30/10/2010 (Eco Heart.com) - In response to rapid population growth in Asia and increasing demand in the Western world for trans-fat-free oils, the market for palm and palm kernel oil has exploded over the past thirty years. Palm-oil plantations grew from about 400 square miles in 1973 to almost 12,000 square miles by 2003. As a result, a virtual who's who of charismatic wild animals, including Sumatran tigers, orangutans and rhinos, and Asian elephants, are paying the price as their habitat is cleared to make way for palm-oil plantations.

Tigers on the Attack
They read like statistics from a guerrilla war anywhere in the world. At least 245 conflicts have been fought between Sumatran tigers and humans in recent years. Pushed to the edge by habitat destruction and lack of natural prey, tigers have been fighting back, killing 55 people since 1997. In return, villagers and government agents have killed 15 tigers and captured another 17, out of only 400 or so that remain in the wild. These numbers reflect only tigers killed as a result of human-related conflict, not those poached for illegal trade in tiger parts, which could be five times as many, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The Forestry Minister of Indonesia, Malam Sambat Kaban, said he believed that most of the recent tiger attacks were on poachers and illegal loggers. “I don’t blame those tigers because that’s their habitat that’s being invaded,” he told the Jakarta Globe.

Of all the wildlife suffering habitat loss as a result of palm-oil plantations, tigers have become the most newsworthy. Other animals usually either find new homes or quietly die when their habitat is destroyed, but these top predators, with no other options, have turned to preying on livestock and humans.

There’s no place for its prey to live here; all the land has been converted into palm-oil plantations,” said Nurazman Nurdin, a ranger in Sumatra's Nature Conservation Agency, as reported in the Chicago Tribune. “You can’t expect tigers to become vegetarians... They need meat, and humans trespassing their territory are relatively easy targets.”

Orangutans at Risk
A report (pdf) by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) details the effects of these plantations on tigers, rhinos, elephants and orangutans. Citing research from Cambridge University, the report claims that converting forests to palm-oil plantations is the greatest threat to Sumatran orangutans, a species that lives only on the island of Sumatra.

According to CSPI, the Sumatran orangutan population dropped a startling 50% between 1998 and 2005, at the same time the area of palm-oil plantations nearly doubled. The 12,000 remaining Sumatran orangutans live on only 10,000 square miles of heavily fragmented forest. Most of that land is destined to become palm-oil plantations, which the report calls a "biological desert" that won't sustain most forest animals. Orangutans that manage to hang on in the plantations are living on borrowed time. They can be legally killed for eating palm nuts, virtually the only food available in the monoculture plantations.

No silver bullet will end the destruction of Sumatra's tigers and orangutans, or their habitat. In an ironic twist, however, the recent carnage between tigers and humans has caught the attention of governments and conservation groups in a way that statistics—like the number of acres cleared or orangutans that have disappeared—never could. All sides of this debate are now racing to find solutions.