Indonesia’s Orangutans Suffer as Fires Rage and Businesses Grow
NYARU
MENTENG, Indonesia — Katty, a docile, orange-haired preschooler, fell
from a tree with a thump. Her teacher quickly picked her up, dusted off
her bottom, refastened her white disposable diaper and placed her back
on a branch more than seven feet off the ground.
Katty is an orangutan, about 9 months old, whose family is believed to have been killed by the huge
fires last fall
in the Indonesian regions of Borneo and Sumatra. The blazes are an
annual occurrence, when farmers clear land by burning it, often for palm
oil plantations. But last year’s fires were the worst on record, and
scientists blamed a prolonged drought and the effects of El Niño.
The blazes destroyed more than 10,000 square miles of forests, blanketing large parts of Southeast Asia in a toxic haze for weeks, sickening hundreds of thousands of people and, according to the World Bank, causing $16 billion in economic losses.
They
also killed at least nine orangutans, the endangered apes native to the
rain forests of Borneo and Sumatra. More than 100, trapped by the loss
of habitat or found wandering near villages, had to be relocated. Seven
orphans, including five infants, were rescued and taken to
rehabilitation centers here.
“This
is the biggest in the world for primate rehabilitation, not just
orangutans, but we’re not proud of it,” said Denny Kurniawan, the
program director of the Nyaru Menteng Orangutan Rehabilitation Center,
who oversees the care of 480 orangutans at seven sites in Central
Kalimantan Province on the island of Borneo. “The number of orangutans
here is an indicator of the mass forest destruction due to lack of law
enforcement and the local government giving out palm oil concessions.”
The
suffering of the wildlife is part of a larger story of corporate
expansion in a developing economy crashing into environmental issues in
an era of climate change.
Indonesia
has approved palm oil concessions on nearly 15 million acres of
peatlands over the last decade; burning peat emits high levels of carbon
dioxide and is devilishly hard to extinguish.
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Multinational
palm oil companies, pulp and paper businesses, the plantations that
sell to them, farmers and even day laborers all contribute to the
problem. Groups like Greenpeace and the Indonesian Forum for the
Environment put most of the blame for the blazes on the large
plantations, which clear the most land.
While
it is against Indonesian law to clear plantations by burning,
enforcement is lax. The authorities have opened criminal investigations
against at least eight companies in connection with last year’s fires,
but there has yet to be a single high-profile case to get to court.
The
government in Jakarta, the capital, has recently banned the draining
and clearing of all peatland for agricultural use, and it has ordered
provincial governments to adopt better fire suppression methods. But it
has not publicly responded to calls for better prevention, such as
cracking down on slash-and-burn operations by large palm oil companies.
“Investment
is good, but so is the environment,” said Eman Supriyadi, the director
of a satellite rehabilitation center where two orphaned orangutans —
6-month-old Oka and 3-year-old Otong — are bottle-fed human infant
formula and sleep in bamboo cribs. “There has to be a balance.”
The
government has admitted that it made a “mistake” in granting large
strips of land to big corporate palm oil and pulp and paper companies
over the past 10 years, said Luhut B. Pandjaitan, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs.
“The
Indonesian government has taken serious measures to freeze any new land
rights or concessions for those giant industries,” he said. “We are
encouraging them to be more efficient, so productivity can grow without
adding more land.”
However,
he said the main cause of the 2015 fires was the previous environmental
destruction combined with the El Niño climate cycle.
Katty,
the roughly 9-month-old orangutan, was found in a charred forest by
villagers in Central Kalimantan last October and eventually brought to
the Nyaru Menteng center, which was established by the Borneo Orangutan
Survival Foundation in 1999.
She
now lives with 20 other infants in an old, one-story wooden house that
was converted into an orangutan nursery, where they sleep side-by-side
in colored plastic laundry baskets stuffed with leaves.
They
will spend the next seven or more years learning from their human
minders how to climb trees, make a nest of leaves, spot edible forest
fruits and avoid snakes and other predators, before being released back
into the wild as young adults.
At
7 a.m. each day, they are carted by wheelbarrow, three or four per
load, to a fenced-off forest area more than 300 feet away for survival
classes. They subsist on fruit, mainly bananas and rambutan, and on
human infant formula.
The
minders take pains not to be overly affectionate with their adorable
charges: The orangutans need to learn to avoid humans and not be
accustomed to their presence, in preparation for their return to the
jungle.
Most
of the center’s older orangutans are also orphans, found alone and
rescued by conservationists or local villagers, or confiscated from
people illegally keeping them as pets.
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The
center aims to release 68 young-adult animals per year. Each returned
animal is tracked by a computer chip implanted near the base of the neck
that sends signals to the center for about two years.
The release program has also been jeopardized by the fires, which have drastically reduced the potential orangutan habitat.
Over
the years, thousands of square miles have been cleared for plantations,
a majority in lowland areas that are the prime habitat for orangutans.
The fires last year destroyed more than 1,650 square miles of forest in
Central Kalimantan alone, or 16 percent of its total.
“Our
challenge for now is, if we have information that orangutans should be
rescued, we don’t know where we will relocate them because in Central
Kalimantan there is no forest left,” Mr. Denny said. “Every day it’s
estimated that we’re losing forests the size of a football field, and
that’s orangutan habitat.”
Since
2012, his rehabilitation center has returned 158 orangutans into a
124-square-mile protected forest known as Batikap. But Batikap has
reached its maximum recommended orangutan population, Mr. Denny said.
He
said the center was negotiating with the federal government to
establish a 288-square-mile preserve in Bukit Baka-Bukit Raya National
Park, in Central Kalimantan and West Kalimantan Provinces, for future
releases.
Last
year’s fires caused such an outcry that the provincial government and
local district chiefs in Central Kalimantan have approved no new palm
oil concessions this year.
But
with dry conditions again this year, new fires have broken out. Last
month, the governor of Riau Province in Sumatra declared a state of
emergency because of fires, and the Indonesian Meteorology, Climatology
and Geophysics Agency issued a warning about the increased risk of fire
in Sumatra and Borneo through the end of April.