One of man’s closest and most enigmatic cousins, the Orang Utan, may disappear from the earth in just five years! Blame the booming palm oil industry, illegal logging and fires that are eating their rainforest habitat away even more rapidly than had been predicted!
A shocking United Nations report details that the primary cause of deforestation is a huge expansion of palm oil plantations, racing to meet Western food manufacturers’ and the European Union’s soaring demand for biofuels.
According to a report by the UN’s environment programme — ‘The Last Stand of the Orang Utan: State of Emergency’ — the Indonesian and Malaysian natural rainforests are being cleared so drastically that if it goes on at this rate, it is just by 2022, up to 98 percent may be destroyed!
And, unless urgent action is taken, the orang utans’ lowland forest strongholds will disappear much sooner. This is a full decade earlier than the previous report estimated when it was published five years ago. Thus, overall the loss of the habitat of orang utan is occurring 30 percent more rapidly compared to what previously been thought.