Nestlé, the world’s biggest food manufacturer, says it will make the palm oil in its best-selling chocolate bars more eco-friendly, after a guerrilla campaign against it on the internet.

The Swiss confectionery-to-coffee giant said it was inviting a not-for-profit group to audit its supply chain and promised to cancel contracts with any firm found to be chopping down rainforests to produce the vegetable oil, which it uses in KitKat, Aero and Quality Street.

The concession followed a three-month campaign by the environmental group Greenpeace, which led to Nestlé being attacked on social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube. One million people watched Greenpeace’s spoof advert for KitKat, despite its being taken off YouTube temporarily after a legal threat.

As well as illustrating the vulnerability of multinational companies to new media campaigns by NGOs which can galvanise individuals in a way that was impossible before the creation of the internet, the campaign also illustrated the intense environmental controversy surrounding palm oil.

Thousands of hectares of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia have been cleared to make way for oil palm plantations, depriving tribes of ancestral lands, increasing climate change emissions and killing rare animals such as the Sumatran tiger, sun bear, clouded leopard and pangolins. Campaigners have particularly stressed the damage done to orangutans, a close relative of man which lives only on the heavily deforested islands of Borneo and Sumatra.
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Dayak tribesman Hanye Jaang didn’t know it, but he used to be part of a multi-billion-dollar “mafia” that is ravaging Indonesia’s forests and, scientists say, warming the climate.

The wiry 36-year-old still cuts down trees but now he’s doing it legally in a way that minimises damage to fragile forest ecosystems.

“I don’t have to play hide-and-seek with the forest police anymore. It’s safe doing my job now,” he told AFP in the jungles of East Kalimantan, or Indonesian Borneo.

He is also free of the powerful mafia bosses known as “cukong” who run Indonesia’s illicit timber industry.

“When I worked by myself I sometimes didn’t get paid by the cukong. I used to earn big money but they stole my timber many times,” he said.

Jaang is typical of the tribesmen who work for PT Belayan River Timber at its 97,500-hectare (241,000-acre) concession near Samarinda on southeastern Borneo.

With assistance from the US-based Nature Conservancy (TNC), the company is seeking to have its timber products certified by the internationally recognized Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) as sustainably harvested.

But experts agree that certification alone is not going to stop Indonesia’s forests disappearing at a rate of about 300 football fields an hour, according to TNC estimates.

TNC sustainable forest management specialist Benjamin Jarvis said only 1.1 million hectares of Indonesian forest were being logged according to FSC standards, or less than two percent of the land under logging concessions.
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More than 800 runners are expected to take part when the Birmingham Zoo stages its fifth annual “Run Wild for the Orangutans” Zoo Run on Saturday, May 15, proceeds of which will benefit Orangutan Conservancy (OC) projects in Borneo and Sumatra for the second straight year.

The 5-kilometer race, which winds through the zoo grounds in central Alabama, is organized by the Birmingham chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers (AAZK). All runners will receive registration packs that include OC brochures, OC shopping guides, and OC newsletters.

“We are excited about the race, and encouraged that so many people in Birmingham will take part in an event to help orangutans,” said Patti Frazier, president of the Birmingham chapter of the AAZK. “They may be running through the park, but they are also raising funds that can make a difference 10,000 miles away.”

Proceeds for last year’s “Run Wild” were used to stage the inaugural Orangutan Conservancy Veterinary Workshop in Borneo, which brought together veterinary healthcare workers from orangutan rehabilitation centers for a week of presentations, seminars and practicals.
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