Orangutans and Palm Oil

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Okay, now to the orangutans.

Recently, I’ve been talking to the owner of a vegan restaurant/shop who proudly presented me with his “cheese” alternative. It didn’t taste too bad so I asked what’s inside.

”Oh! It’s just coconut oil and palm oil! Very pure, nothing else in there.”

I felt like screaming at him. Palm oil? How can someone who claims to respect and protect animals use palm oil? Are orangutans less worthy of our protection than cows?

I told the story in the chat yesterday and @geekpowered pointed out that people mostly don’t know the connection between palm oil and orangutans. Sometimes, we assume everyone knows about certain problems and forget that not everyone can be aware of everything all the time.

So what is the problem with palm oil?

Palm oil can be found in many products, often labeled as “vegetable oil”. Lipsticks, instant noodles, shampoos, ice cream, margarine, chocolate, cookies, the list goes on. It’s obviously a lucrative business!

About 85% of the world’s palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. For Indonesia alone, palm oil is the export product with the biggest profit. It’s not really surprising, that oil palms are being planted a lot. But that’s exactly the problem. _@suesa

Big parts of rainforests are destroyed to make room for the palms. That’s often done by illegally burning it all to the ground. Swamps are being drained to make room too. Between 1990 and 2013, the swamp forest in Tripa was reduced from 60,000 hectares to 10,000!

All this destroys the home of the orangutans who live in the forests of Borneo and Sumatra. I roughly marked the areas where they can be found on the map below.

Map by Central Intelligence Agency [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, slightly modified by me

With their homes cut down, burned and replaced with oil palms, the orangutans just starve to death. They’re restricted to small patches of forest which can’t feed all of them. The hunger often forces them onto the plantation where they look for food - and are killed brutally by plantation workers.

Of course, that’s illegal. Just as it’s illegal to just burn down the forest. In 2012 there has been a lawsuit against the palm oil firm P.T. Kallista Alam by the Indonesian government for burning down 1,000 hectares! They were sentenced and … nothing happened aside from the company filing a lawsuit back. Don’t we all love companies like that?

It’s also illegal to traffic orangutans and sell them as pets. But the people doing that don’t care. Mothers who wander onto the plantations together with their young are captured and killed so the young can be sold off. Orangutan mothers are very, very attached to their babies. Just imagine the emotional trauma, the pain.

So what can you do? After all, palm oil is seemingly everywhere.

There are companies who try to “ethically” farm palm oil and to not add to the deforestation. How closely they follow that guideline is questionable, but it’s a start.

You can generally try to only buy products with palm oil from verified sources or just cut out palm oil out of your life as far as possible. It’s not guaranteed that this will be enough. Maybe orangutans will be gone in a few years or decades. Maybe it’s too late.

But we can at least try.

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Sources:

The Effects of Palm Oil

Palm oil kills orangutans in Indonesia peat swamp

Can Oil Palm Plantations and Orangutans Coexist?

Endangered Orangutans Gain From Eco-Friendly Shifts in Palm Oil Market

Orangutans fight for survival as thirst for palm oil devastates rainforests

Which Everyday Products Contain Palm Oil?

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Pictures taken from pixabay.com if not stated differently

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