Tanjung Puting National Park on the island of Borneo is made up of vast tracts of wetlands, forest and ancient peat swamps. Its 1,600 square miles are home to endangered species including proboscis monkeys, gibbons, clouded leopards, more than 220 species of birds, and orangutans.1 Orangutans, which live only on Borneo and Sumatra, are seriously endangered. Not only is their natural habitat being destroyed, they are captured and attacked by palm oil workers who do not want the animals to harm them or their crops. Tanjung Puting offers a rehabilitation home for 2,000 once-captive orangutans, but even these apes are threatened by the encroachment of palm oil plantations.2 The Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation predicts that if palm oil plantations continue to expand at their current rate, the orangutan will be extinct by 2012.
Yet, Wilmar, a Singapore-based company in which Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) has a controlling share, continues to clear forests on all sides of Tanjung Puting for palm oil plantations. Wilmar is the world’s largest producer of palm oil, with facilities in Indonesia, Malaysia and Uganda. Wilmar owns at least 2,200 square miles of land, two-thirds of which has not yet been cleared and planted with oil palm (the tree species that produces palm oil).3
Just west of Tanjung Puting, on land once equally rich with life, lies a Wilmar-owned palm oil plantation. East of the park, Wilmar has been clear-cutting forest for palm oil plantations. Although Wilmar has only obtained permission from a local government official – who happens to be an investor in the company – and not from the federal government, there have been no official attempts to prevent the company from clear-cutting.4 What once was a dense, orangutan-inhabited rainforest is now an empty wasteland.
The park itself is also under threat. Three Indonesian palm oil companies have requested government permits and received permission to convert land within the park to palm oil plantations. Dr. Birute Galdikas, head of orangutan rehabilitation in Tanjung Puting, has called the encroachment of palm oil plantations the “most serious threat” to the park.5
But Tanjung Puting is not the only national park under threat. To its west, the Gunung Palung National Park, another haven for orangutans, is being encroached upon by Cargill-owned plantations. To the east, Borneo’s largest national park – the Kayan Mentarang National Park—is being threatened by the proposed 850 kilometer Kalimantan Border Oil Palm Mega-Project. If developed, it would be the single largest palm oil plantation in the world, destroying intact tropical rainforests and the ancestral territory of up to a million Dayak people, according to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples Rights.
