Indonesia: Is There Any Space Left for Our Apes?

Jakarta Globe 2 Nov 11;

Around 70 percent of orangutan habitats are vulnerable to logging and other human activities because they fall outside conservation areas, a fact that could threaten efforts to protect the apes, a study has found.

Niel Makinuddin, the East Kalimantan program manager for the Nature Conservancy, said on Tuesday that only 30 percent of the endangered species’ habitat was protected because it fell within conservation areas.

As for the orangutans outside these areas, he said during the launch of the executive summary of the Kalimantan Orangutan Portrait, they are prone to getting killed or trapped by villagers after encroaching onto farmland, villages and other human habitations.

“Many local people consider orangutans as a sort of pest because they eat their crops,” he said. Niel also said that in some areas, locals were known to hunt and kill orangutans for their meat.

“A lot of them claim that orangutan meat is very nutritious. There are also those who kill the apes out of mystical beliefs or simply out of desperation for a source of protein,” he said.

“All this,” he added, “makes orangutans in unprotected areas highly vulnerable.”

Niel said that since 2007, an estimated 750 to 1,800 orangutans had been killed across Kalimantan. Local villages are believed to be responsible for up to two deaths each a year, with the rest attributed to illegal loggers and operators clearing forests for palm oil plantations.

“A lot of the people we’ve spoken to actually say they’d be proud if they could kill more orangutans,” he said.

A study on orangutans carried out by 17 nongovernmental organizations in 725 villages across East Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan and West Kalimantan showed that conflicts between humans and the apes were the most serious threat to the preservation of the endangered species.

The study also indicated that Kalimantan had the highest rate of conflict, with 18 percent of the villages in the study reporting regular conflicts with encroaching orangutans, according to Sri Suci Atmoko, from the Indonesian Association of Primate Experts and Observers.

She said many of the conflicts occurred in villages on the peripheries of palm oil plantations, rice paddies and logging concessions, indicating the apes were being chased out of their habitats by those commercial activities.

Between 2000 and 2008, about 4 percent of the region’s total forest cover was cleared, or 2.3 million hectares, according to official estimates. Independent estimates put the loss at 5.4 million hectares during this period, or 9.2 percent of forest cover.

Agus Sutito, head of species conservation at the Forestry Ministry’s Directorate General of Forest Conservation, said the issue of human-orangutan conflict needed to be addressed by regional-level teams overseen by district heads and governors.

“There need to be better coordinated efforts at the regional level to quell these conflicts, especially in regions with a lot of wildlife,” he said.

He added that there were no such coordination teams for Kalimantan yet, although teams had already been set up to address human-tiger conflicts in the Sumatran provinces of Aceh and Jambi.

Antara