From Yahoo.
PALANGKARAYA, Central Kalimantan (Reuters) - Bound hand and foot, disheveled orangutans caught raiding Borneo’s oil palm crops silently await their fate as a small crowd of plantation workers gather to watch.
Thousands have strayed into the path of international commerce as Indonesia and Malaysia, their last remaining habitats, race to convert their forests to profitable palm crops.
Branded pests for venturing out from their diminishing forest habitats into plantations where they eat young palm shoots, orangutans could be extinct in the wild in ten years time, the United Nations said in March.
Fighting against this grim prediction is the Nyaru Menteng Borneo Orangutan Survival (BOS) centre in Central Kalimantan, which rescues orangutans and returns them to the wild at the cost of US$3,000 per ape.
“It’s not just orangutans — bears, gibbons — everybody is losing their home,” said Droscher-Nielsen.
Indonesia and Malaysia together produce 83 percent of the world’s palm oil. Made by crushing fresh fruit, the reddish-brown oil is riding high in the commodities charts, with crude prices up over 15 percent this year after rising 40 percent in 2006.
Used in cookies, toothpaste, ice cream and breads it is the world’s second most popular edible oil after soy.
Demand is also soaring for palm oil-derived biofuel, despite objections from critics who slam the “green” alternative to pricey crude oil as “deforestation diesel” because of the destruction wreaked on forests to make way for palm plantations.
Forty local Dayak women look after the current crop of 18 palm oil “orphans,” whose mothers have been killed; bottle-feeding them milk, administering medicine and supervising their climbing and nest-building.
After “forest school,” the apes graduate to eventual release.
“They are cute and funny,” said Sukawati. “They make me laugh.”
“The orangutans can withstand a certain degree of logging, as most loggers don’t take the orangutan food trees,” said Bhayu Pamungkas of the World Wide Fund for Nature.
“But they have no chance with oil palm -& there’s no chance for the orangutan if they clear-cut all the forest.”
8 Comments
Rebels seize habitat for endangered gorillas.
Third of primates ‘under threat’.
Almost a third of the world’s primates are in danger of extinction because of destruction of their habitats, a report by conservation groups has warned.
The report focuses on the fate of the world’s 25 most endangered primate species, which are threatened by a depressing list of problems.
The authors say all the surviving members of these species combined would fit in a single football stadium.
25 Most Endangered Primate Species Could “Fit Into Single Football Stadium”.
Gorilla slaughter sparks campaign. (The Sydney Morning Herald)
Photographs documenting the slaughter are heartbreaking, mostly because of the peaceful, human-like expressions the dead gorillas wear.
These pictures are part of the tool kit brought to the United States by Arthur Mugisha, a former game warden in Uganda and now manager of the International Gorilla Conservation Programme.
Southeast Asia Paying High Environmental Cost For Palm Oil. (treehugger)
Mac devs band together to save lemurs; you can too! (ars technica)
Developer Mike Lee from Delicious Monster is heading up an end-of-year project to get everyone in the Mac community to save the lemurs in Madagascar, called Club Thievey.
Madagascar Fauna Group savethelemur.org
Wildlife extinction rates ’seriously underestimated’. (guardian)
Melbourne and Hastings highlighted two other factors that extinction models fail to include, the first being the proportion of males to females in a population, the second the difference in reproductive success between individuals in the group. When they factored these into risk assessments for species, they found the danger of them becoming extinct rose substantially.
Trove of endangered primates found in Africa. (IHT)
A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing primate populations. ..