Tanjung Puting1 January 2006
One of the reasons I went to Borneo was to gain a first-hand impression of the grave situation facing the orang-utan. Ashley Leiman, director of the Orang-utan Foundation, invited me to accompany her to Tanjung Puting, a national park that occupies 400,000 hectares in Central Kalimantan.
Tanjung Puting is considered to be one of the crown jewels of the Indonesian national park system and of major biological importance. It is the home of one of the largest groupings of orang-utans in the world, with a population of at least 5,000 animals.
If we can't save the orang-utans in Tanjung Puting,where can we save them?
Ashley Leiman, Director - Orangutan Foundation
Tanjung Puting, technically speaking, is a lowland peat forest of a type that once covered much of southern Borneo.
Camp Leakey: home of anthropologists
We arrived in Camp Leakey early in the afternoon. The place is aptly named. Apart from his own fame as a discoverer of Early Man, Professor Louis Leakey identified, trained and otherwise encouraged three extraordinary female primatologists.
Dr Jane Goodall rose to fame as a result of her studies of chimpanzees at Gombe in Tanzania.
Dian Fossey's devotion to the mountain gorillas in central Africa is already the stuff of legend, not least because of Gorillas in the Mist.
Image: © David Birkin
The third of the "Leakey girls'', Professor Biruté Galdikas, is no less remarkable. Although she was lecturing in Canada at the time of our visit, her spirit dominates Camp Leakey and, indeed, Tanjung Puting National Park as a whole.
Galdikas and her former husband, Rod Brindamour, arrived in Tanjung Puting in November 1971. They set up camp in a bend of the Sekonyer River to begin what has become one of the longest continuous mammalian studies in the world.
Galdikas also set up the Orangutan Foundation International, which, with its sister organisations such as the Orangutan Foundation in Britain, has supported the ongoing research on apes in Tanjung Puting for decades.
The foundation, with the aid of a grant from the United States Agency for International Development, has put in place no fewer than 17 guard posts.
There has been a practical side to this work, too. The foundation has liaised closely with the Indonesian authorities to wage an unceasing war on illegal logging, which, until a few years ago, was having a serious impact on the national park.
Tanjung Puting in jeopardy...
On our last weekend in Kalimantan , we drove up-country to try to assess the extent of the palm-oil threat to Tanjung Puting itself.
There were rumours of massive new oil plantations being planned, with proposals to grant concessions for five palm-oil plantations, totalling 16,000 hectares, inside the park.
In addition, as much as 20,000 hectares of land could be lost outside the park. It might not be officially protected, but it is vital orang-utan habitat. Without it, Tanjung Puting will be totally isolated, with the sea on one side and a desert of palm oil on the other.
Image: © David Birkin
After heading north for two hours you begin to understand the sheer scale of the palm-oil industry when you see the immense area of land in central Kalimantan, where primary forest has already been converted into plantation.
More than once we passed long convoys of trucks loaded with bags of palm-oil nuts, as well as lines of tankers carrying the processed oil from the refineries down to the coast.
Our worst fears seemed to be confirmed when, just before sunset, we finally reached our destination, a remote guard post at the north-east corner of Tanjung Puting.
It was clear that palm-oil plantations had already made substantial incursions into the park, and markers indicated that further, still deeper, incursions were planned.
If they go ahead, there will be palm-oil plantations right in the heart of the park, within less than 10 miles Camp Leakey itself.
Stephen Brend, Senior Conservationist
Orangutan Foundation
We all felt numb. The scale of the current incursions, as well as the projected further "conversions'', which seemed to be almost a fait accompli, left us stunned. The "crown jewels'' of Tanjung Puting were not just in jeopardy, they were being pillaged before our very eyes.
Image: © David Birkin
Hope and help
Is the situation for the rain-forests of Borneo and Sumatra hopeless? To my mind, the answer is not hopeless, but certainly critical.
UK and EU consumers can play a key role in helping to avoid further disasters.
In February last year, Friends of the Earth wrote to 96 UK companies asking them to trace the source of all the palm oil in their products, to adopt minimum standards to ensure that it comes from non-destructive sources and to join the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a joint initiative set up by WWF and businesses to "promote the growth and use of sustainable palm oil''.
© David Birkin
