Palm Oil and Orangutans: How Plantations Threaten Primate Habitat

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Palm Oil and Orangutans: How Plantations Threaten Primate Habitat

Orangutans are disappearing mainly because the lowland rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, the only places they live in the wild, are being logged, burned and replaced by farmland, and oil-palm plantations are among the biggest drivers. A 2018 study led by Maria Voigt of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology estimated that Borneo lost more than 100,000 orangutans between 1999 and 2015. Today the Bornean orangutan is classed as Critically Endangered.

Palm oil is in a remarkable share of what we buy, from biscuits and margarine to shampoo, lipstick and car fuel. That makes the problem feel distant and personal at the same time. This guide explains how the crop and the apes are connected, what scientists have measured, why simply banning palm oil is not as straightforward as it sounds, and what an ordinary shopper can do that genuinely helps.

How palm oil and orangutans are connected

Orangutans are the most tree-bound of the great apes. They eat mostly fruit, travel through the canopy, build a fresh sleeping nest most nights and raise one infant at a time, with gaps of several years between births. A population that loses even a small share of its adult females each year struggles to recover.

The oil palm, originally from West Africa, thrives in exactly the warm, wet lowlands where orangutans are most common. Indonesia and Malaysia now grow most of the world's supply. When a plantation is established, the forest is cleared, often with fire, and replaced by evenly spaced rows of a single tree species. An adult orangutan cannot live on that. It loses its food trees and its nesting sites, and it becomes easier to see and easier to kill.

Palm Oil and Orangutans: How Plantations Threaten Primate Habitat

Field reports from Borneo describe apes stranded in cleared land, mothers killed so their infants could be sold as pets, and animals shot or beaten after wandering into plantations to feed on young palms. A survey published in 2011 estimated that between 750 and 1,800 Bornean orangutans were killed in the single year leading up to April 2008. In one case reported that year, two men were arrested for killing at least 20 orangutans on the orders of a plantation. Prosecutions remain rare.

The earliest version of this story called the situation a "genocide". That word has a specific meaning: the deliberate destruction of a human national, ethnic, racial or religious group. What is happening to orangutans is better described as habitat destruction and wildlife killing on a large scale. It is serious enough on its own terms, without borrowing a term coined for crimes against people.

What the research says about Borneo's losses

The most cited figures come from Voigt and colleagues, who published their analysis in Current Biology in February 2018. The team combined surveys of 36,555 orangutan nests with satellite data on forest cover across Borneo. Their model put the total loss at around 148,500 animals over the 16 years from 1999 to 2015, roughly half of the island's population.

Two findings stand out:

  • Clearing caused the sharpest drops. Density fell fastest where forest was cut down or converted to industrial agriculture, including oil palm and pulpwood.
  • Most of the animals were lost from forest that was still standing. Because so many disappeared from areas that remained wooded, the researchers concluded that killing by people plays a large role, alongside habitat loss.

The study also found that only 38 of 64 identified groups (metapopulations) contained more than 100 individuals, the size usually considered the minimum for long-term survival. The team projected that more than 45,000 additional orangutans could be lost over the following 35 years if trends continued. Some conservation groups disputed parts of the method, but the overall picture of a steep decline is widely accepted.

The Bornean orangutan was moved to Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List in 2016. Current estimates suggest around 104,700 remain in the wild, against just under 14,000 Sumatran orangutans. A third species, the Tapanuli orangutan of northern Sumatra, was only described by scientists in 2017 and is the rarest great ape on Earth.

A frequently repeated claim says that 90% of orangutan habitat has been destroyed in 20 years. We could not find a reliable source for that exact figure. What researchers do say is that today's population is a small fraction of what it was a century ago, with most of the fall happening over the past few decades.

Why palm oil is in so many products

Palm Oil and Orangutans: How Plantations Threaten Primate Habitat

Palm oil did not take over the world's supermarket shelves by accident. It has three big advantages for manufacturers:

  • Yield. In 2016 an average hectare of oil palm produced about 4.17 tonnes of oil, against roughly 0.56 tonnes for sunflower and 0.39 tonnes for soybean. No other common vegetable oil comes close.
  • Texture and stability. It is semi-solid at room temperature and keeps well, which makes it useful in baked goods, spreads, chocolate fillings and instant noodles.
  • Price. High yields and low labour costs keep it cheap.

About 70% of personal-care products contain ingredients derived from palm oil, often under chemical names such as sodium lauryl sulphate, glyceryl stearate or anything containing "palmitate". In Europe, a large share of imports has gone into biodiesel; by 2018 around half of the EU's palm oil imports were used as fuel. Indonesia alone produced about 57% of the world's supply in 2023–24, with Malaysia second.

Fires, peat and the climate

Clearing rainforest does more than remove trees. Much of the coastal lowland in Borneo and Sumatra sits on deep peat, a waterlogged layer of partly decayed plant matter built up over thousands of years. Draining peat for plantations dries it out, and dry peat burns. In January to September 2019, about 857,000 hectares burned in Indonesia, and more than a quarter of that area was peatland.

Peat fires release enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and smoke that drifts across Southeast Asia, closing schools and filling hospitals. This is why the orangutan story is also a climate story: the same forests that shelter apes store carbon that, once released, adds to global warming. A study backed by the European Commission in 2015 found that biodiesel made from palm oil can produce about three times the emissions of the fossil diesel it replaces, once land clearing is counted.

The short film above, shared widely when this story first ran, shows the scale of clearing and its effect on wildlife in a few minutes.

Boycott or better palm oil?

The instinctive answer is to stop buying anything with palm oil. Many conservation scientists are more cautious. In 2018 the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) concluded that palm oil is "here to stay". Because oil palm yields several times more oil per hectare than the alternatives, replacing it with soy, rapeseed or sunflower could require far more farmland, which could push deforestation into other ecosystems, such as South America's forests and savannahs.

The IUCN and most large conservation groups instead recommend stopping plantations from expanding into forest and peat, and raising demand for oil that is produced responsibly. The main certification body, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), was founded in 2004 and has thousands of members. Critics point out that certification has gaps and that demand for certified oil has often lagged behind supply, so a label is a starting point rather than a guarantee.

What you can do that actually helps

  • Read labels. Look for "palm", "palmitate", "elaeis guineensis" and related names. Choose brands that state their oil is certified or fully traceable.
  • Ask companies directly. A short, polite message asking where a company sources its palm oil, and whether its suppliers have no-deforestation commitments, adds to pressure that has already changed some firms' policies.
  • Cut waste, not just one ingredient. Eating fewer heavily processed snacks reduces demand for palm oil and for the replacement oils alike.
  • Support work on the ground. Rescue centres, forest-protection projects and groups that work with local communities in Borneo and Sumatra all need funding.

Is palm oil bad for your heart?

Palm oil from the fruit is about half saturated fat, mostly palmitic acid. A 2015 meta-analysis and a 2017 advisory from the American Heart Association linked high saturated-fat intake with higher LDL cholesterol and greater cardiovascular risk, and bodies such as the WHO encourage people to limit saturated fat. Other reviews have found weaker links, and good-quality studies on palm oil specifically are limited. The sensible reading is that palm oil is not uniquely toxic, but diets heavy in processed foods rich in it are not ideal. If you have concerns about cholesterol or heart health, talk to a doctor.

Common myths about palm oil and orangutans

  • "Orangutans live across Indonesia and Malaysia." In the wild they are found only on Borneo, which is shared by Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, and on Sumatra, which belongs to Indonesia.
  • "All palm oil is equally destructive." Oil from long-established plantations on former farmland has a very different footprint from oil grown on freshly cleared forest or drained peat.
  • "Habitat loss is the only threat." The 2018 study suggests that killing in standing forest accounts for a large share of the losses, so law enforcement matters as much as land use.
  • "It is too late." Orangutans breed slowly, but protected forests with low hunting pressure can hold stable populations. What happens to the remaining forest over the next decades will decide their future.

Every orangutan that survives does so in forest that someone chose not to clear. Choices made far away, on supermarket shelves and in company boardrooms, are part of that decision.

Sources: Asian Scientist, February 2018: More than half of Borneo's orangutans have been lost (Voigt et al., Current Biology); Wikipedia: Bornean orangutan; Wikipedia: Palm oil. Video: "A Different Kind Of Genocide That Is Occurring At The Moment" (YouTube). Study: Maria Voigt and colleagues, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Current Biology, 2018.

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