Forests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations

18/01/2009 (The Saultstar) - Hoping to unravel the mysteries of human origin, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent three young women to Africa and Asia to study our closest relatives: It was chimpanzees for Jane Goodall, mountain gorillas for Dian Fossey and the elusive, solitary orangutans for Birute Mary Galdikas.

Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of his "angels," is the only one still at it. And the red apes the Canadian scientist studies in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations.

Galdikas worries many questions may never be answered. How long do orangutans live in the wild? How far do the males roam? And how many mates do they have in their lifetime?

"I try not to get depressed; I try not to get burned out," she says, pulling a wide-rimmed jungle hat over her shoulder-length grey hair in Tanjung Puting National Park. She gently leans over to pick up a tiny orangutan, orphaned when his mother was caught raiding crops.

"But when you get up in the air you start gasping in horror; there's nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be plush rainforest. Elsewhere, there's burned-out land, which now extends even within the borders of the park."

The demand for palm oil is rising in the U. S. and Europe because it is touted as a "clean" alternative to fuel. Indonesia is the world's top producer of palm oil, and prices have jumped by almost 70 per cent in the last year.

But palm oil plantations devastate the forest and create a monoculture on the land, in which orangutans cannot survive. Over the years, Galdikas has fought off loggers, poachers and miners, but nothing has posed as great a threat to her "babies" as palm oil.

There are only an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 90 per cent of them in Indonesia, said Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. Most live in small, scattered populations that cannot take the onslaught on the forests much longer.

Trees are being cut at a rate of 300 football fields every hour. And massive land-clearing fires have turned the country into one of the top emitters of carbon.

Tanjung Puting, which has about 4,145 square kilometres, clings precariously to the southern tip of Borneo island. Its 6,000 orangutans -one of the two largest populations on the planet, together with the nearby Sebangau National Park -are less vulnerable to diseases and fires.

That has allowed them, to a degree, to live and evolve as they have for millions of years.