I am a huge fan of orang-utan’s and think it’s great that we now have a World Orangutan Day, designed to highlight the plight of this incredible creature. If we can save their forests it will massively increase the chances of saving not only them, but the world’s climate so it should be a collective effort to help and to get them to stop issuing licences and start passing laws to protect relevant trees. Progress has been too slow and there continues to be a steady destruction of the worlds tropical forests because corruption is a huge problem as are levels of poverty and economic infrastructure demands.
Indonesia has become one of the world’s biggest deforesters and when we were in Sarawak a few years ago, we drove past many oil palm plantations and last year the urgency became even greater as they use fire to clear their peat bogs which blanketed vast parts of South East Asia in a noxious haze that closed schools and disrupted flights.
I took this photo of the orang-utan’s in the tropical forests when we were there:-
Borneo Island is home to some of the last remaining untouched wilderness areas and one of the world’s most endangered great apes the orang-utan and palm oil is a crop that has come to symbolise the destruction of Indonesia’s forests. It needs state protection for the animals and for the indigenous people’s territory,
The popularity of oil palm is understandable, it is easy and cheap to grow and has a very high yield compared with other oil seed crops. Indonesia has grown it for generations and global demand has soared because it is an oil that is used in hundreds of household products, from shampoo and soap to doughnuts and chocolate. However, if we all stopped buying products that contained palm oil in, then the bottom would drop out of the market. It’s a very simple economic supply and demand argument. We demand it. Indonesia, Malaysia and increasingly Angola and the rainforests of the Congo Basin in Africa are supplying it.
We need to help change that landscape because unless we decide unilaterally to pay them to stop growing it as well as stop buying the product, how are they going to be encouraged to stop? Then we can so that we can encourage them to focus more on their eco-tourism instead.
“Consumers are unaware of palm oil content”, the campaign says, because of current labelling laws. Palm oil is a key ingredient in many products – including chocolate and biscuits – but companies are not required by EU law to label products containing it until December 2014. WHICH MEANS THAT NOW WE HAVE NO EXCUSE, because they have to say if it’s been included.
