Fat of the Land

Dr. A. Christy Williams, a thirty-eight-year-old Indian zoologist, carries himself with the confidence of a man fully engaged in his vocation. One of the world’s foremost authorities on Asian elephants, Williams leads the team of a dozen researchers crouching in the bush. He carefully approaches the still-standing mother elephant and gently speaks into her ear. Receiving no discernible response, he peeks around her side and into an unseeing eye. He nods, and the crew moves in to hobble her hind legs.

The anaesthetized elephant is around forty years old. She stands well over two metres tall and weighs more than two tonnes. A tape measure is tossed over her back and around her considerable girth as long poles are gently placed against her temples and wedged into the ground to keep her from turning her head or keeling over.

Dr. Symphorosa (Rosa) Sipangkui, a veterinarian with the Sabah Wildlife Department in Kuala Lumpur, has been specially flown in to sedate the subject. The smallest member of the team, she delicately removes the darts from the clay-coloured skin, daubs the wounds with peroxide, and administers injections of penicillin. The rest of the team goes to work monitoring vital signs and preparing a tracking collar. Everything is done with the swift precision of a Formula 1 pit crew. I walk up and stroke the elephant’s side, tough skin spiked with rigid black hair.

This satellite tracking project, the largest ever undertaken with elephants in Asia, was launched in 2005. Since then, ten other individuals have been collared and tracked, providing the first raw data about how pygmy elephants use their habitats. Beyond question, Williams says, the biggest threat researchers are seeing to the continued existence of pygmy elephants is the conversion of their habitat to industrial agriculture — specifically oil palm plantations that, in many parts of Borneo, stretch beyond the horizon.

“When people are flying over the jungle at 40,000 feet,” Williams says, “they need to be aware that the package of coffee creamer they’re opening is directly linked to the survival of such species as pygmy elephants, tigers, and orangutans. What they buy and consume is actually driving deforestation in a country far away — because that coffee creamer contains palm oil.”

Not long ago, palm oil appeared to be a dietary and ecological wonder. Native to West Africa, the commercial variety of oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) yields up to ten times more oil than other major oil crops. A perennial plant, it fruits throughout the year and has a productive lifespan of twenty-five years. Palm oil seems tailor made for industrial food processing and baking, because, like butter, it is semi-solid at room temperature. It also increases the shelf life of packaged foods without requiring trans fat–producing hydrogenation.

Palm oil has long been a staple of Asian pantries, and European nations have rapidly adopted its use (along with palm kernel oil) in the manufacture of an astonishing array of processed foods, soaps, shampoos, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals, in addition to biodiesel. Until recently, North American producers preferred domestically grown soy, corn, and canola oils. All that changed with the new labelling requirements. Suddenly, the world’s largest economy developed a taste for palm oil.

Oil palms have been cultivated in Borneo since the nineteenth century, but it was only after the collapse of the rubber and logging industries in the 1990s that the crop gained real traction. Rising unemployment and continued immigration of workers, particularly from Indonesia, was creating political problems. The growing demand for palm oil was seen as an economic salvation.

Grown sustainably, palm oil could be part of a global ecological solution. Grown as a monoculture, however, palm plantations are essentially biological deserts, suitable for only a tiny fraction of Borneo’s astounding biodiversity. In Malaysia, fully 62 percent of cultivated land is covered in oil palm plantations. Although industry and conservation organizations have been talking for years about establishing standards and a certification regime, the wwf reports that there are still no certified organic or sustainable producers in all of Southeast Asia.

The industry also destroys habitat by fragmenting the Bornean rainforest. Elephants and other large animals require unhindered access to large areas of forest to locate food and water. The plantations, as large as 250 square kilometres, block migration patterns and isolate populations from one another. If the behaviour of mainland Asian elephants is any indication, female pygmy elephants live in matriarchal groups, usually of related sisters and their offspring. Adolescent males tend to travel in bachelor packs, while older males prefer to go it alone. In Borneo, when young male elephants are ready to establish territories of their own, they do so in a shrinking wilderness.