The Orangutan Conservancy, which helped broker the negotiations with Hollywood animal trainers that resulted in the donation this week of six orangutans to the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, hailed the deal as a positive step for conservation.

The first two orangutans – a 19-year old female named Katy (pictured above) and her three-year old son, Rocky – arrived at the Des Moines, Iowa, facility on July 12. The remaining four will follow over the course of the summer.

“This is wonderful news, not only for the orangutans that worked in entertainment, but also for wild orangutans in Indonesia,” said Norm Rosen, president of the Orangutan Conservancy. “The idea of laughing at an orangutan in a television commercial or a greeting card might seem harmless, but there is a very direct correlation between the way we view orangutans in America or Europe and the way they are perceived in Southeast Asia.”

Added Rosen: “The sooner we stop regarding orangutans as props, the sooner we’ll be able to make effective arguments to the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia to protect them and the forests in which they live.”

The six orangutans – two males and four females – were donated to the Great Ape Trust of Iowa by Steve Martin’s Working Wildlife, which was the last major supplier of trained orangutans for television, films and advertising. Rocky was generally regarded as the most visible orangutan in media today, having appeared in recent television advertisements for Capital One and Aflac and an Elle magazine spread with pop star Fergie of the Black-Eyed Peas.
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JAKARTA — The leaders of Indonesia and Brazil have agreed that their developing nations, home to much of the world’s remaining tropical forest, would cooperate on biofuels after talks covering climate change and food.

The two nations signed an agreement on July 12 for Indonesia to send experts to Brazil to study its biofuel developments, said Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

“Brazil has been successful developing bioethanol and of course Indonesia can learn from the research and development,” Yudhoyono told a news conference after talks with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Brazil, a pioneer of mass ethanol usage in cars, has been mixing the sugar cane-based fuel with gasoline for decades, as well as running a vast fleet of vehicles on pure ethanol.

Indonesia, the world’s biggest palm oil producer, has also been pushing biofuels to cut the use of costly petroleum products, and aims to make mandatory the use of a 2.5 percent blend of biodiesel by September. Indonesia’s forests in Sumatra and Borneo are home to the world’s last remaining wild populations of orangutans.

The biofuel sector has come under attack from green groups for accelerating the destruction of forests, while some analysts blame it for contributing to soaring world food prices by diverting land that could be used for food crops.
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