#agribusiness

Tomato cannery. Susan's neighbors at work. 1950.

Since the 1970s, hundreds of hectares of forest in Borneo have been cleared to grow rice and pineapples and, more recently, oil palms. The large spiky palms with their red, bulbous, oil-rich fruit have become the main cash crop in this once densely forested area.

Since the transmigration scheme opened up this area to new settlers in 2016, the orangutans’ forest habitat has been disappearing, and the settlers have found their crops and gardens invaded by unwelcome visitors.

Most of us see orangutans as adorable, with their tufts of red hair and solemn eyes. They are known as devoted mothers. Their hands are very like ours. The renowned primatologist Biruté Galdikas once remarked: “Orangutans have souls, absolutely.” But they are also big, smart and strong, and locals can find them scary, says Karmele Llano Sánchez from Yiari, a charity based in West Kalimantan that works across Indonesia to protect orangutans and their habitat. The charity had been receiving a stream of messages about orangutans taking bites out of precious fruit, and scaring children. There was no reason for alarm, Yiari told callers. Orangutans are generally peaceful, and only become dangerous if threatened or cornered. Orangutans had not directly attacked humans, according to Yiari (though there had been occasions where orangutans had charged at people); but humans had attacked orangutans.

As the population of southern and western Kalimantan has increased, and farms and new settlements have expanded, conservationists have been sending out rescue parties to catch orangutans that have come into conflict with humans. The apes are tranquillised and moved to a more remote area, where they are released back into the wild. This approach has become common, but according to a recent study, which triggered fierce debate, moving orangutans does more harm than good. In their new environment, they may struggle to find food, and get attacked by orangutans who view them as intruders. Many are moved more than 30 miles away, but some captured animals make their way back to their original home, the authors claim, even when their home territory has been violently altered. The solution, said Julie Sherman, the director of conservation non-profit Wildlife Impact and a lead author of the paper, is not to remove animals to alien territory, but for humans and orangutans to live alongside each other.

“When you’ve got farmers shooting at orangutans, or the forest on fire, what should we do?” asked Gail Campbell-Smith, a primatologist who works at Yiari. “Should we leave the animal to die? What should we do in that moment in time? Moving them is the last resort when we’ve done everything else that we can.”

When Llano Sánchez first visited Kalimantan as a vet in 2005, the drive to convert land into oil palm plantations was well under way. She encountered the roaring of chainsaws and vehicles, crashing trees and people yelling. The bulk of palm oil expansion was between 2001 and 2012, when powerful corporations descended, and things really started to speed up. At the peak in West Kalimantan in 2012, an area of ancient forest slighty less than the size of Greater London was cleared in one year.

“It was crazy,” she said. “So many orangutans were being displaced and wiped out.” A lean and slight woman in her late 40s, Llano Sánchez speaks forcefully, as if she’s running out of time to get her message across. She showed me a video shot in the district of Ketapang, West Kalimantan, in 2013. Orangutans were clambering around among felled branches, charred tree stumps and upended root balls in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

The place where the video was shot is now mile after mile of evenly spaced trees, each topped with a dense crown of fronds. Palms are planted nine metres apart and the fruit is harvested by hand, with a machete, chisel or long-handled sickle, which is used to prise the fruit bunches from the body of the tree. The oil extracted from the flesh and kernel is highly versatile, turning up in about half of all supermarket products globally, from pizza dough to lipsticks.

Indonesia is now the biggest palm oil producer in the world, responsible for 59% of global output, worth about £26bn a year.

Besides the major commercial plantations, villagers in very out-of-the-way places are clearing pieces of land to create their own palm oil smallholdings. Oil palms have changed fortunes. Villagers have been able to fix up their houses, buy a motorbike, set up a hair salon.

Despite pressure from environmental campaigners, it is not easy to prevent illegal deforestation. The palm oil industry is enormous, supply chains are complex and include independent farmers who have as little as two-hectare plots. These smallholders mostly sell their fruit to companies for processing. The number of smallholders clearing ground to plant palms is growing fast, and they are largely unmonitored. Smallholders are not just converting tiny patches of existing cropland, according to a study of their environmental impact. People are avoiding the regulations that restrict companies and finding pristine forests to slash open.

More photos from my days being across the street from a working farm. What a treat to watch the tractors do their work.

A green belt in Burkina Faso cools surroundings, feeds residents. Started in the 1970s, the belt surrounds the capital city of Ouagadougou preventing desertification, cooling the city, and promoting urban agriculture. Many residents make a living by growing vegetables on their allotments, an added value for the greenbelt, which has seen renewed impetus following last year’s deadly heatwave.

Start demanding 24/7 live camera footage inside slaughterhouses. Start demanding comprehensive bans on gestation pens and forced insemination. Start demanding wide open pastures (cage-free is not actually cage-free). Start demanding painless procedures of killing and set strict and decreased limits on kills per minute, absolutely NO rushing for the sake of profit. This is for the sake of not only animals but workers as well, many of whom are immigrants.

This will significantly decrease access to store-bought animal products as it stands, but we cannot accept exploitation of animals and workers for the sake of convenience. It is not worth it for meat and dairy and eggs to be as accessible as they are with the way they are produced. It is not good that we’re used to this.

As for long term, it’s highly unlikely that any system of industrial agriculture can reliably remain ethical, safe to work in, or remotely environmentally friendly. Factory farming needs to be abolished.

You can buy from local farms if they are ensured to have sufficiently ethical procedures, meaning the welfare of the animals are protected throughout their lives and their deaths are painless. If this is not the case, you can learn rifle hunting or buy from hunters.

And yes, all of this can be done whilst also acknowledging issues within mass scale vegetable farms and cosmetics.