The Last Stand of the Orang-utan: Palm Oil and the forests of Indonesia

What i am about to explain in this post is too put it bluntly an environmental catastrophe that we are all responsible for (including me) and one that is thousands of miles away but will eventually come back to haunt all of us. The consequence of our fast, consumer driven lives, the consequences of fast food and the need for cheap ingredients to go in these foods.

But, what is it you ask? Animal slaughter? the destruction of the oceans? The Iraq war? Nope, none of those, in the end it all comes down to a substance called Palm Oil and the utter annihilation of the Indonesian rainforests leading to the extinction of the Orang-utan, because believe you me if this is not stopped Orang-utans will be gone in less than 10 years. We are currently losing around 1,000 of these majestic apes each year and around 6 football pitches a minute of rainforest (conservative estimate). In Sumatra there are fewer than 7,300 surviving orang-utan, scattered between 13 forest patches. In Borneo, the population is estimated to stand at around 50,000 individuals, divided with forest fragmentation, particularly from oil-palm plantations, having separated the Bornean orang-utan habitat into 306 forest patches.

So, what is Palm Oil? and why is it so bad?
Palm Oil is a cheap vegetable oil that can be found in 1 in 10 of all supermarket products, it is an oil harvested from the Palm tree, a tree not native to Indonesia and the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Palm Oil is consumerd by over one billion people across the globe and can be found in products ranging from cosmetics to chocolate and for me sums up how our relationship with the planet is so very wrong. The Orang-utans are not just displaced from losing their habitat, they are killed because they are seen as pests. They also caught and sold into the illegal pet trade. Orang-utans have been drowned, burned alive, buried alive and attacked with swords.

Basically, we are tearing down the species rich rainforests of Indonesia so we can have cheap oil in our food to supply our hectic consumer driven lifestyles, you tell me what is right with that? It is wrong to the core on a vast amount of levels and brings a tear to my eye, everytime i think about it. We will eventually lose the Orang-utan just so we can have oil for our food, the next generation really will be ashamed of us.
But what can we actually do to stop this? The problem is, alot of the poorest people now depend on the income of the palm oil industry, so boycotting items does come with its problems, but as consumers we do have the power.

These are the actions that we can take:
1). We can first of all lobby the government to make the labelling of palm oil compulsory on every product it is in, because at the moment it is mostly labelled as 'vegetable oil'. (http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page17322).
2). Secondly we can buy wood that is Forest Stewardship Council certified (the logo is a green tree with a tick), which means it has come from sustainable sources.
3). Thirdly we can boycott the worst palm oil companies and spread the word of the plight of the Orang-utan. (These include Nestle, KFC and Unilever).

It is not just one animal that we are losing but a whole ecosystem that has evolved through thousands of years and contains many thousands of species still unknown to science. What you must ask yourself is can you live with the extinction of one of our closest relatives on your conscience? I know i cannot...

Nature as a way of life...


Further reading:

- http://redapes.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/bospalm_oil_report.pdf (Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation)
- http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/oil_for_ape_full.pdf (Friends of the Earth)
- http://www.unep.org/publications/search/pub_details_s.asp?ID=3920 (United Nations Environment Programme)