SAY NO TO PALM OIL! Did you know that most of us are fuelling one of
the world’s biggest ecological disasters and acts of primate genocide
in history? Borneo and Sumatra are two of the most bio-diverse regions
of the world, yet they have the longest list of endangered species.
This list includes the magnificent Orangutan. These two South-East
Asian islands are extremely rich in life, containing around 20,000
flowering plant species, 3,000 tree species, 300,000 animal species and
thousands more being discovered each year.
Despite this amazing biodiversity and delicate web of species, an
area the size of 300 football fields of rainforest is cleared each hour
in Indonesia and Malaysia to make way for the production of one
vegetable oil. That’s 6 football fields destroyed each minute.
This vegetable oil is called palm oil, and is found in hundreds of
the everyday products, from baked goods and confectionery, to cosmetics
and cleaning agents… many of which you buy in your weekly shopping. Due
to the massive international demand for palm oil, palm oil plantations
are rapidly replacing the rainforest habitat of the critically
endangered orangutan; with over 90% of their habitat already destroyed
in the last 20 years.
Orangutans are some of our closest relatives, sharing approximately
97% of their DNA with humans. Orangutan means ‘Person of the jungle’ in
the Indonesian language. It is estimated that 6 to 12 of these ‘jungle
people’ are killed each day for palm oil. These gentle creatures are
either killed in the deforestation process, when they wonder into a palm
oil plantation looking for food, or in the illegal pet trade after
they’ve been captured and kept as pets in extremely poor conditions and
provided with extremely poor nutrition.
Orangutans are considered as pests by the palm oil industry. In the
deforestation process, workers are told that if wildlife gets in the
way, they are to do whatever is necessary in order to dispose them, no
matter how inhumane. Often orangutans are run over by logging machinery,
beat to death, buried alive or set on fire… all in the name of palm
oil. Government data has shown that over 50,000 orangutans have already
died as a result of deforestation due to palm oil in the last two
decades. Experts say that if this pattern of destruction and
exploitation continues, these intelligent acrobats of the jungle will be
extinct in the wild within 3 to 12 years (as early as 2015). It is also
thought that their jungle habitat will be completely gone within 20
years (approximately 2033).
Around 50 million tons of palm oil is produced annually; with almost
all of that being non-sustainable palm oil, that replaces 12 million
hectares of dense, bio-diverse rainforest. That’s the equivalent
landmass of North Korea deforested each year for palm oil alone! Palm
oil is also having a shocking impact on our planet. The production of
this one vegetable oil is not only responsible for polluting rivers and
causing land erosion, but when the plantation workers set fire to the
remaining trees, shrubs and debris to make way for the oil palms, it
produces immense amount of smoke pollution that is toxic to planet
earth.
