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Melanie Jae Martin : Visiting Sumatra’s Orangutans Responsibly

Palm Oil Boom Threatens the Last Orangutans

A famous British company, Jardines, is profiting as the lowland forest – which shelters the few remaining orangutans – is razed to make way for massive palm oil plantations, reports Kathy Marks in Tripa, Indonesia.

Perched halfway up a tree near a bend in the Seumayan River, a young orangutan lounges on a branch, eating fruit. In the distance, smoke rises from an illegal fire, one of dozens lit to wipe out the virgin rainforest and replace it with oil palm plantations.

It’s burning season on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, where vast tracts of vegetation are being torched and clear-felled to meet the soaring global demand for palm oil. The pace is especially frenzied in the peat swamp forests of the Tripa region, one of the final refuges of the critically endangered orangutan – and a company owned by one of Britain’s most venerable trading groups is among those leading the destructive charge.

Prized for its productiveness and versatility, palm oil is used in everything from lipstick and detergent to chocolate, crisps and biofuels. Indonesia and Malaysia are the world’s biggest palm oil producers – but they also shelter the last remaining orangutans, found only on Sumatra and Borneo islands in the same lowland forests that are being razed to make way for massive plantations.

In Indonesia, one of the largest palm oil companies is Astra Agro Lestari, a subsidiary of Astra International, a Jakarta-based conglomerate which is itself part of Jardine Matheson, a 177-year-old group that made a fortune from the Chinese opium trade and is still controlled by a Scottish family, the Keswicks, descendants of the original founders.

Conservation groups are targeting supermarkets in Britain to alert consumers to the effects of the palm oil explosion. But The Independent can reveal that Jardines, registered in Bermuda and listed on the London Stock Exchange, is implicated through Astra Agro in ripping out the final vestiges of orangutan habitat.

Environmentalists are dismayed by the activities of Astra Agro, one of the main companies operating in Tripa under permits that were awarded during the 1990s by the notoriously corrupt Suharto government. They point out that Tripa belongs to the nominally protected Leuser EcoSystem, renowned for its exceptional biodiversity, and claim that the plantation businesses are contravening a logging moratorium as well as engaging in illegal practices including burning land.

Greenpeace UK says: “It’s scandalous that a British company is bankrolling the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests and peatlands. We need to see big firms like Jardines withdrawing investment from companies involved in rainforest clearance.”

Orangutans are vanishing at an alarming rate in Borneo but in Sumatra their situation is even more precarious. The Sumatran orangutan – more intelligent and sociable than its Borneo cousin and with a unique culture of tool use – is likely to be the first great ape species to go extinct.

There are believed to be just 6,600 individuals left, mostly living in unprotected areas of Aceh province. Their lowland forests remained relatively undisturbed during the long-running separatist war in Aceh, but since a peace agreement was signed in 2005, it has been open season.

The primates are now splintered across 11 pockets of jungle, with only three populations considered viable. Another three, including Tripa, are borderline viable. Elsewhere, the orangutans – which use sticks to extract insects from trees and seeds from fruit – are effectively extinct. As their territory shrinks, along with their food supplies, the apes are increasingly coming into conflict with humans. Farmers shoot those caught raiding crops; babies are captured and sold as pets. Adults discovered in oil palm plantations may be hacked to death with machetes.

In Tripa, more than half of the 62,000 hectares of ancient forest has gone. As well as being home to endangered species including the sun bear and clouded leopard, the peat swamps acted as a protective buffer during the 2004 tsunami. They also hold gigantic carbon stocks which are now being released, exacerbating climate change. “If you can’t save Tripa, what can you save?” asks Denis Ruysschaert, forest coordinator for PanEco, a Swiss environmental organisation.

Sumatra is a beautiful island, with jungle-clad mountains and picturesque villages where long-horned water buffalo wander. But it is difficult not to be shocked by the colonisation of the landscape by one short, stumpy tree: oil palm. The monoculture is a desolate sight, stretching for miles, relieved only by charred hillsides dotted with tree stumps – cleared land awaiting yet more oil palms. Trucks rattle past, laden with the prickly red fruit from which oil is extracted. In Aceh, they call it the “golden plant” – the cash crop that is lifting the province out of poverty and helping it rebuild after the tsunami. “Recently there’s a frenzy to plant oil palm,” says Fransisca Ariantiningsih, who works for Yayasan Ekosistem Lestari (Yel), an Indonesian conservation group.

On Sumatra’s west coast, a small-time farmer, Raluwan, is nursing his seedlings. Ten families, he explains, have logged and burnt 100 hectares of land. Each hectare will yield four tonnes of fruit, fetching 800 Rupiah (47 pence) a kilo.”I used to grow chilli, but palm oil is a very economical crop,” he declares. “You don’t need much pesticide or fertiliser.” Raluwan knows orangutans live in the nearby forests. “I don’t care,” he says. “I’ve got to feed my family.”

However, many are missing out as the industry grows to meet demand from Europe, the US, China and India. Most plantation workers are migrants from Java and in Tripa, communities that depend on the swamps for water, fish and medicinal plants are suffering.

Kuala Seumayan is hemmed in by plantations. Villagers say they no longer have space even to bury their dead. “Since the forest has been chopped down, it’s difficult to get food,” says one elder, Darmizi. In the Seumayan River, youngsters dive for freshwater clams while children squeal and splash in the placid brown waters. It’s an idyllic scene, but something is missing: the sights and sounds of the forest. The only wildlife consists of a hornbill and two long-tailed macaques. Indrianto, a forestry manager, says: “This used to be all peat swamp, with many trees and animals. Now it’s all oil palm. Before, I heard animal calls. Now I hear only chainsaws.”

By chance, we spot an orangutan in a solitary tree. Tripa has just 280 apes left. The young male, its fur glowing in the afternoon sun, curls one arm lazily over an upper branch.

A black slick floats on the water: sludge from one of many canals dug to drain the swamps. The arduous procedure is considered preferable to planting on fallow land, which would require negotiations with landowners. This way, the companies also get to sell the timber. As you fly over Tripa, the scale of destruction becomes clear. The green tangle of the forest, in all its riotous variety, abruptly gives way to giant rectangles, laid out with geometrical precision and studded with thousands of palms.

Riswan Zen, a spatial analyst for Yel, last flew over in 2007. “So much forest gone, and all in two years, my God,” he says, gesticulating at a satellite imaging map. “If nothing is done, there’ll be no forest left in one to two years.”

Tripa, designated a priority conservation site by the UN, could hold 1,500 orangutans if the forest was allowed to regenerate. Prospects seem slim, although Indonesia – one of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, thanks to deforestation – claims to be committed both to saving the orangutan and combating climate change.

Fewer than a quarter of Indonesian producers have joined the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, a global organisation promoting sustainable practices. (Astra Agro is not among them.) Even in Aceh, where Governor Irwandi Yusuf, a former rebel leader, has proclaimed a “Green Vision”, authorities seem unwilling to crack down on the powerful oil palm companies.

So far, Jardines, whose colourful history inspired a series of novels by James Clavell, has resisted pressure to rein in its Indonesian subsidiary. In a statement to The Independent, Jardines – whose interests include the Mandarin Oriental hotels and Asian branches of Starbucks and IKEA – said Astra Agro’s plantations “function in full compliance with … environmental impact studies”.

Astra Agro says it plans to develop only half of its 13,000 hectares in Tripa because of conservation concerns, and it denies any illegal activity.

Ian Singleton, a Briton who heads PanEco’s Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme, has no doubt that oil palm is the biggest threat to the orangutan: “I see the orangutan as a test case. Are we serious about trying to conserve the planet’s ecosystems? If we are, let’s prove it by saving a species like the orangutan. We know where the orangutans are; all we have to do is protect the forests. If we’re serious about conservation, this is where we start.”

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/oil-boom-threatens-the-last-orangutans-1714157.html

Related Post: UK Firm Plans to Log Habitat of Critically Endangered Orangutans for Palm Oil Production

UK Firm Plans to Log Habitat of Critically Endangered Orangutans for Palm Oil Production

A Scottish firm has been implicated in funding a plan that would destroy the rainforest habitat of critically endangered orangutans in Sumatra.

Jardine Matheson Holdings is the majority shareholder of Astra Agro Lestar, a palm oil company that plans to develop the peatland forests of Tripa in Aceh Province for oil palm plantations. Environmentalists say conversion of the forest would destroy a biologically rich ecosystem that serves as a buffer against natural disasters in a region that bore the brunt of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 225,000 people. Draining of the carbon-dense peat soils would also accelerate climate change by releasing vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

In a series of statements, members of the coalition blasted Jardine and its chairman Sir Henry Keswick, who was knighted this month in the Queen’s birthday honors list.

“It’s scandalous that a British company is bankrolling the destruction of this vital part of Indonesian rainforest,” said Greenpeace forest campaigner James Turner. “If the executives at Jardines don’t stop this they will be rightly accused of speeding up climate change, destroying a vital tsunami buffer zone and driving the Sumatran orangutan to the brink of extinction.”

“It is frankly shocking that the Chairman of Jardine Matheson has been knighted for services to British business interests overseas, while his company is actively contributing to the demise of the critically endangered Sumatran orangutan,” said Helen Buckland, UK Director, Sumatran Orangutan Society (SOS). “British businesses must be held accountable for their part in the destruction of this globally important area of forest.”

“The crisis facing Tripa Swamp Forest demonstrates just how ruthless this industry can be,” said Michelle Desiliets, Director of the Orangutan Land Trust. “A UK-based company, chaired by an individual recently knighted for services to British business interests overseas and charitable activities in the UK, provides the investment for such destruction, and as such, surely cannot claim to have any interest in Corporate Social Responsibility.”

Orangutan refuge

Twenty years ago Tripa was home to around 1,500 orangutans but hunting and habitat destruction have reduced the population to around 280, or about 4 percent of the 6,600 Sumatran orangutans that remain in the wild.

Trip is one of Sumatra’s few remnant lowland forests. Since 1975, the extent of primary forest cover in Sumatra has decreased by more than 90 percent due to logging, agricultural expansion, and plantation forestry — especially rubber and oil palm.

“This case in unfortunately just one example,” said Alex Kaat from Wetlands International. “Throughout Indonesia and Malaysia, we see that the last remaining peatswamp forests are cleared for palm oil production to meet the growing demands for vegetable oils and biofuels.”

While the oil palm is the world’s most productive oilseed — far outstripping canola or soy — conversion of forests and peatlands for its cultivation has sparked alarm among environmental groups concerned by its impacts on biodiversity and climate. The worries have been supported by a series of studies published since 2007 in peer-reviewed scientific journals showing that biodiesel produced from palm oil grown at the expense of these ecosystems is worse for the planet than conventional fuels. In response, some industry members say they will avoid developing high conservation value forests and peatlands for new plantations, instead focusing on degraded grasslands and improving yields on existing plantations. The Indonesian government has also restricted development of peatlands deeper than 10 feet (3 meters) for oil palm. Still some firms continue to develop contentious parcels, sometimes in direct conflict with local communities.

Source: http://news.mongabay.com/2009/0623-tripa.html

Carbon Credits Could Help Orangutans

Carbon markets were designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The system could also be a financially feasible way to save tropical forests, according to a new study that estimated how much it would cost to prevent logging in Borneo’s forests.

What’s more, an established market would help buoy orangutans, pygmy elephants and other threatened species.

“I think it’s our best chance we’ve ever had to conserve forests,” said Oscar Venter, a conservation biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “There is a big potential positive here for the twin objectives of climate mitigation and biodiversity protection.”

Deforestation in the tropics accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse emissions — more than from any other source, including vehicles. Animals that live in native forests suffer as their habitats disappear.

In Indonesia, which emits the most land-generated greenhouse gasses of any country in the world, most forests are cut down to make way for oil palms. The industry is extremely profitable, and it’s growing quickly. Palm oil appears in a large number of food products and is used for biofuel.

One idea to prevent palm plantations from replacing ever more tropical forests is to set up a type of carbon market based on payments for reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). Instead of selling land to be developed, a country could sell carbon credits to an international market. Other countries could buy these credits to make up for exceeding limits set by the Kyoto Protocol or its successor. Purchased credits would guarantee that a certain plot of forest would remain standing.

In order for the system to work, a country like Indonesia would need to make as much or more money from selling the credits as it can make from developing palm plantations. Venter and colleagues wanted to know if that were possible.

First, the researchers looked at the financial reports of oil palm companies to figure out how much money palm plantations were actually bringing in. Those calculations included profits from oil and from the timber that is cut down to make way for the palms.

Next, they considered all of the carbon produced when land is cleared for oil palm development. The value includes decomposition and burning of timber and vegetation. The team estimated these numbers over the next 30 years for all 808 palm plantations planned for forested areas in Kalimantan, the Indonesian region of Borneo. Overall, that area includes 3.3 million out of the country’s 27 million hectares of forest habitat.

To match potential profits from oil palms, credits would have to cost between $10 and $33 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, the team reported in the journal Conservation Letters. In current markets, prices range between $2 and $30 per ton.

“If this had come out and said we would need to price carbon at $100 to $200 a ton to make this feasible, we would have said, ‘Oh crap. This is not going to help us,’” said Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist at the Nature Conservancy in Washington, D.C. “This was a big deal to us to find out. It means we’re going to invest in resources to make sure we do it right.”

For wildlife, that investment would be well worth it. Forty of Kalimatan’s 46 threatened mammals live in areas that are slated to become palm plantations, the study found. Orangutans are a particularly high-profile example.

The good news, Venter said, is that threatened mammal populations are twice as dense in areas that have the richest (and therefore cheapest) sources of carbon — in places, for example, where the forest is thick and undisturbed.

“Conservationists had optimism that this carbon market was going to help them solve a lot of problems, but that all depends on where the animals live,” Kareiva said. “It turns out that if in fact you go into this carbon business to slow down climate change, you will also get wildlife protection. It’s like a free bonus.”

Source: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/06/19/carbon-credits-orangutan.html

Orangutans Cannibalise Own Babies

Two female orangutans have been seen cannibalising the bodies of their recently deceased babies.

Such behaviour has never before been recorded in any great ape species.

The two incidences occurred just one month apart in the same region of forest in Indonesia.

The conservationist who witnessed both incidences suspects they were examples of aberrant behaviour, triggered by stressful living conditions suffered by both mothers.

Humans aside, chimpanzees were the only great apes known to engage in cannabilism, the eating of members of the same species. The behaviour had also been inferred but not seen in gorillas, after the remains of infants were found in the faeces of two adults.

But until now, no ape has been recorded eating its own offspring.

“Cannibalism has been documented in chimpanzees and reported in gorillas. Never before has any ape species been seen treating its own offspring as a consumable resource,” says David Dellatore of Oxford Brookes University, in Oxford, UK.

That was until Dellatore begun tracking orangutans living in Bukit Lawang, an area of forest within the Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra, Indonesia.

Dellatore, who now works with the Sumatran Orangutan Society based in Medan, Sumatra, initially monitored the physical health of once captive orangutans that have been rehabilitated and released back into the wild.

But soon he noticed that tourists in the area were interacting closely with the apes. Despite a ban on doing so, some tourists would feed or touch the semi-wild apes. So Dellatore switched his research to monitoring the behavioural health of the orangutans, following them from dawn till dusk.

During this research he twice witnessed female apes he recognised eating the corpses of their recently deceased babies.

“While following Edita, whose infant had just died in the forest, on the eighth day myself and my assistant Tumino saw her begin to consume the corpse,” Dellatore says.

“At first we did not believe it, but there was no mistaking it. Edita was engaging in filial, or mother-infant cannibalism.”

“Then a month later I was following Ratna by myself, whose infant had also just died, and observed her also cannibalising her dead infant.”

Seeing the first instance surprised Dellatore, while he found the second even more shocking.

“Such behaviour had never been seen before in more than four decades of orangutan research. Surely it’s not happening here twice in a one month period?” Dellatore recalls asking himself.

But Dellatore managed to collect further evidence of the second event. “I recovered a fallen piece of the infant’s skeleton that Ratna spat out, as well as rather clear video footage of the event.”

Grieving mothers

Dellatore is unsure why the orangutans behaved so. “It makes little evolutionary sense for orangutan females to kill their infants, nor is there any evidence that this happened here,” he reports in the journal Primates.

But he points out that it is not uncommon for orangutans and other nonhuman primate mothers to carry their deceased infants. “It may be part of a grieving process,” he says.

Indeed, Edita, a 23 year old female, carried and protected the body of her one year old infant for seven days, occasionally inspecting it while vocalising a whimper. Only on the eighth day did she start to consume it, when it was already heavily decomposed. Twenty year old Ratna’s seven month old infant appeared unwell a few days before death.

Dellatore is reluctant to make any definitive claims as to why the behaviour occurred. But he suspects that the mothers’ stressed upbringing may have triggered their later actions.

“Semi-wild orangutans are all exposed to considerable traumas, such as witnessing the deaths of their own mothers,” he says. To feed the pet trade, an orangutan is often captured from the wild as an infant, with its mother being killed as she would not otherwise let her baby go. Captive orangutans also suffer long periods of social isolation.

“Studies have shown that early social deprivation can have deleterious effects on later levels of cognitive ability. It is possible that the cannibalism events are an extension of these effects,” he says.

Although rare, mothers have been recorded cannibalising their infants in a few species of monkey. In galagoes, another primate species also known as bushbabies, the behaviour has been linked to stressful living conditions.

The presence of tourists may also be stressing the apes.

Dellatore supports proper ecotourism in the area, which can bring in important funds that can help conserve the great apes. But he says too many tourists visit and interact with the apes without a sense of environmental or social responsibility.

His organisation is running an ecotourism development programme in Bukit Lawang to try and mitigate these problems.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8058000/8058365.stm

Humans Related to Orangutans, not Chimps or Gorillas

In a new research, a team of scientists has suggested that humans most likely share a common ancestor with orangutans, not chimpanzees and gorillas.

The research, done by scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and the Buffalo Museum of Science, reject as “problematic” the popular suggestion, based on DNA analysis, that humans are most closely related to chimpanzees, which they maintain is not supported by fossil evidence.

Jeffrey H. Schwartz, professor of anthropology in Pitt’s School of Arts and Sciences, and John Grehan, director of science at the Buffalo Museum, conducted a detailed analysis of the physical features of living and fossil apes that suggested humans, orangutans, and early apes belong to a group separate from chimpanzees and gorillas.

They then constructed a scenario for how the human-orangutan common ancestor migrated between Southeast Asia, where modern orangutans are from, and other parts of the world and evolved into now-extinct apes and early humans.

The study provides further evidence of the human-orangutan connection that Schwartz first proposed in his book “The Red Ape: Orangutans and Human Origins, Revised and Updated”.

Schwartz and Grehan scrutinized the hundreds of physical characteristics often cited as evidence of evolutionary relationships among humans and other great apes like chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, and selected 63 that could be verified as unique within this group (that is, they do not appear in other primates).

Of these features, the analysis found that humans shared 28 unique physical characteristics with orangutans, compared to only two features with chimpanzees, seven with gorillas, and seven with all three apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans).

Schwartz and Grehan then examined 56 features uniquely shared among modern humans, fossil hominids-ancestral humans such as Australopithecus-and fossil apes.

They found that orangutans shared eight features with early humans and Australopithecus and seven with Australopithecus alone.

The occurrence of orangutan features in Australopithecus contradicts the expectation generated by DNA analysis that ancestral humans should have chimpanzee similarities, according to Schwartz and Grehan.

Schwartz and Grehan pooled humans, orangutans, and the fossil apes into a new group called “dental hominoids,” named for their similarly thick-enameled teeth.

They labeled chimpanzees and gorillas as African apes and determined that although they are a sister group of dental hominoids, “the African apes are not only less closely related to humans than are orangutans, but also less closely related to humans than are many” fossil apes.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Health–Science/Science/Humans-related-to-orangutans-not-chimps-or-gorillas-/articleshow/4670642.cms

Sumatran Orangutan (Pongo abelii)

Orangutans are the species of great ape along with gorillas, chimpanzees and Bonobos Orangutan becomes the only ape which remains in Asia while gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos can be found in Africa. There are now two accepted species of orangutan – the Sumatran Orangutan ( Pongo abelii) and the Bornean Orangutan ( Pongo pygmaeus).

Orangutan greatest habitats in Sumatra are the alluvial forest patches in lowland river valleys and in the freshwater and peat swamp forests in floodplains. The orangutan is the largest arboreal animal means Orangutan spend almost all of their times on the tree and rarely to go down. Orangutan is well adapted with their environment that they have long hands and feet and has very mobile shoulder and hip joints to move from one tree to another tree.

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