Kyoto Fails Endangered Orang-Utan

It is very easy to cast a roving eye over the planet and find some less than humane human acts perpetrated against other creatures—whether they be destruction of protected habitats, or the wholesale wiping out of a scarce endemic species. But to find these things and one or two others, including corporate acquisitiveness, wrapped up in a single situation is rather tragic.

Palm oil, which sounds innocuous enough, is now found in 10% of supermarket products and hails from South East Asia. Vast palm oil plantations carpet the lowlands of peninsular Malaysia, parts of Sumatra and Borneo. They have replaced some of the most diverse and ancient habitats in the world with a landscape as inappropriate as the ill conceived spruce plantations of the Flow Country in Northwest Scotland.

In South East Asia labour is cheap and palm oil in a world market is equally so. It contains a natural preservative, which increases the shelf life of the product into which it is infused and therefore sits well with an E number-conscious West. Apparently we can't get enough of it and share prices in palm oil may well be in the running to soar as the product is set to become a major player in the global vegetable market.

Currently South East Asian rainforests are being destroyed faster than ever, their indigenous peoples and wildlife swept aside or asunder by a commercial tsunami. One scheme alone, slap bang in the middle of Borneo's Tanjung Puting National Park, proposes to clear an area the size of, yes you guessed it, Wales for palm oil production. Apart from the area being home to several tribes, it is also one of the last places where orang-utans, an endangered species, live. Orang-utans 'enjoy' the highest conservation priority yet, paradoxically, "The rate of loss ... of orang-utans has never been greater than in the last three years" says Dr Willie Smits at the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, "and oil-palm plantations take the brunt of the blame".

It's a twisty tale but this is basically how it goes. In the dim yet recent past Malaysia and Indonesia joined the Kyoto Protocol buoyed by their massive carbon credits in lieu of rainforest. The special waiver in the deal is that if palm oil forests replace rainforest their Kyoto obligations remain the same. This provision unfortunately pans out into the exposure rather than the protection of natural habitats. These countries, for not cutting down their existing forests, gain no carbon credit through Kyoto.

Orang-utans, scarce and unique to Borneo, are disappearing fast. All the worlds' experts concur that without intervention orang-utans could be extinct within as few as 12 years. Professor Biruté Galdikas of the Orangutan Foundation International laments that "The orang-utan is endangered because of habitat loss. Today the greatest threat to orang-utan habitat is the continued expansion of oil-palm plantations. Palm oil is the greatest enemy of orang-utan and their continued survival in the wild."

Unlike man and bird, which on foot or wing can at least escape, orang-utans seek refuge high up in the canopies often in the very trees the loggers intend to fell. In an act of total barbarism both ape and tree are then often killed together. Also forest fires started to make way for palm oil plantations have killed thousands of orang-utans.

Some young surviving orang-utans are secreted into the illegal trade in endangered species, re-emerging as novelty pets or in private zoos. Should an infant be found in the clutches of a surviving mother, the parent is often crudely killed with machetes. Sometimes the youngster is also injured in the fray. Orang-utan rescue centres in Borneo are awash with orphaned orang-utans many with hands, fingers, toes or feet missing.

Perhaps Kyoto's 'loopholes' will eventually be pulled out with the new Company Law Reform Bill, which is under consideration, but it will take time. And time, it would appear, is the one thing the orang-utan and its forest do not have as legislation to protect the environment seems to grip globalisation like greasy palms on a slippery fish; mostly it swims freely and when caught remains so only briefly.