Orangutans in Malaysia

Sept. 30, 2003 — Orangutans could disappear within the next 10 to 20 years if illegal logging that is destroying their habitat is not stopped, according to a report released Monday.

Anthropologist Cheryl Knott of Harvard University said loggers have infringed on the apes' habitat in Gunung Palung National Park, on the Indonesian island of Borneo, where she studied the orangutans. Some 2,500 orangutans — about 10 percent of the world's remaining wild population of the apes — live in the park.

"At the current rate of habitat destruction, orangutans could be extinct in the wild in 10 to 20 years. We must stop this trend — the alternative is unthinkable," Knott, who has studied the park's apes, wrote in the October issue of National Geographic.

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Orangutans, close kin to humans, live only on Borneo and the nearby island of Sumatra. By some estimates, more than 80 percent of their original habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia has been destroyed, and deforestation has escalated with political and economic turmoil.

Wildlife experts in Malaysia on Tuesday cast doubt on Knott's publication. "That's not a realistic forecast for Sabah's orangutan population," said Geoffrey Davison, the Malaysian Borneo program director for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Malaysia's Sabah state on Borneo Island is home to some 13,000 of the red-haired apes, while there is another one or two thousand in Sarawak state, he said.

"The outlook for orangutans in Malaysia is brighter than those from certain neighboring countries," Davison said. "Sabah has a substantial orangutan population and I believe the government is serious in tackling problems like illegal logging and so on. So a viable population of orangutan should continue to exist here."

"However, orangutans everywhere face major challenges and their numbers are declining," he added, stressing that sustainable forestry practices were vital for their survival.

French primatologist Isabelle Lackman-Ancrenaz, of the Kinabatangan Orangutan Conservation Project in Sabah, said the orangutan population in Sabah was "viable" and that state forestry policies "give good hope for the survival of the orangutan."

However, she also warned that the ape's continued viability would depend on whether or not commercial forests adopted sustainable forestry practices, as most of Sabah's orangutans live outside protected reserves.