboard on the jungle terrain of Papua New Guinea, an island northeast of Australia, bigger than California. Dark green squares mark off the acres of palm trees.

Cargill workers in blue coveralls stomp through the plantation, their boots falling with soft thuds on the jungle floor. Palm trees tower over them, the fronds a canopy that block out the August sky. The men kneel down and pluck the deep-red palm fruit that has fallen to the ground, sweeping them into piles and tossing the piles into a large container.

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Palm oil is killing orangutans!

By Pete Harrison

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/8090914

BRUSSELS, Nov 27 (Reuters) – The European Commission plans new rules for biofuels by the end of 2010 to prevent the valuable trade from contributing to the destruction of rainforests, a document seen by Reuters on Thursday showed.

Environmentalists have attacked the Commission’s initial proposals in January to get 10 percent of all road transport fuel to come from renewable sources by 2020, as it sought to avert storms, floods and droughts foreseen with climate change.

Much of that 10 percent would come from biofuels, creating a huge potential market that is coveted by exporters such as Brazil and Indonesia, as well as EU farming nations.

But environmentalists charge that biofuels made from grains and oilseeds have pushed up food prices and forced subsistence farmers to expand agricultural land by hacking into rainforests and draining wetlands — known as “indirect land-use change”.

The new proposal will lay down which biofuels are acceptable in the 27-nation bloc, where they can be produced, from what plants and which methods can be used.

Such rules would rule out ethanol fermented using power from coal, the most polluting source of energy, which has no benefits for the climate.

Biofuels grown on degraded land, or made from algae, rubbish, or forestry and agricultural waste would all be acceptable, the draft document added.

DEADLOCKED

The plans coincide with efforts by the European Parliament to alter the Commission’s initial proposal so as to protect forests and to limit traditional biofuels to just 6 percent of road fuel.

But talks aimed at reaching a compromise have become deadlocked, because EU member states refuse to move on the original 10 percent target, parliament’s lead negotiator Claude Turmes said on Thursday.

“The negative environmental and social consequences of biofuels are now widely acknowledged,” he added. “This is why the European Parliament proposed strengthening the safeguards.”

He told Reuters that major progress had been made on other elements of renewable energy legislation, including improving the access of windfarms and solar power to energy networks and allowing countries to invest in renewables overseas.

But like most areas of EU climate legislation, the renewables proposals remain blocked by big political hurdles and intransigent member states.

Europe has to tread carefully on biofuels, after eight developing nations including Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia warned this month they could file a World Trade Organisation complaint over what they see as unfair trade barriers.

The Commission draft said biofuel schemes built before 2012 that produce biofuels which provide greenhouse gas savings of more than 45 percent would be exempted from the rules for five years, so they can recoup their investment.

(Reporting by Pete Harrison; editing by Dale Hudson and Peter Blackburn)

This is a long post– but it is incredibly valuable. Please take the time to read it… You won’t be sorry.

By Karl Amman
Visit his website to see hundreds of absolutely breathtaking photos: http://karlammann.com/

Nov. 10, 2008

I’ve just finished a film shoot, with a German television crew and a print journalist, which took us to several locations in Western and Central Kalimantan. Our objective was to investigate and document the current conservation status of orangutans indigenous to these areas.

We chartered a plane to fly from Palangkaraya to Pangkalanbun which used to be one of the strong holds of the orang utan in the Central Kalimantan region. Soon after flying over the BOS ( Borneo Orang Utan Survival Foundation) Center at Nyaru Menteng, we could clearly see where huge areas of swamp forest had recently been bulldozed for oil palm plantations with other areas having been flattened to make way for illegal gold mining . The deforestation continues all the way to Tanjung Puting National Park, then resumes along its northern border on the Kumai River.

This kind of deforestation is indicative of what is also occurring in West Kalimantan, and to some extent in the east as well. On the Malaysian side of Borneo, in Sarawak and Sabah the story appears to be the same, with many of the same companies, under Malaysian ownership and using Malaysian capital, now moving into the Indonesia side of Borneo.

I had been visiting Kalimantan on an almost annual basis since the mid 1980’s up to about 5 years ago. My favorite location for photographing the red ape, in a relatively natural setting, has been Tanjung Puting National Park. The resulting photographic coverage has been included in two titles on great apes (produced with co-authors), as well as in Orangutan Odyssey (Abrams, 1999) by Dr Birute Galdikas featuring my photography.

Eco-tourism
I had however not been back to Tanjung Puting for five years, before this opportunity arose to return, and I was shocked at how much more commercial we found it. Prices at the park’s Rimba Lodge and for boat charters have tripled since my last visit, and the orangutan feeding sites are now crowded with the “kloktok” tourist boats.

These feeding sites were originally set up to supplement ex-captive orangutans which were being re-introduced to the forest and still had to learn to forage on their own. Now, however, they appear to be provisioning adult animals as well, ones which should no longer require supplementary feeding. Thus the primary purpose of the feeding platforms now seems to be for the benefit of tourists seeking an up-close orangutan photo-op in an artificial setting complete with visitor seating areas, cordoned-off view points, and signs full of instructions and warnings – however no real information on the conservation issues affecting the orang utan populations or the new oil palm fields next door.

While eco-tourism has been touted as a panacea for many conservation projects, the number of visitors to Tanjung Puting has increased to the extent that, in my opinion, the quality of the overall experience has drastically diminished. At such a point, instead of offering a solution eco tourism often becomes part of the problem as has been seen in many of the more prominent national parks in East and Southern Africa.

On the way to Indonesia I read in an in-flight magazine a story about an orang utan rehabilitation center on Sumatra. It states; ‘ The center no longer takes in new captive orphaned orang utans as the forests around Bukit Lawang are nearly saturated with rehabilitants which is a real testament to the centers success.” I would classify filling the last patches of forests which orphaned apes as a major failure in terms of overall conservation objectives. Then no longer being able to deal with the still incoming orphans and the corresponding animal welfare as well as conservation issue, I will touch on later.

The piece concludes stating: ‘By allowing close human contact in a controlled way will not only increase the understanding and appreciation of these endangered animals but also increase the desire to protect them for future generations as well”.

If that is one of the objectives of eco tourism, in this and other parts of the world, then where is the success?

Lip Service

The Project Manager of an orangutan conservation research project in West Kalimantan informed us that Borneo’s population of red apes, 100 years ago, is estimated to have been 2 million. Today the latest census data indicates that a maximum of 50,000 remain, and these only in relic populations so fragmented that their genetic viability has become a conservation concern. This would strongly suggest that, despite the last 30 years of active conservation efforts – plus the new additions of eco tourism – and millions of dollars having been spent on trying to protect Asia’s only great ape and it’s forest habitats, nothing has worked.

A telling example of this failure, in my opinion, is the “Tanjung Puting Declaration” signed by the world’s leading primatologist in 1991, which has long been, and still is, proudly displayed in the dining room of Tanjung Puting’s Rimba Lodge. It states:

WE, THE CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS, WHO HAVE STUDIED AND WORKED TO PROTECT THE GREAT APES…
RECOGNIZE
THE EFFORTS EXPENDED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF INDONESIA TO PROTECT THE ORANGUTANS…
RESPECT
THE QUALITY OF NEW INDONESIAN LEGISLATION DEALING WITH ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES AND NATURAL PROTECTION
SUPPORT
THE SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF INDONESIAN EXPERTS…
APPRECIATE
THE SUPPORT GIVEN BY THE INDONESIAN GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS…
ACKNOWLEDGE
THE PROBLEMS FACED BY THE GOVERNMENT OF INDONESIA TO CONSERVE BIODIVERSITY………

The reality is, however, that more forest destruction has been taking place in Central Kalimantan than in any other ape habitat in the world. Around the time this declaration was signed Indonesia spent millions of dollars from it’s “Reforestation Fund” to clear-cut a huge tact of primary peat swamp forest in Central Kalimantan, for something called “The Rice Bowl Project” which, in the end, was never completed. Indonesia is cited today in The Guinness Book Of World Records as the biggest destroyer of primary rainforest in the world, with some estimates suggesting that forest is being lost at a rate equivalent to 300 football fields every hour. Indonesia has also become the third largest emitter of CO2 due to this clearing of primary rain forests.

During the late 90s and the early parts of this decade, I regularly documented illegal logging activities taking place along almost the entire length of the Sekonyer River, which forms the park’s western border . The park’s Probiscus research station was demolished and looted by loggers, who then used the station’s jetty as part of their riverside infrastructure. Within the park, an entire village had been constructed, complete with a mosque with shining domes.

The port of Kumai was at the time home to many active saw mills and lumber yards, where dozens of ships could be seen being loaded with illegal timber. Today, however, this activity seems largely a thing of the past, for reasons which have less to do with enforcement or conservation efforts and more with the fact that the valuable Ramin timber has been depleted, the big bucks earned. Now the raw material for Indonesia’s numerous paper mills is supplied by the clear-cutting of millions of hectares of what is now mostly secondary forest, advanced by the new kid on the block – the palm oil industry.

When I first saw reports of the “Special Palm Oil Working Group” included within the minutes of The Great Ape Alliance, I knew that things had to be bad. I did not, however, expect them to be disastrous and, possibly, already beyond hope.

Clearly, whatever the Indonesian authorities have been saying in terms of being committed to protecting Kalimantan’s forests has not resulted in any effective actions being taken on the ground. Rather, it appears to amount to little more than lip service having being paid in order to give the international community what it wants to hear. Meanwhile, the behind-the-scenes policy seems to be: the faster the remaining forests can be converted into plantations the less possibilities for descriptive international media coverage.

Orphans
The lack of political will, combined with a willingness to window-dress and deceive, is now manifestly affecting the survival of Indonesia’s few remaining wild orangutans, as well as the welfare of the approximately 1200 orphan orangutans residing in the country’s sanctuaries. It is patently obvious that these orphans would not still be coming out of the forest at these rates if any progress were being made as far as halting the forest destruction. Each orphan, in my opinion, is an advertisement of the failure of the various conservation efforts.

Besides Sumatra, Borneo’s lowland rainforest is the orangutan’s only other indigenous habitat on our planet

In the past considerable efforts were made to provide orphaned orangutans with a second chance through rescue projects offering sanctuary, rehabilitation and, ultimately, reintroduction into protected areas. (Several times, in the late 90s, I stumbled across baby orphans being illegally held in various locations in Central Kalimantan. After reporting this to the BOS Sanctuary Management in Waniraset, some were successfully confiscated and rehabilitated.)

Many of the big conservation players, having access to serious funds to apply to issues they consider conservation priorities, make the argument that the funding it takes to rehabilitate captive orphans would be better spent on protecting habitat for those remaining in the wild. In doing so, however, they overlook the fundamental fact that every orphan represents a failure on their part to protect the wild populations in the first place. Given the present situation, it seems that the flow of orphans will decline only at the rate the wild populations decline and no longer produce them.

Based on this track record should we trust these conservation conglomerates with suddenly finding an effective approach to deal with these issues.?

It seems that the concerned and educated public of the developed world has come to a general acceptance that we are unable to address the problem of uncontrolled and unsustainable development within such poorly governed countries as Indonesia. As such, one humane alternative is to focus on the plight of the orphans, even if giving them a second chance limits them to a life in semi-captivity. Therefore considerable funding has been made available to take care of great ape orphans throughout Africa as well as Indonesia and to some extent Malaysia.

As consumers of a large percentage of Indonesia’s illegally harvested timber (much of which imported as finished products from China), as well as a wide range of products containing palm oil, we, the consumers in the west as usual bear quite a bit of responsibility in arriving at this stage. Since we seem to have a problem curtailing the consumption side of it and push for better and more responsible governance in the countries concerned we feel the occasional check to adopt an orphan here or there is part of a way to make up.

In my opinion this is a mopping up exercise and has little to do with conservation but is basic animal welfare responsibility we have when it comes to our closest animal relatives. However even on this front things seem to be now changing for the worse as well.

Transparency
The media team I was traveling with wanted to film the BOS Nyaru Menteng Rescue Center where some 600 orphans are being held awaiting rehabilitation.

However, the BOS application for a filming permit entails a daunting three page list of requirements, including CV’s of all team members, health certificates, HIV tests, a full outline of script and story angle, and an explanation of how the film project will benefit BOS, “…and it’s efforts to help save orangutans”. The camera man stated that this was far in excess of what they’d had to do to film aboard a U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier during The Gulf War. The print journalist (who was also a producer) asked if he could visit without the film crew, but was told that he would have to submit an outline and “story board” of his intended piece. This he considered “totally absurd” and the worst form of censorship he had ever encountered.

After making a few phone calls, we established that the board of BOS is now comprised mostly of ex-government officials doing the bidding for the authorities. The result being a media access policy structured in such a way as to allow to exclude any proposals not portraying happy endings and an overall positive slant.

Apparently this has been deemed necessary based on the fact that media teams have regularly used the orangutan’s plight as a vehicle to telling the wider story of unsustainable development and forest destruction combined with the drastic increase in CO2 emission. Thus the powers that be, seeking to curtail this kind of exposure, and seemingly in collaboration with the palm oil industry lobby groups, have come up with demands for documentation which will allow them to in turn use this red tape to control future media coverage.

2015
Unwilling to accept these censorship rules, we abandoned our plans to visit the BOS rescue center. Rather than pursuing the story of rescued orphans, we decided to focus instead on the story behind those orphans still awaiting rescue. In the West Kalimantan town of Ketapang we found five young orangutans awaiting transfer to one of the official rescue centers, in solitary confinement within dark cages, to which they had already been confined for four months. Local forestry officials told us that the sanctuaries were now considered full and this was the first time they had encountered such a delay in transferring confiscated orphans.

Also in Ketapang we were told, by a representative of a foreign conservation NGO, that they had submitted a list of 20 illegally held orangutans to Forestry officials with the hope of having them confiscated. They too confirmed that, because no sanctuary space was available, further confiscations were deemed pointless. A local conservationist who later tried to locate the orphans on that list told us that most had already “disappeared”… It seems this is now the latest approach to ‘solving the problem’ of illegally held orphans.

In Pontianak we visited two adult orang utans held illegally in small cages in a garbage area of a residential estate. They have been there for years and as usual with adult animals they are much harder to confiscate and relocate then small orphans. After a recent escape their cages have now been welded closed. The message again seems to be they will never again leave these cages. Our local guides estimated that there are between 50-100 illegally held orang utans in Pontianak alone.

“The Strategic Plan” for the conservation of the remaining orangutan populations, which was presented by Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the 2007 Bali Conference, embedded within a wide range of lofty goals and declarations, makes it clear that Indonesia’s target is for all orangutan rescue and rehabilitation centers to be closed by 2015. Many of the world’s largest conservation organizations have signed on to this plan and are cited on its title page.

The conclusion has to be that sanctuaries which are expected to close down in seven years will have their hands more than full to find new forest patches for rehabilitation and then getting the 1200 orphans now awaiting relocation back into a natural setting and as such it should not be surprising that a bottleneck concerning new arrivals is developing. However confiscation relocation represented about the only aspect of any kind of effective law enforcement in the context of orang utan protection there ever was. No longer accepting orphans and no longer confiscating any means officially ignoring the law of the land (an orang utan can only be legally held with a specific authorization of The President of the Republic of Indonesia) and sending a loud and clear message: The Orang Utans have become too inconvenient.

Trading of Orang Utans and Conservation

In 2006 the CITES Secretariat and the Great Ape Survival Project (GRASP) mounted a joint mission to determine why large numbers of orangutans were being illegally exported and turning up elsewhere in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. One point the corresponding report makes is that there has never, in the history of independent Indonesia, been a successful prosecution of any poacher having killed an orang utan or anybody for illegally holding one. Clearly this lack of political will in enforcing national laws protecting endangered species is hardly conducive to productive conservation efforts. Indeed, the CITES/GRASP answer to the problem of orphan orangutans was: to ship them to foreign zoos or euthanasia. The UN body specially established to protect the last remaining great apes concludes that in case of the orang utan there is little hope and potentially a dead orang utan is the best solution.

I fail to understand the logic behind the message which conservation NGO’s attempt to convey to local villagers, that wild orangutans in the forest comprise a valuable resource, while illegally held orphans (captured after their mothers have been illegally killed) no longer have any kind of value – they are classified as already genetically dead.. At least the occasional confiscation in the past, served as a reminder of the government’s official stance regarding law enforcement and wildlife protection.

The future

On the ground in Kalimantan, the situation appears hopeless. In the larger economic scheme of things, the orangutan now seems to amount to little more than an inconvenient nuisance, the sooner gone the better. The facts are:

- orphans are still appearing in numbers
- it has become close to impossible to film or photograph the large numbers of apes now held at ‘rescue centers
- recently confiscated orphans are stuck in half way houses
- no more confiscations seem to be taking place
- the government has decided that all sanctuaries and rehabilitation centers need to be closed by 2015

Clearly, the efforts of both the conservation and now the animal welfare establishments have failed and are failing. While millions of hectares of Indonesia’s secondary lowland forests are being replaced by palm oil plantations, no new areas are being allocated for the rescue and rehabilitation of the hundreds of homeless orangutans. Apparently the conservation community wields no real clout on any level. The sooner we accept the fact that whatever the past approach was (Tanjung Putting, Kinshasa declaration etc.) has failed and that unless something drastically changes all the efforts of the past will amount to having lost ‘by one less goal’.

It appears that the orangutans of Indonesia will be the first of the great ape populations to go extinct in the wild with a few, genetically no longer viable, relic populations hanging on in some forest patches. The projections of experts of this occurring within the next 20 years might, in fact, be overly optimistic. It is no longer a subjective question of seeing the glass half full or half empty – it is obvious that the glass is indeed empty, of all but the last few drops.

Greenpeace has branded the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) “a farce” following their failure to take action against members they say are destroying Indonesia’s peat lands and forests.

By Ian Wood
28 Nov 2008
Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Tripa area of forest in North West Sumatra is home to the critically endangered Sumatran orang-utan Photo: IAN WOOD

A draft resolution calling for an immediate moratorium on logging in areas of high value protected forests did not even make it on to the agenda.

Before their recent annual meeting in Bali there was hope that the new resolution would have forced members to cease logging in important areas of forest as determined by new digital maps.

“The rapid loss of forests in Indonesia and the current climate crisis needs strong leadership from the global business community,” said Bustar Maitar, Greenpeace southeast Asia forest campaigner.

“However the RSPO has failed dismally to take up the challenge.

“‘Sustainable palm oil’ continues to be a farce while RSPO stands exposed as a weak and ineffectual industry body.”

The coalition of members that make up the RSPO include NGO’s such as WWF and Oxfam along with both producers and major users of palm oil.

Unilever is one of the world’s largest purchasers of palm oil and has been under pressure from Greenpeace not to deal with companies who are destroying critical areas of rainforest.

Unilever’s sustainable agriculture director, Jan Kees Vis, is also president of the RSPO executive board. Unilever did recently pledge to purchase only sustainable palm oil by 2015 but the argument over how this is certified continues.

Following pressure from Greenpeace, Unilever developed a draft resolution calling for a moratorium on logging in areas of high value forest that was due to be voted on in Bali last week.

However, to the dismay of many conservationists, the resolution was removed from the schedule of the RSPO meeting.

“If the RSPO had any integrity then it would have taken urgent action. For Greenpeace it is clear that the current RSPO standards are too weak, are not implemented and are clearly failing to address this rampant deforestation,” said Tim Birch, Greenpeace international forest campaigner.

Recently a shipment labelled ’sustainable’ palm oil arrived in Holland to coincide with the annual general meeting of the RSPO.

The 500 tons of palm oil was destined for Unilever and was cited as proof that sustainable palm oil was at last being produced.

However Greenpeace has produced a report which they say casts doubt on the company that produced the shipment.

It came originally from United Plantations who were the first palm oil producer to be RSPO-certified. Although the certification of United Plantations only applies to their Malaysian operations they are also under an obligation to ensure that their other interests meet certain minimum requirements.

This process, known as partial certification, was developed by environmental groups within the RSPO to ensure that companies could not attract buyers of sustainable palm oil from showcase plantations while destroying forests and peat lands elsewhere.

Greenpeace alleges that United Plantations and its subsidiaries are embroiled in a number of illegal non-compliant activities in Indonesia including deep peat forest conversion and land disputes with local community members.

United Plantations said the Greenpeace report was based on “misconceptions and misunderstandings”.

In relation to the development of peat land they point out that RSPO criteria stipulates: “Planting on extensive areas of peat soils and other fragile soils should be avoided.”

United Plantations claim that their estimated peat area in Kalimantan, Indonesia, amounts to 3,800 hectares which constitutes 11 per cent of their entire Indonesian land bank.

Of this total area of peat forest they say they have planted 604 hectares with palm oil which would fit in with the criteria of the RSPO.

Even with the advance of digital mapping and GPS systems the reality is that it is hard to monitor exactly what is happening in remote areas of Indonesia. Land ownership laws are confusing and often the palm oil companies have been granted their concessions by central Indonesian government.

United Plantations admit their properties contain a number of local communities who claim traditional land ownership and/or user rights. As part of the process in obtaining their operational permit they need to get the full consent of communities involved.

“This is arguably the most tedious and challenging part of land acquisition in Indonesia, because there is rarely consensus among villagers pertaining to trading of traditional land.

“Therefore land acquisition often necessitates negotiations directly with each family who owns a piece of land.

“It cannot be emphasised enough that villagers’ approval are of utmost importance to the palm oil business. It takes merely one discontented villager to cause massive havoc in and around the estates,” United Plantations said.

They claim that the specific case raised by Greenpeace pertaining to land conflicts involved the falsification of land ownership documents by a villager who they also claim assaulted an employee of United Plantations.

There is certainly a growing demand for sustainable palm oil as many users do not want to be associated with the destruction of rainforest and the threat to endangered species including the orang-utan.

United Plantations say their 500 ton shipment that recently arrived in Europe was a major milestone and that the allegations made by Greenpeace are “unfounded”.

A resolution put forward by the Swiss NGO PanEco to force the RSPO to act to protect an area of peat forest swamp in Sumatra was narrowly approved.

The Tripa area of forest in North West Sumatra is home to one of just six remaining viable populations of the critically endangered Sumatran orang-utan and contains millions of tons of carbon dioxide that is being released into the atmosphere as it is destroyed.

The palm oil company PT Astra Agro Lestari are running one of the concessions in Tripa that has about 6,000 hectares of virgin forest located on peat swamp. This is a legal concession granted by Indonesian central government some time ago.

PT Astra Agro Lestari supply Unilever with palm oil and under the terms of this resolution the RSPO is forced to write to PT Astra Agro Lestari and members that have business relationships with them to explain their concern regarding their activities.

Because Unilever is such a key member of the RSPO it is hoped that this could help persuade PT Astra Agro Lestari to move its concession to more suitable land.

By Diana Plater
October 1, 2008
Photo: Matthew Moore

The ranger, wearing gum boots, is standing on a timber platform in the middle of the jungle holding out some bananas.

“Geooooooorge, Geooooorrrge,” he yells.

There’s a rustle in the leaves high up in the canopy and then the branches begin to sway; the vines droop and there’s more movement up above.

Next thing George is swinging down to the platform, grabbing the fruit, then leaping away.

It’s not some Tarzan movie. We’re in the Semmenggoh Orang-Utan Rehabilitation Centre in the Malaysian state of Sarawak in Borneo, where confiscated and surrendered orang-utans are cared for and rehabilitated.

At the 9am feed, we’ve been waiting to see Ritchie, the dominant male, who is leader of the group. The rangers know he’s coming when he lefts off a loud roar, similar to that of a lion, announcing his presence to any females within range.

The other males mate also, but they are said to “do it secretly” so Ritchie doesn’t find out.

At 1.37m tall and weighing 90k, Ritchie was named after the local journalist James Ritchie who “rescued” the six-month-old from an illegal wildlife trader in Batang Ai in 1989.

In a recent article Ritchie says that Ritchie (45.72cm tall at that time) had been squeezed into a small square cage and hardly had room to move. Apparently, he was on its way to the home of an animal enthusiast.

Today we’re disappointed: George, but no Ritchie.

Tourists are able to take their chances to see the males at the 9am and 3pm feeds.

Closer to the centre’s buildings, mothers and babies come down to grab food and are not as shy as the males. But we are still told to keep quiet and not use our cameras’ flashbulbs,

The name orang-utan is Malay for “man of the forest.” In the local Sarawak language the name is Maias.

Colour of orang-utans in Borneo vary from orange in young animals to dark reddish brown in their elders. In Indonesian Sumatra, they tend to be lighter in colour and have thicker longer hair.

Ritchie says Sarawak’s orang-utans used to roam the forests and foraged in the lowlands. But when man intruded into their territory, the conflict started.

Over the past 100 years, maybe a quarter of the 12 million hectares of forests in Sarawak had gone under the axe and “slash and burn” farming leaving very little tracts of virgin jungle.

So the orang-utan left for other regions where there were other sources of food. Then with illegal wildlife trade reaping millions of dollars, the population of the primates began to shrink.

Over the last 50 years, logging, agricultural activities and other forms of development have taken their toll.

But in 1998 Sarawak established a legal framework for wildlife protection with the introduction of the Wildlife and Protection Ordinance; now, highly viable areas of orang-utan are totally protected.

There’s a centre of excellence for orang-utan research at Nanga Delok (Batang Ai) where local and foreign scientists and experts are working closely and exchanging notes to protect the primate.

Ritchie says that in the early 1900s, there were an estimated 200,000 orang-utans in Borneo and Sumatra. Now, there’s an estimated 27,000 in Borneo (5,000 of the Pongo Abelii species in Sumatra) with about 2,000 in Sarawak.

The animals are shy, elusive and arboreal and spend most of the time in trees, navigating like master climbers. They build four to five nests a day where they rest and their home range is sometimes 1,000 hectares for the male or from 50 to 300 hectares for the female.

They mainly eat fruit, insects and occasionally eggs and small vertebrate. An adult male is estimated to have the strength of six men.

Orang-utans have the slowest rate of reproduction among mammals – the gestation period is 8-1/2 months.

A baby stays with its mother until it’s about five or six years old, when she’s ready to give birth again. This enables mohers to teach them survival skills.

A female will give birth only two or, at most, three times.

The Semenggoh Nature Reserve was formerly the Semenggoh Forest Reserve, established in 1920 and opened to the public in 1975.

Chong Jiew Han, the Customer Service Supervisor at the Sarawak Forestry Corporation, says there are presently 22 orang-utans roaming around the 653 hectares of the nature reserve, and 10 new-born babies.

Because some of them had been kept as pets, they were incapacitated by captivity by humans and lacked survival skills. So they needed to be taught about their environment, just like humans.

Chong says the centre is trying to provide the animals with the most conducive environment, similar to their natural habitats in the wild.

The aim is to eventually release them all back to the wild in order to breed.

Some of the rescued orang-utans are “too old and too fat” to be trained, and some have to be quarantined, depending on how long they were kept in captivity.

The rangers train them by bringing them up to the forest and then bringing them back to the centre to sleep.

Some have difficulty climbing the trees, so the rangers have to actually teach them how to. They also have to watch out for snakes such as pythons which can swallow the babies.

“We have to be very patient,” Chong says. “Slowly, slowly. We prefer them to go on their own. When the babies are born we don’t want to interfere.

As this particular forest is not their natural habitat, the rangers are “afraid if there’s not enough food to eat they’ll kill each other. The 9am feed is supplementary.”

Chong goes on: “Our objective is for people to understand the importance of wildlife. We have to work with committees formed by the local communities.

“We’re still looking at the number of males coming out, and bringing them to another area means a lot of stress. We’re still doing a lot of research.”

The reserve is 20km south of Kuching, Sarawak’s capital, and has its own rare flora and fauna including the giant squirrel, pigmy squirrel and a huge variety of birds.

Trips can also be combined with the yearly Rainforest World Music festival at the Sarawak Cultural Village at Santubong. The tenth one will be held from July 13 to 15 next year, coinciding with Visit Malaysia Year 2007.

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/travel/where-orangutans-go-for-rehab-20081113-63v1.html

Steve Meacham
October 1, 2008

Please visit the source of this artic’e: http://www.theage.com.au/

The Sarawak jungle is the last habitat of the orangutan, Steve Meacham keeps his head as he visits the “wild men” of Borneo.

So much for the wild men of Borneo. They’re actually quite mild. Why, even the headhunters seem friendly. The old man showing off his tattoos is an honoured man in this part of the Sarawak jungle. It’s said he has killed seven men and brought their decapitated skulls back to the longhouse to prove it. There they are, displayed in an alcove in the roof like golf trophies.

The old man – he’s 84 by his own reckoning, although I doubt he could produce a birth certificate – has just been demonstrating one of the war dances unique to his Iban tribe. At the same time he has been revealing, a little too graphically, the drawbacks of the Iban loincloth as a modest form of dress. Brazilian beach girls on Copacabana wear more.

If he is a little unsteady on his feet, it could have something to do with the copious amount of rice wine and rice whisky he has drunk to toast our arrival at the longhouse. Something to do with convincing his tribal ancestors we are not evil enemies despite our pale complexions.

Every time he stumbles, the women on the longhouse’s communal veranda tease him. He takes their rebukes in good humour. He’s a happy headhunter. Or, as our guide describes him, “a very kind man”.

It is not hard to work out that the severed heads probably belonged to young Japanese soldiers caught in this unforgiving jungle more than 60 years ago when the headhunter was a young man. But for obvious reasons – not least the impact such a revelation might have on Japanese tourism – no one really speaks about it.

The Borneo longhouse is one of the great crucibles of human civilisation. The forums of imperial Rome may now be mere ruins and the pleasure domes of Kublai Khan just lines in a poem, but when we visit a longhouse we are witnessing a form of human society that has survived largely intact for 2000 years.

Of course, there have been changes. For one thing, the longhouse chief probably wouldn’t have had (as this one does) a colour TV, satellite phone and electric organ tucked behind his front door.

Like all longhouses, this one is a subtle balance of the communal and the private: an entire village in one long, narrow building traditionally made of wood (though modern ones are often made of concrete). The inhabitants spend most of their time working together on the verandas. But behind each door – there are about 25 doors in this longhouse – are their private quarters. Each door signifies a different family.

When we arrived, the chief was away on business, visiting a nearby longhouse for talks about the future of a river. But his wife was happy to show us around their abode, which was not particularly spacious or comfortable by Australian standards, but palatial to an Iban.

Of all the surprising things in their “apartment” – the electronic gadgets, the pink and purple colour scheme, the musical instruments, the ancient ceramic jars exchanged a century ago with the first Chinese traders to penetrate this far inland – the oddest was the presence of the chief’s married daughter.

Her husband, born outside the longhouse culture, had been given permission to build one of the few “private homes” less than 20 metres from the longhouse. But after a few months the daughter missed the community life so much the family – wife, husband and baby – moved back to the chief’s quarters and they were now living together in the tiny space.

The Iban are just one of the peoples of Borneo, the world’s third largest island after Greenland and New Guinea (if you don’t count Australia). These days the island is politically divided into four areas: the Indonesian province of Kalimantan, the independent oil-rich state of Brunei and two Malaysian states, Sarawak and Sabah.

Sabah is the better known to Australians tourists, mainly because of its cheap resort hotels and convenient direct flights from Sydney. But Sarawak is a fascinating and friendly destination with much to offer the independent traveller (though be aware of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade warnings issued from time to time).

Chief among Sarawak’s attractions is an overnight trip to a longhouse (easily arranged by email in advance or in Kuching when you arrive). With a German couple and our Chinese guide, Kenny, I visited a longhouse on the Lemack River. The trip involved three hours on a minibus then an hour going upriver in a motorised canoe.

We were able to get a good feel for longhouse life before retiring for the night under mosquito nets in the separate bunkhouse for guests.

The next morning, after a brisk wake-up swim in the river, we were obliged to watch demonstrations of two of the Iban’s most popular pastimes: cockfighting (non-lethal, thank goodness) and blowpipe target practice. Then it was off into the jungle for an exploratory lesson in the rainforest larder. It really is amazing how abundant the foods are in the jungle – provided you know what to look for. Some are cash crops, particularly rubber and pepper, sold by the longhouse for the communal good. Others end up in their own cooking pots. Well, it’s better than human heads.

ORANGUTAN SANCTUARY

But it was the sight of the big male coming in from the jungle that really stirred the imagination. There was something both human and inhuman in his approach. His furtiveness, seizing yet another banana, reminded me of a schoolboy taking the last jam doughnut while he thought no one was watching. And yet the incredible agility and athleticism in his arm and leg pirouettes would have defeated any Olympian gymnast.

QUEEN OF THE HEADHUNTERS

Many more people may have lost their heads but for James Brooke, the first of the famous “white rajahs” of Sarawak, who discouraged the practice. Brooke, an English adventurer and idealist who had left the army in India because of injury, arrived in Kuching in 1838 on his private gunboat and quelled an insurrection against the unpopular Sultan of Brunei, who then ruled Sarawak. The result, extraordinarily, was that the protesters asked him to be their rajah.

And so was born a dynasty that survived until the Japanese invaded Sarawak in World War II.

The second white rajah was Charles Brooke, James’s nephew. Charles’s wife, Margaret, was a young Englishwoman who knew little about her adopted homeland. But she had a strong constitution, an aptitude for photography and, most important of all, an intense curiosity about language, culture and the things that bind us together as human beings. Her autobiography, My Life In Sarawak, published in 1913, is one of the great works of travel literature. Not just because of the extraordinary events she witnessed – headhunters, the plague, the deaths of three of her children just six days apart – but also because of the modern sensibility of her eloquent prose.

She believed in what today we call a multicultural society and used her autobiography to lambast what she saw as the arrogant ignorance of her white contemporaries, all too ready to dismiss other races and religions as second rate or savage.

So what would Ranee (a rajah’s wife) Brooke think of the modern Kuching, the city she describes so memorably in its nascent years?

At sunset I sit with a beer in the James Brooke Bistro and Cafe, next door to the Chinese Historical Museum and on the other side of the Sarawak River from her old floodlit palace, the Astana.

Kuching is not just a multicultural success but one of the most pleasing and relaxing cities in South-East Asia. True, there are not a lot of must-see sights. After you have toured the Sarawak Museum (reckoned by some to be among the best natural history and entomological museums in Asia), taken a river cruise, seen a few cat statues and even a cat museum (Kuching is Chinese for “cat”), you will struggle.

There are some handsome architectural relics left over from the Brooke era (the post office, the old courthouse, a square tower from the prison). Plus the things you would expect to find in any Asian city: fish, meat and vegetable markets, silk and batik bazaars, food courts, tailors’ shops, Chinese herbalists, temples, churches, and even internet cafes.

But it is the atmosphere of tolerance that is most appealing.

I move on from the James Brooke Bistro, past the Crowne Plaza, the Hilton and the Holiday Inn, along the floodlit riverbank with its food stalls, to the New Kuching Food Centre (the word “new” is relative), tucked away in a forgotten location behind the Pizza Hut.

I order a seafood claypot from one of the food court stalls and can hear Michael Buble’s voice ringing from some bar, competing with a mullah calling his faithful to prayer in the mosque on the opposite riverbank. Kuching is that kind of city.

At its heart is the river. From my seat on the incoming plane the meandering river had looked exotic and bewildering. From the ground it is no less exotic, but easier to appreciate. There are no bridges in Kuching, at least not in the city centre. People cross the river by sampan, a five-minute journey that costs about 30 Australian cents.

Tonight the river is bejewelled with light. The cruise boat has just steamed back to its resting place, another sunset suitably dispatched. The mullahs have grown silent, at least for now. A new set of diners has taken the adjoining table, a mixture of mullahs and Indians.

And across the river, serene despite the roar of a jet, is the floodlit profile of Fort Margherita, named in honour of the ranee.

Would Margaret Brooke be happy with the way Kuching turned out? I think so.

BAKO NATIONAL PARK

If you’re going to spend any time in Sarawak, pack your hiking boots. Barely two hours from Kuching is Bako National Park, one of the most fascinating and varied parks in Malaysia. Landscapes include thick jungle, open heathland, swamps, rocky promontories and a handful of beaches bordering the South China Sea – all in an area that’s not much bigger than Sydney’s North Head.

Most foreign visitors to Bako book a day trip through one of Kuching’s tour companies (about $50 a person). But it’s a much more fulfilling experience if you spend the night in the park at one of the government-run hostels or lodges. You can make the most of the world-class treks and the wildlife.

Reaching Bako is a mini adventure in itself. A No. 6 local bus from Kuching takes you on a 45-minute journey to the fishing village that acts as the ferry terminus. There you catch a speedboat for a 30-minute ride across the bay, with the $13 fare split between the passengers.

The park’s chief attraction is the proboscis monkey. (Bako is home to a fifth of the 250 left in Sarawak.) You do not need to venture far from the park headquarters to see the curiously long-nosed animal, which spends a large part of its time in the mangrove forests.

But it is the walking tracks themselves that draw me. There are about a dozen connected routes, all colour-coded so you can’t really get lost (just follow the paint marks on the trees). My circuit takes about seven hours, combining a little of everything: steep ascent, open country, thick jungle, a pretty beach, waterfalls, swamp and hillside lookouts.

It is tough trekking. Not because of the gradients but because of tree roots that make some sections of the track look like a plait of Medusa’s hair. Several times I trip – once backwards into a waterfall.

But it really is special country. Visit it, if you can.

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/travel/borneo–mild-at-heart-20081113-63tr.html?page=-1