Today O is for
Orangutans and Palm Oil
Palm Oil has become an ever popular ingredient in food. Sometimes food producers don't label it as such and just simply write Vegetable Oil. Palm Oil can be found in cakes, biscuits, desserts, ready meals in fact just about everything. It is also being used increasingly in cosmetics. Some cosmetic producers boast they don't test on animals, but they kill orangutans during the deforestation process or simply cull the animals that are in their way.
So what? I hear you say. Well to produce Palm Oil, palm trees must be planted. To plant these other trees have to be chopped down and areas of forest cleared. The main driver of deforestation in Indonesia and Malaysia is Palm Oil and 85% of the worlds Palm Oil comes from these areas. An area of forest the size of 300 soccer fields is cleared every hour in these areas. This means that many Orangutans lose their habitat and simply have nowhere to go or are killed during the burning of the forest. The worlds population of wild Orangutans has dropped by 50% in the last decade and a staggering 80% of their natural habitat has been destroyed or altered in some way.
Other species affected are the Asian elephant, Tiger and Sumatran Rhinoceros. The Asian Elephant and Bornean Orangutan are endangered whilst the Tiger, Sumatran Rhinoceros and Orangutan are Critically Endangered.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUNC) has classified the Bornean Orangutan as Endangered with approximately 55,000 left with 5,000 killed a year. The Sumatran Orangutan is Critically Endangered with approximately 6,300 left and 1,000 being killed a year.
As a consumer you can read packaging and not buy items which contain Palm Oil. Challenge manufacturers and supermarkets if the oil used isn't named and ask why these items need to contain Palm Oil.
I can't bring myself to buy anything containing Palm Oil any more as I imagine Orangutans being killed and babies being orphaned.
There are many organisations that care for the orphaned babies and for the adults that have lost their homes, but that shouldn't be the case. Humans should not be interfering with their habitat in the first place and certainly not re-homing them.
There are so many charities out there trying to help so please visit some of the links below to see what you can do to help.
Say no To Palm Oil
The Orangutan Project
WWF
There are some horrendous pictures out there of the cost of planting palm oil which I don't want to include, but believe me it's awful.
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Wow, I didn't realize this! Thank you so much for calling my attention to it. I will say no to palm oil from now on. If you have time you should stop by and check out my O Post.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading x
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