Malaysian booming palm oil industry threatens Borneo's fauna
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.