Wildlife groups urge unified force to save Borneo's orangutans
Wildlife groups urge unified force to save Borneo's orangutans
Sebastien Blanc
Agence France Presse/Pontianak
Leading environmental and wildlife agencies called Friday for a
united effort to protect the habitats of Borneo's orangutans
whose survival is threatened by mass deforestation.
Aggressive destruction of jungles has caused a breathtaking
decline in orangutan numbers and action is urgently needed to
lift the threat of their imminent extinction, non-governmental
organisations and Indonesian officials said.
"We would like to develop an action plan putting together all
stakeholders," said Jito Sugardjito, representing Fauna and Flora
International (FFI) at a meeting in the Borneo town of Pontianak.
Asia's only great ape -- which translated from the local Malay
language means "person of the forest" -- could be wiped out
within 12 years, environmentalists have warned.
The red-haired apes, close kin to humans, are found only on
Borneo, which is shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, and on
the Indonesian island of Sumatra. In Borneo, the number of
orangutans is estimated to have dropped from 200,000 to 50,000 in
the past decade.
"Large-scale and coordinated actions are needed so that the
limited resources available for securing Bornean orangutan can be
used efficiently and effectively," said Indonesian government
conservation official Adi Susmianto.
Friends of the Earth warned in a report last month that
wildlife centres in Indonesia were over-run with orphaned baby
orangutans that had been rescued from forests cleared to make way
for new palm oil plantations.
Malaysia's palm oil industry denied the accusations Thursday,
saying palm oil was a strategic, well-planned agricultural
industry which supported the preservation of wildlife including
orangutans.
Beyond forest clearing, orangutans also are threatened by
commercial logging, forest fires and hunting and poaching for the
bush meat and pet trades.
Representatives from FFI, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the
UN's Great Apes Survival Project (GRASP), and UNESCO gathered
Wednesday in Pontianak to try and pool their expertise to save
the orangutan.
"FFI are very good on law enforcement. WWF is very weak on
that. Both are very good on rehabilitation," said WWF's
Indonesian director Nazir Foead. "Our strength is in habitat
management and corporate engagement."
"We need to work a lot with corruption-watch NGOs" to keep a
tab on the palm oil industry, Foead said.
Indonesia's environmental groups say they are powerless to
stop timber barons who corrupt senior officials so they can
plunder Borneo's tropical forests. Even national parks in
Kalimantan, the Indonesian area of Borneo, are losing forests
invaluable to the orangutan.
Deforestation in Indonesia has accelerated since the industry
was decentralised in 2000 putting the decision-making power over
logging in the hands of easily-manipulated local officials, the
groups say.
"We want the government to be more transparent and make a
commitment" to stop the rapid deforestation, said Darmawan
Liswanto from the Yayasan Titian, an Indonesian environmental
charity.
Sugardjito, the FFI representative, agreed.
"At the moment it is very uncontrolled. Nobody is responsible
for logging," he said.
Despite promises of increased cooperation, some fear real
progress will not be achieved without greater effort from the
Indonesian government, currently struggling with an oil price
crisis as well as the threat of bird flu.
"Environment is still way down on the Indonesian government
list," said Stephen Brend, a senior conservationist at the
Orangutan Foundation, a leading international agency aimed at
saving the primates.
seb/ag/tha
Indonesia-wildlife-environment
AFP
GetAFP 2.10 -- OCT 14, 2005 13:36:50