The Malaysian government has announced a revised adopt-an-orangutan plan for major palm oil trading partners, Reuters reported Minister of Plantation Industries and Commodities Johari Abdul Ghani as saying.
Companies that import palm oil from Malaysia would be able to adopt orangutans but they would not be able to leave the country, Johari said on 18 August, in a revised version of a conservation scheme announced earlier this year.
Johari also pledged to halt deforestation in Malaysia, saying 54% of the country was forested and that the level would not fall below 50%, the 18 August report said.
In May, the minister had put forward a plan to send orangutans overseas as trading gifts in a similar policy to China’s panda diplomacy.
However, the plan had raised concerns from conservation groups over the welfare of the orangutans that are critically endangered, Reuters wrote.
“The animals cannot leave their natural habitats. We have to keep them here. And then we will meet the countries or the buyers of our palm oil if they want to work together to ensure that these forests can be looked after and preserved,” Johari told a news conference in Sabah, northern Borneo.
According to conservation group the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the orangutan population on the island of Borneo is less than 105,000.
Johari said funds raised from companies who adopted orangutans would be distributed to non-governmental organisations and the Sabah government to monitor the forested areas where the primates live and to monitor the animals’ safety and condition. He gave no details of the cost of adoption.
Marc Ancrenaz, scientific director of non-government organisation Hutan, was quoted as saying he hoped the plan could fund habitat conservation work, such as building corridors between fragmented forests that are too small to sustain viable wildlife populations.
Native to Malaysia and Indonesia, the large apes were a critically endangered species as logging and agricultural expansion had led to a loss of natural rainforests where they lived, the BBC said on 8 May when the initiative was first proposed.
