Bulgaria Palm Oil Plans: Money v Orangutans

Over the past few days news has been leaking slowly out of Indonesia about the Bulgarian government’s plans to invest in a large number of different sectors in the country – from the fertilizer industry to coal and from agriculture to palm oil.

Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, Marin Raykov, and Deputy Minister of Economy, Energy and Tourism, Evgeny Angelov, both attended a meeting Thursday with Indonesian officials, one of whom soon after announced that Bulgaria is set to build an Indonesian palm oil terminal at one of its ports on the Black Sea.

This may at first be seen as another fantastic economic move by the new center-right GERB government, as since 1995, there has been a 90% increase in palm oil use in the EU and this will rise drastically as companies start to use palm oil to make biodiesel. In fact Indonesia and Malaysia produce the lion’s share of total global output, which is projected to double by 2020.

Palm oil is literally everywhere. This globally traded vegetable oil is found in thousands of products you buy off the shelf, including ice cream, chocolate, biscuits, crisps, lipsticks, toothpaste, soap, detergents, cosmetics. Again this fact seems to back the idea behind the Bulgarian government’s alleged terminal plan.

There is once again however a hidden black cloud behind the sound economic move made by Boyko and his merry men. This cloud may lead to the extinction of one of man’s closest relatives and may leave a deep stain on the ultra clean image of GERB and their rightist friends.

Sadly palm oil’s very success has sealed the fate of the orangutan, whose population has declined 90%, along with hundreds of other animal species that live in the Indonesian rainforests. Originally from Western Africa, the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) has become the plantation crop of the 21st century. Where heat and regular rainfall combine, it can flourish. And Indonesia has become its home with ever-increasing areas being given over to this high-yielding crop.

Keen to cash in on demand, plantation owners have been rapidly clearing rainforests by chopping or setting fire to the vegetation. As forests get cleared, orangutans, facing starvation, desperately seek food in the developing plantations, and are considered an agricultural pest. It is estimated that no less than 5,000 orangutans are killed every year in the area.

At this rate, complete extinction of one of our closest relatives will occur within 10 years.

It is true that, after activists, NGOs and even some government bodies in the EU raised an outcry against this wanton destruction of rainforests and animal life and called for a boycott of palm oil, the Indonesian government did begin damage control and agreed to establish a Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2004 that would certify production of oil from non-destructive plantations.

However the majority of palm oil is still produced in non-sustainable plantations that leave Orangutan babies with a very short life expectancy compared to the normal 30-years that they can expect to survive in a safe environment.

Bulgaria has of course many environmental and economic issues to worry about on home soil but this is one issue that will affect not only us but many generations to come, if one of man’s closest relatives follows the dodo into the list of mythical creatures that once graced planet Earth. I for one can only hope that Bulgaria’s new government can show that it is moving away from the former government’s policies that mostly involved short-term greed leading to serious long-term damage.

• 1