BORNEO DEVASTATED

bY Fernando Turmo, PGS/ GAP Spain

Four hundred dollars per ton. This is the approximated amount paid for the palm oil, a trade that threats to hit the final stroke to the unavoidable climate change on our Mother Earth.

Millions of square kilometers of tropical forests have disappeared in Borneu in the last few years, as a consequence of this abrasive and contaminating monoculture. The wet forest is normally dissected through an canal that drains water, which is cut, burnt and converted to a palm plantation.

There is no other greasy seed planted in the world that produces the quantity of oil of these ones planted today in Indonesia. One hectare can reach the production of 5 thousand liters of oil, compared to 446 liters of soy and 172 liters of corn, all of them called "biofuels".

Nevertheless, the name "biofuel" is a label name, with commercial purpose, because in reality these palm plantations devastate violently the environment. First of all, this plant absorbs all the nutrients of the soil, causing it to be extremely poor and in 25 years the soil became completely unfertile. And after thatω That land will only be able to give birth to short bush, the best fuel to cause fire.

Apart from that, the industries which process this oil produce a great quantity of contaminated waste, consisted of fat residuals. As long as it is a monoculture, it is need a great amount of herbicides, fertilizers and pesticides.

The exploitation of palm oil in Indonesia seems to benefit only the great farmers and corrupted politicians. The weak can only look to the other side, routine repeated in a lot of lands in the third world.

Seventy per cent of the forests in Indonesia have disappeared, as it they had never existed. Close to two millions of hectares of forests are destroyed per year.

According to studies of Michigan University, the consequences of this destruction reflect in the fragile balance of the planet, both in Borneo Island and regionally in Asia, even globally. For each jungle hectare that disappears in Indonesia a great portion of ice will become water on the poles, with the consequent rising of global heating.

In the following map it can be observed the evolution of the disappearance of the jungles of Borneo in a period of a little bit more than 50 years, which cause unpredictable consequences to climate change on Earth.

It is important to know who is evolved in this savagery. In the beginning it could be thought that the devastation of Borneo forest is a product of a bad Government management. But this is only a part of a complex operation that counts also with the participation of international traders and buyers.

China, which is famous for its aggressive external trade politics and great exploitation of the planet\’s natural resources, mainly the fauna and wood, imports great amounts of the wood from Indonesia and Papua New Guine. All the wood arrives at the Asian giant through Zhangjiagang harbor. The labels on the wood identify the origin, but the truth is that they were collected illegally, which contributes to the disappearance of two million hectares of forest annually in the last 15 years. This is too much.

Half of the woo that enters China is for internal consumption and the rest is exported. Chinese consume 17 times less wood than the North American, but the quantity of Chinese people is much bigger than Americans, which ends up in a huge consumption.

The other half supplies other consumption monsters: Europe and USA. In the last 10 years United States imported eight times more tropical wood from China, and Europe, five times more. China protect their forests, promoting replanting, but is import illegal wood of other countries; 75% of the Indonesian wood have illegal origin.

At Tanjung Puting National Park, in the south of Borneo Island, there is still a protected area of forest and wet land, located in the middle of a deforested area. This is one of the few habitats that remain to the orangutans. Very near the reserve, with only a river separating them, a palm plantation is about to grow inside the forest. Some of the orangutans cross the line of the reserve to get fruits of the palms and end up being killed shot by the workers of the large properties. WWF estimates that 250 to 1000 orangutans are hunted per year to have their meat sold in the black market and the young orphans sold as pets.

This area is protected, but has been being impacted by exploiters and hunters, not to mention the points of fire. Fighting against this mixture of curses to the nature there is a special and heroic woman: Birute Galdikas. She is a primatologist known all over the world for her work and research with orangutans. At Tanjung Puting Park she had released more than 150 orangutans that were given to her by people who did not want to keep them home anymore, as they had grown up.

At Pasir Panjung city, near the park, there is an Orangutan Rescue and Quarantine Centre managed by Galdikas herself, through her NGO OFI (Orangutan Foundation International). In this centre there is a team of 3 veterinarians and keepers that take care of the primates. The centre has the instruments and donated medicine needed to the treatments. Every morning the orphan orangutans are taken to the "training forest", an area of the park where they learn to live in freedom. The best is to reintroduce them in the jungle when they are 6 to 8 years old.

Everything seems perfect until you notice the great cabinet used as a record file. It is full of small books and each one represents an orangutan. In the total there are 327 guests in the centre. And to those others will be added soon. The majority are orphans with a few weeks old. There were months that four of them had arrived. The situation is critic and uncontrolled. Even with all the effort, it is impossible to achieve everything that is necessary. The number of orangutans is excessive, the money is not enough and the diary logistic gets more complicated as the time goes by.

According to Galdikas, in the past it was tragic and complicated, at the time of Dictator Suharto. At this time there were not any kind of control and the country had been devastated, including areas of the park. Nowadays it seems that the Government intends to impose order to put an end in the devastation.

Her NGO employs 200 people today, with the objective of protect the park from hunters and wood exploiters and from the burning, and also take care of the orphans. Gadilkas intends to show the Government that the protected park can generate economic feedback and generate funds with tourism, much more than destroying it.

It is worth to mention that Greenpeace has been talking against the giant food and cosmetic multinational UNILEVER, which supports the exploitation of the palms and the oil. The products we have at home are the cause of this tragedy.

When I was writing this article in the plane from Indonesia to Africa, I took a look at the window in the moment that the plane was preparing to land in Douala, capital of Cameroon Republic (where chimpanzees and gorillas still live in the wild). In front of my eyes a vision made me shiver: great palm oils plantation surrounded the city. The Indonesian curse is threatening the African ecosystems and will destroy them if nothing is done to stop it.