Use Biofuel: Kill An Orangutan!

Right in line with the previous post comes this article: Palm oil puts squeeze on Asia's endangered orangutan.

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.

Lacking only hand-cuffs and finger-printing to complete the atmosphere of a criminal bust, such "ape evictions" have become part of life for Asia's endangered red apes.

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.

"They will kill the animals if we don't go … It's cheaper to kill the orangutan than put up a fence or snares," said Lone Droscher-Nielsen, the Danish-born founder of the centre.

While harming the apes is illegal, her centre has amassed a slew of photographs of the grisly fates of some plantation trespassers: Apes with their hands cut off and slashed to death with machetes, and others with bullets through their foreheads.

With dozens captured this year, cages are full, and finding secure land for releases is a constant challenge for the centre.

"It's not just orangutans — bears, gibbons — everybody is losing their home," said Droscher-Nielsen.

"If it was only the orangutan, people just say: 'Well it's only one species that's going to go extinct'. But it's not just one species. Those forests have millions of animals in them that are all going to go extinct if we continue."

So why are the orangutans being executed? Why, to provide trans-fat-free oil and to produce "eco-friendly" biofuel!

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.

Of 6.5 million hectares cultivated in Malaysia and Indonesia in 2004, almost four million hectares was previously forest, environment group Friends of the Earth calculated.

For orangutan, the clearances are a matter of life and death.

"You can see how desperate the situation is," said forestry department official Sugianto, 43, as he gestured at row after row of palms in the ape's last stronghold, Central Kalimantan.

"The company knows the orangutan has a protected status … if they have a permit to clear 60,000 hectares they clear 60,000 hectares, orangutan or not. They only care about their profit."

The pushers of the global warming agenda and their nanny-state allies could frankly give a damn about the orangutans. It is more important to bring the Western economies to their knees than it is to actually care about the environment they profess to be concerned about to further their agendas. This is the upshot of the "environmental" agenda. No more orangutans so that there is plenty of trans-fat-free oil and abundant biofuel. Lots and lots of gushing about how industry is embracing the environmental agenda without even a glance at what that entails.

Really want to go there? Meet the new boss.

EVER so much worse than the old boss.

Other Links to this Post

1. Blue Crab Boulevard » Go Green, Kill A Peasant — Tuesday, 5 June , 2007 @ 7:16 am

2. Blue Crab Boulevard » Who’s Going To Pay For All This? — Friday, 8 June , 2007 @ 6:27 am

3. Blue Crab Boulevard » And Reality Sets In — Monday, 11 June , 2007 @ 6:57 pm