As if to underscore the colloquium's importance, delegates on arriving in the Malaysian State of Sabah found the capital covered in a thick and strange fog caused by the burning of rainforests and peat lands in neighboring Kalimantan.
After two days of intensive meetings the colloquium adopted a resolution which included the acquisition of land for creating wildlife buffer zones of at least 100 meters along all major rivers, in addition to corridors for connecting forests. Researchers said such corridors were essential if orangutans were to have a future in Sabah.
Young orangutan in Sabah. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.
"This has to be the way the way forward to restore or allow reversion of forests along riverbanks," John Payne with WWF-Malaysia said.
If the corridors, both connecting forests and alongside rivers, are implemented this will prove a huge success for conservationists and a vital step forward in saving the last remaining—and still declining—populations of orangutans in Malaysia. Such action would also represent a seismic shift in the palm oil industry's quest to repair a long-battered reputation due to large-scale deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia.
Sponsored by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC), the Bornean Conservation Trust, and the local conservation organization HUTAN, the meeting provided a rare venue for government officials to have drinks with primatologists, and palm oil entrepreneurs to share a meal with conservationists.
The call for conservationists and palm oil industry to work together
At times frustrations between the palm oil industry and environmentalists rose to the surface as when a member of Greenpeace SEAsia told the crowd that neither his organization nor he, himself, could approve of any deforestation. However, most of the meeting was conciliatory as members from all sides strove to find common ground.
Palm oil plantation in Malaysia. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.
"This colloquium throws a challenge to all concerned stakeholders in the palm oil industry, primatologists and ecologists included, on finding ways to develop the palm oil industry in a symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationship with the environment," the chairman of the Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC), Dato' Lee Yeow Chor, told the audience.
"I'd like to call for companies and NGOs and palm oil to get close together, get off your high horses about what should not be done […] but try to find some middle ground for where we can constructively move forward," said Erik Meijaard with the Nature Conservancy, Indonesia. Meijaard works with a population of orangutans who have continued to survive despite apart of the habitat being a paper plantation
Wildlife veterinarian and researcher, Marc Ancrenaz led the call for cooperation: "It's high time to stop polarizing this debate. The oil palm industry is going to stay, there's no point in fighting against development." He added "we need to look for a solution" to save orangutans.
Orangutans caught in a sea of plantations
Ancrenaz and the local organization HUTAN, of which he is a co-founder, was one of the major driving forces behind the meeting. Recent aerial surveys, funded in part by the palm oil industry, discovered orangutans living in small forest patches hemmed in on all sides by plantations. According to Ancrenaz, they are probably transient individuals looking for new territory.
Orangutans face many hazards in oil palm plantations. Workers have been known to kill the apes because they can damage the pricey crop, as well orangutans may starve to death due to lack of food sources.
Orangutans in Kalimantan. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.
"Oil palm plantations looks like forest, seem like forest, but they are not forest," Ancrenaz told the delegation. Studies have shown that biodiversity falls by 80 percent when forest is converted into oil palm plantation. The industry currently covers 1.4 million hectares of Sabah alone, over 18 percent of the state's total land.
Chairman of MPOC, Dato' Lee Yeow Chor, agreed that orangutans need help. "There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of the State Government and the Malaysian palm oil industry to find the ideal balance in meeting and achieving the needs of the people while ensuring healthy co-existence with the orangutans," he said.
A new palm oil industry?
During the colloquium oil palm delegates appeared to vacillate between conciliatory acknowledgement of environmental problems and passionately defending their industry from any criticism.
Tan Sri Bernard Dompok, the Minister of Plantation Industries and Commodities, called allegations by NGOs "vastly unfounded", saying that "palm oil is […] singled out as one of the primary causes of deforestation, depletion of biodiversity, and the displacement of endangered species such as the orangutan […] I wish to stress that all these allegations are unjustified".
However, a study in Conservation Letters found that 55-59 percent of palm oil plantations in Malaysia built between 1990 and 2009 occurred on forested land. In all it has been estimated that in Sabah alone forest cover declined by nearly 90 percent from 1975-1995, likely due to both logging and oil palm.
Palm oil plantation and rainforest in Malaysian Borneo. Photo by: Rhett A. Butler.
Other industry speakers touted the benefits of palm oil. As the world's highest yielding oil crop, oil palm has yields that vastly outperform corn, soy, or rapeseed, providing more food per hectare by ten to twenty times as much. It also has a better carbon balance than rapeseed or soy, but only if not grown over forests or peat land.
The CEO of MPOC, Tan Sri Datuk Dr. Yusof Basiron argued that oil palm was responsible for poverty alleviation in the region.
Mongabay.com is an environmental science and conservation news website.
