We’d found our family group of pygmy elephants stripping fronds from native palms with dexterous trunks, raising them up and over their heads to swat the nuisance of flies from their backs. The team quickly selected the matriarch. Before the tranquilizer was fired, we watched as the cow allowed her young calf plenty of room to explore. When he came cantering back for reassurance, she was generous with her touch.
On a small oil palm plantation seventy-five kilometres to the north, assistant manager Tuan Ali (not his real name) proclaims his company’s achievements while jabbing a tiny calculator. Ali has dark, coffee-coloured skin and the thick, meaty fingers of a man unafraid of physical labour. Where others in his position might be reluctant to speak to nosy foreigners, he sees his company as one of the industry’s good guys.
Ali’s plantation covers 1,620 hectares of former jungle and yields 500 tonnes of oil per month. The company plans to expand to 8,250 hectares. As on most other plantations in Sabah, virtually all of Ali’s 100 labourers come from neighbouring Indonesia. They work under temporary status; military checkpoints are set up at highway intersections to nab illegal immigrants, who come from as far away as the Philippines. “Local people don’t like to work the plantation,” Ali says. “I don’t know why. Maybe the income is not so good, or they don’t like a hardship situation.” Most of the managers, he claims, are local.
For as little as ten ringgits ($3) per day, Ali’s employees clear land, plant stock, prune mature trees, apply fertilizer and herbicide (including toxic paraquat dichloride), and harvest palm fruit, which grows in heavy clusters. On mature trees, the fruit is shorn off with a thin saw affixed to a long pole, then loaded onto trucks and sent to a depot or a mill. The fruit must be processed within forty-eight hours to yield the highest fat content. Difficult and dangerous, work on the plantation often involves crossing paths with black spitting cobras, which are attracted to the rats that favour this man-made environment. The snakes have the terrifying habit of ejecting venom into the eyes of intruders.
The wwf reports that displaced elephants are showing up on plantations and in villages, where they trample houses and gardens, injuring and occasionally killing people in their search for their daily requirement of about 150 kilograms of grasses, twigs, bark, fruit, and flowers. When these are scarce, they will turn to any available food source, including such agricultural crops as sugar cane, bananas, and oil palms. To defend their property (and sometimes themselves), villagers and plantation workers have been known to take matters into their own hands — often with tragic consequences for the elephants.
More often, elephants are the unintended targets of snares. In one study area alone (Sabah’s Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary), the wwf reports that an estimated 20 percent of resident elephants have sustained “gruesome” injuries from illegal traps set by plantation workers to catch smaller game to supplement their diets.
At the moment, Ali doesn’t have problems with elephants here, but he has in the past. Back in 2003, on his previous plantation, a herd of 120 displaced elephants arrived and stayed for three months. He called the government wildlife department but was told there was nothing they could do. The elephants must be left alone, they said. His solution was an electric fence. Being clever creatures, however, the elephants simply pushed trees over the weak solar-powered wires, coming and going as they pleased. “So I switched to a [diesel-powered] generator,” Ali says. “I put live current in the wire. When the elephant touched it, he got an electric shock and died.” In all, five were electrocuted. After that, he says, the elephants got the message, and the problem went away.
Down the road from Ali’s operation stands a much larger plantation with its own mill, which churns out up to 800 tonnes of oil each day. Because palm fruit must be processed so quickly, there is roughly one mill for every forty to fifty square kilometres of Bornean palm plantation — hundreds in all. Palm plantations with on-site mills are often villages unto themselves, with housing, medical facilities, schools, and even soccer fields for workers and their families. Many are surrounded by electric fences and have guards posted at their gates. Often there is an impressive residence for the manager that, in comparison with the surrounding accommodation, resembles a manor house from the antebellum American South. Although the majority of plantations are owned by large, publicly traded corporations, approximately 20 percent are owned by “small holders” — individual farmers who sell their crops to corporations.
Journalists researching the issue have been known to gain access to palm mills by posing as foreign investors. Despite my declaration that I am a writer interested in the fate of Borneo’s wildlife, and despite the long, ponderous pause of the man in charge, I am granted a guided hard-hat tour.
A fresh-faced Malaysian from junior management drew the short straw. We shuffle over stairs and pavement slick with oil, past a metal pit where trucks dump heavy clusters of vibrant palm fruit into waiting rail carts. The loads travel fifty metres, directly into a grey, hangar-sized factory of furnaces, conveyors, dryers, and vats. There, the bunches are steamed, the fruit separated from the husks, the flesh separated from the kernel, and the oil rendered down. It smells as if all the world’s deep fat fryers have drained into this one bubbling cauldron. Spent kernels and husks are collected and dried outside in the sun, then used to fuel the burners — not only for cooking the next batch of fruit, but to generate electricity for the mill and surrounding plantations. Efforts have been made, I’m told, to extract the highest value from the raw material. The oil is transported via tanker truck to Lahad Datu for further refining into oil suitable for use in food, medicine, cosmetics, or fuel. From there, it is shipped to manufacturers abroad, where it is pumped into diesel generators, lathered into scalps, rubbed onto skin, and consumed in bars of chocolate.
