Mega-Blogger ~ Using Imagination

Female orangutans have the longest inter-birth interval of any primate, with a mean duration of eight years. The infant to mother bond is incredibly strong in orangutans, with the offspring remaining dependent for up to six years. Both species of orangutans are reported to survive up to forty-five years of age (and potentially past fifty), with females not giving birth until approximately fifteen years of age. This equates to four or five offspring surviving per mother possibly the lowest reproductive potential of any mammal.

Orangutan mothers are slaughtered by palm oil workers with machetes and their hands taken as proof of death for financial bonus. The babies that survive are then sold into the illegal pet trade where they may initially be treated like human babies (due to sharing 97% of our DNA, they are endearing and cuddly creatures) but later are chained and caged, mistreated and abused (an adult orangutan has the strength of seven men so an orangutan baby quickly turns into a physically unmanageable child).

What do they eat? Around sixty percent of Their diet is fruit, then around twenty five percent young leaves, the remaining fifteen percent is flowers, bark and insects, mainly ants, termites and crickets.

So with this in mind why on gods earth are we allowing people to destroy their homes, destroy their food supply and kill these beautiful creatures.  I’ll tell you why, because everywhere you look its corruption and money. Oh yes and beauty products that promise miracles such as rejuvenated skin of a sixteen year old. What a load of old nonsense that is!  But all these products and indeed certain fun foods contain Palm Oils and this is a huge reason for the devastation caused to the population of our world Orangutans.

A specific type of vegetable oil may not sound like a particularly interesting subject, but palm oil is no ordinary vegetable oil.  It is one of the more destructive forces on our planet today.  Or perhaps I should say that the well oiled corporate machine of people and industry distributing palm oil is one of the more destructive forces on our planet.  Either way, consuming this ingredient – which is in an unbelievable amount of foods and cosmetics and other things – is something which makes one responsible for encouraging this.

The rainforest is being cleared at an alarming rate, particularly in Southeast Asia, to make room for palm plantations.  Many species – both discovered and undiscovered – are being driven to extinction because of habitat loss.  The most notable is the orangutan, which could become extinct within the decade because of deforestation in Malaysia, Borneo, and Indonesia.

Palm oil plantations – while providing a considerable amount of jobs and a product that is used in many places – are damaging our climate (through the burning of forest and the destruction of a carbon sink), the local environment, and even small landowners.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has sounded alarm over the loss of land in a country where in rural areas, every second child is malnourished and access to land for foraging of natural resources is critical.

As I mentioned earlier, orangutans are also suffering.  A Center for Science in the Public Interest Stated:

• Malaysia and Indonesia account for 83 percent of palm oil production, according to Cruel Oil—a 2005 CSPI report on the health and environmental consequences of palm oil. Since the 1970s, the area planted with oil palm in Indonesia has grown more than 30-fold to almost 12,000 square miles. In Malaysia, the area devoted to oil palm has increased 12-fold to 13,500 square miles.
• As rainforest is cleared for oil palm plantations, orangutans and other species have less room to roam and reproduce and become easier targets for poachers. Borneo’s orangutan population was reduced by a third in just one year, 1997, when almost 8,000 were either burned to death or massacred as they tried to flee fires set to clear rainforest for new plantations.

The Seattle Times also reported,

The orangutans’ biggest enemy, United Nations experts said, is no longer poachers or illegal loggers. It’s the palm-oil industry…

The park is on the southern tip of the island of Borneo, which is shared by Indonesia and Malaysia, the last two of the world’s top producers of palm oil. Exporters market the product as an environmentally friendly alternative to crude oil and a replacement for oils containing trans fats.

“They change the forest and say it’s for energy sustainability, but they’re killing other creatures,” said Ichlas al-Zaqie, local project manager for Los Angeles-based Orangutan Foundation International…

98 percent of Indonesia’s forest might be lost by 2022, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

“If the immediate crisis in securing the future survival of the orangutan and the protection of national parks is not resolved, very few wild orangutans will be left within two decades,” the U.N. environment program concluded in a 2007 report…

In July, loggers finished buzz-sawing and bulldozing a 40,000-acre swath in a northeastern corner of the park, where at least 561 orangutans lived, to clear ground for oil-palm plants, al-Zaqie said.

Now that you have an introduction to the problem that palm oil causes, I’ll give you a bit of basic information on how to avoid it.  First of all, look at the ingredients of every bit of processed food and cosmetic product you buy.  If there is anything with the word “palm” in it – whether it’s palm oil, palm kernel oil, palmitic acid, or something else – you should put the product back on the shelf and look for an alternative.

Biofuel is also a major market for palm oil.  If you use biofuel, please make sure it is not palm oil.

The thing that you can do right now that will have the most impact is to stop buying products with palm ingredients in them.  This will reduce the demand for them and send a message to companies that use them.  There are so many products with palm in them that you have to be ever vigilant at the supermarket, drugstore, convenience store, etc.

Below I’ve listed just a few off the top of my head:

Skittles
Good Humor chipwiches
Wasa crackers
Trader Joe’s chocolate chip cookies
Newman’s Own Oreos
Clearasil face wash
Kit Kats
Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets