InfoSAWIT, KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia delivered announcement the revision about environmental conservation that would enable palm oil importer companies to adopt orangutan without moving it from its real habitat. The policy was announced by Minister of Plantation and Commodity Malaysia, Johari Abdul Ghani, Sunday (18/8) in a press conference in Sabah.
Johari said that the scheme would be about to conserve endangered orangutan because of palm oil (plantation/industrial) expansion that might always involve deforestation. “The animals should not leave their real and natural habitat. We have to conserve them,” he said, as InfoSAWIT quoted from Voice of America (VOA). He also mentioned Malaysia would be in cooperation with palm oil buyer countries to confirm the forest conservation.
The scheme revision raised up after the first plan proposed in last May, was criticized by environmental campaigners/activists. At the time, Malaysia proposed to send orangutan abroad as part of trade diplomacy strategy. The goal was abot to muffle the international scale – concern about the impacts of palm oil production to orangutan habitat.
Now the fund collected by orangutan adoption program would be allocated for non-government organizations (NGOs) that focused on environmental conservation. The State of Sabah would monitor forest areas where orangutan lives to make sure that the animal lives well.
Sabah is now home for about 15.000 orangutans, while in Sarawak there are 2.000 orangutans. The two states were taken as the last fortresses for orangutan population that kept decreasing because of deforestation.
Scientific Director of Forest – NGO, Marc Ancrenaz did welcome the program and hoped that the fund collected would be used to fund orangutan habitat conservation. One initiative to propose would be about to develop forest corridor that would connect fragmented forest areas and orangutan would be worth living.
“Orangutan diplomacy’ scheme was firstly announced after commodity import ban was announced by European Union last year. Malaysia, as the second biggest palm oil exporter in the world, thought that the regulation was a discrimination. Palm oil itself is the main material for many products, such as, lipstick, food, and processed foods, for instance, pizza. (T2)
