Endangered Species: Greenwire's Samuelsohn reports on orangutans, palm oil production in Indonesia (Special Report, 04/01/2008)

About this video

Wild orangutans are only found on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra. But their habitat is increasingly being threatened by deforestation and the production of palm oil, a key ingredient in biofuels. Researchers estimate orangutans could be extinct in 10 to 20 years if nothing is done to protect them and their habitat. During today's E&ETV Special Report, Greenwire senior reporter Darren Samuelsohn takes viewers behind the scenes of a story he covered during a recent trip to Indonesia. Along the way, Samuelsohn meets orangutan expert Biruté Galdikas and tours her famous orangutan care center in the Central Kalimantan region of Indonesia. Click here to view the full special report.

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Transcript

Darren Samuelsohn: They were boxing each one other. There were other orangutans that were holding up ring cards, other orangutans that were coming out and carrying them out on stretchers. It was a whole show.

So, here you have 100, I guess was the number at the start, 100 orangutans were found at the zoo and ultimately about 55 of them ended up kind of in custody and about 45 of them disappeared.

It is a black market where these orangutans exist. So, the disappearance of these orangutans was something that was investigated, looked at, but ultimately nobody knows where they went. Forty-five to 50 of them did come back to Indonesia a year before I stepped into this picture and five were left behind.

And they were sent up to a different part of Thailand, up to Chiang Mai, where they were in another zoo. A year later, Biruté Galdikas steps into the picture and she brings these five orangutans back.

Well, I was told by one of Biruté's assistants to show up at the airport, at the Jakarta airport domestic terminal in a yellow shirt so they could pick me out as the white guy in the yellow shirt standing there amid all of the Indonesians.

And Biruté comes out and she looks exactly like the picture that I had been given from a pamphlet from the USAID and she is a little bit harried. She's basically working at the same time to get these orangutans ready to get on an airplane.

I have to admit, at the start, I didn't know who she was, but she is one of the most famous primatologists that there is out there with respect to orangutans. She's been studying them in the field for 35 years.

So, it was a very unique experience. One that, I guess as a lot of journalists do, they tend to sometimes stumble upon stories and that's what happened to me.

And it took two to three people, by hand, to pick these orangutans up in these cages. And the orangutans probably weigh about 20, 30 or 40 pounds, but with the cages, I'm guessing about 60 or 70 pounds.

They push them up into the plane and we climb on board. We fly an hour and a half across the Java Sea and we land in a small town called Sampit in the middle of southern Kalimantan, which is the Indonesian part of Borneo.

So, we watch as the orangutans get moved from plane to customs and then from customs they get loaded onto a pickup truck and a van and then we begin our convoy. It was about a four-and-a-half hour long ride and we were in a convoy that got separated pretty early on.

And for a long stretch of it you do see palm oil and you see palm oil that does seem to stretch as far as the eye can see in both directions. The trees are all ages and all sizes, from little saplings up to maybe middle-sized palm trees that look like you were in South Florida, to really big old granddaddy trees.

And on the road you see, going in both directions, you see trucks carrying the palm oil fruit kind of loaded up on these yellow pickup trucks. So, the palm oil is being done where the orangutan habitat is best.

There are orangutan populations scattered throughout Borneo. There's about 60 orangutan populations, unique groups of orangutans, and when you cut down these trees, which is the primary orangutan habitat, you're basically eliminating good habitat for orangutans.

Their house is very sparse, but by Indonesian standards it's a very big house. It's gated. And we sat and we were waiting for the orangutans to arrive. So we were sitting there drinking coffee and I'm sitting there with several Indonesian men who are talking Indonesian.

And I'm sitting there twiddling my thumbs and trying to ask some questions here and there, but besides Biruté, the English was not flying back and forth. They were speaking Indonesian. We go and we watch the orangutans arrive several hours later and get a chance to see sort of the outlines of this care center where she works.

There are some cages in the quarantine, which is the place where we watched the orangutans get released and put into these cages. This is where they're going to just be away from the rest of the population for 30 days.

There were orangutans everywhere. It was like a zoo, I guess, but it was just an orangutan zoo. There were 350 I believe it was the number of orangutans at this care center I guess you could call it. I guess they're broken up into different age groups. You have the younger ones sort of in one part and you have the infants in another part.

You have the orangutans that have been living there for a very long time in another part and it's just cage after cage after cage of orangutans. And some of them are sort of in, I guess, individual cages that are sort of separate from a building and then you have some that are part of a building.

There's a medical facility there. There's an operating room. That was quite amazing to see. You're just kind of are wondering how on earth could so many orangutans be confined in one place. And I guess adjacent to the facility they have forests that they've purchased that are part of the grounds.

They take the orangutans from their cages, especially the younger ones, and they want to get them the hope of trying to release them back into the wild, get them used to climbing the trees and get them just kind of used to being outside of cages and away from humans, though the humans are sort of just standing right next to these orangutans.

I guess you could say it's a little bit tragic that these orangutans are orphaned, either their mothers have been killed or they're losing their habitat. It's very expensive to keep these orangutans alive, $100,000 to keep one I guess from about two or three or four years on for the rest of its life and they can live for quite a long time.

Do you want to keep them alive in a caged environment or do you want to use that money and those resources to try and save the habitat? That's probably where the biggest controversy is with the orangutans and that's where some of the conservationists would say it's great that she is doing what she's doing with respect to rehabilitating these orangutans.

The president of Indonesia and some conservation groups and the U.S. government announced an orangutan conservation plan in Bali, sort of as a side event to the global warming talks. And I guess there were two main goals that they announced. And they say that they're enforceable goals, but we'll see about that.

The main goal is to stabilize the habitat for orangutans by 2017 and to stabilize the population by 2017. The other major thing that they announced there was to release all of the orangutans that are currently in rehabilitation centers around the country.

And there's about 6,000 of them in about seven major rehabilitation centers and then there's a number of other smaller facilities, release them all back into the wild. I think maybe some people might roll their eyes at that idea, considering the habitat really isn't there for them.

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