Malaysian booming palm oil industry threatens Borneo's fauna

Frank Brandmaier, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Sandakan, Malaysia

Colorful tourism brochures promise an untamed wilderness, steaming jungles and an enormous variety of flora and fauna. But whoever travels between the cities of Sandakan and Sukau in northern Borneo might be rather disappointed.

Oil palm plantations line the roads in the Malaysia federal state of Sabah for many kilometers on end, before the touted jungle finally appears.

It's not as if the tourism brochures were categorically lying. This part of Borneo is the only place where endangered orangutans, Sumatra rhinos and Asian elephants are living in close proximity to each other.

However, the booming palm oil industry has resulted in the perpetual shrinking of their habitat.

In Sabah alone, the land area occupied by oil palm plantations has increased twenty-fold in the past 30 years, according to official statistics, while the overall increase in the whole of Malaysia had only increased six-fold.

The Southeast Asian country is the world's largest producer and exporter of the oil, which is used in lipsticks, ice cream and countless other products.

In 2003, Malaysia exported more than 13 tons of palm oil valued at some 4.1 billion euro. The plantations comprise 3.9 million hectares, an area comparable to the size of Switzerland.

More than half a million people are dependent on an industry that has long been branded "the backbone of Malaysia's agriculture."

The lions share of exports are shipped to Europe, according to the World Wild Life Foundation (WWF), where Germany is the second largest importer of Malaysian and Indonesian palm oil, being outspent only by the Netherlands.

"The Southeast Asian oil palm can be regarded as the agricultural plant of the century," said Cede Prudente, formerly an environmental activist, nowadays a tourism operator. The profitability of the indigenous palm would beat that of its African counterpart by far, he said.

A plantation of seven hectares already generated a monthly net profit of 4,000 Malaysian ringgit (835 euro) soon after its establishment. The manager of a small, local bank branch would earn 5,000 ringgit.

The palm also renders considerable assistance to state coffers. Sabah's government earned about 400 million ringgit in taxes from the industry last year, enough to pay the salaries of 80 percent of all state employees.

But the comfortable earnings generated through the un- demanding plant, which finds excellent climatic conditions in Malaysia, come with a heavy price tag as plantation operators pay no consideration to the habitats of Sabah's fauna - for example, the wild elephants.

Workers routinely try to keep the pachyderms away from the valuable plantations with fences and even gunshots, because the young top leaves of the plants are known to be one of their favorite foods.

"The largest threat to our wild animals is the continuous infringement on the remaining forests," said Cede Prudente.

Animal habitats including those of extremely endangered orangutans have diminished by more than one third over the past 30 years, notably along the lower Kinabatangan river, a few hours' drive from Sandakan.

"Animals in that area were forced to move closer together as more and more oil palm plantations have appeared," said Dino Sharma, national program director of Malaysia's WWF branch.

But at long last Malaysia's government finally recognized that the days of unrestricted logging to make way for ever more plantations were over. Its policy is now to establish a healthier balance between economic profits and animal-species diversity.

"The government is currently gauging out ways how to achieve this balance," Sharma said.

In the meantime, palm oil companies have cast their eyes on the Indonesian part of Borneo. From the air, countless straight rows of palm seedlings can be clearly seen and the new plantations already occupy enormous swaths of land.

"Indonesia is likely to overtake Malaysia as the world's largest palm oil producer within the next few years, said Haron Firaj," chairman of Malaysia's Palm Oil Promotion Commission.

Environmentalists are concerned, because Indonesia has already lost a large part of its tropical rainforests to merciless, illegal logging. Now palm oil plantations may deal a further blow to this already severely compromised ecosystem.