Two years left to save wild orangutans from extinction

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Dutch ecologist Willie Smits says he will never forget the day in October 1989 when he saw the desperately sad eyes of an orangutan baby looking at him from a dark cage on a market in the Indonesian seaport of Balikpapan.

Smits was so disturbed that he returned to the market that same evening, just in time to find the limp body of the orangutan lying on a rubbish heap where the trader had dumped it.

During the next 24 hours Smits managed to just save the orangutan from certain death, feeding it droplets of milk and water.

It was the start of a lifelong mission to save one of the world's last surviving great apes from extinction and to preserve its rainforest habitat that is rapidly being destroyed in Borneo.

"Time is running out. We have less than two years to save the last 40,000 wild orangutans from extinction," Smits said during an interview in the German port city of Hamburg, pointing that there were once more than three million of the apes.

Smits is on a promotion tour of his book Think of the Jungle which he co-authored with German journalist Gerd Schuster. The spectacular pictures illustrating the text were taken by Indian-born photographer Jay Ullal.

"There are books you can do and there are books you just have to bring out," says Herbert Ullmann, the managing director of Ullmann Publishing that is also bringing out the English-language edition of the book in March next year.

Smits says the book highlights not only the plight of the orangutan but how closely the fate of the great ape is interlinked with clearing of rainforests for oil palm plantations.

According to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) the Kalimantan region is losing 1.2 million hectares of its 26 million hectares of forest annually.

Smits, who is a microbiologist and forester by profession, says most of the land cleared is unsuitable for palm oil plantations and the burning of the forests is not only making Indonesia one of the worlds largest emitters of carbon dioxide but destroying biodiversity on a mass scale.

"People in Europe need to know where their palm oil comes from and say: We don't want to contribute to the death of the orangutans," Smits says pointing out that the palm oil can be found in 10 per cent of supermarket products such as soaps and shampoos.

"Losing the orangutan would indeed be a sad loss," says Smits. "They are so closely related to us. I have seen them holding butterflies and flowers, simply enjoying the beauty of their surroundings."

Meanwhile the organisation founded by Smits, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS) has created a home for 1,000 orangutans on 2,000 hectares of reforested land.

Smits recalls that Indonesian schools made the start donating 0.01 euro cent per child per month to save the great apes.

More information at: www.sambojalodge.com, www.createrainforest.org dpa rg bve ds