Palm Oil vs Orangutans: Indonesia’s Transmigration Fuels Wildlife Conflict

The banana skins were an ominous sign. So was the branch broken off to reach the fruit. Had Edi Ramli walked into the forest, he might have seen scattered balls of bark ripped from trees, chewed like gum, then spit out. It takes a powerful jaw to do that. Closer to his home, an intricate construction of bent and broken branches high in a tree formed a nest.

It was October, the fruiting season. The pile of half-eaten bananas sat less than a minute’s walk from where Edi and his family slept. He felt nervous. He got on with his day, picking sweetcorn and selling it at the market. He bought chocolate milk and biscuits for his grandson. He and his wife, Siti Munawaroh, ran the farm with their three adult children, prepping land, sowing seeds, tending crops. Survival depended on what they could grow.

At five in the afternoon, the light began to fade. Suddenly, Edi heard a cry. A neighbor’s child who had been bathing in the river came running back, frightened. He said he had seen an orangutan. Edi ran toward the river, the farm’s guard dog at his heels. In a clearing barely 100 meters away, he saw the reddish bulk of the orangutan. It was an adult male, he could tell from the large cheek pads. The creature was huge, about 90 kg, and far stronger than he was. One swipe would knock him to the ground. The dog ran after the orangutan, barking ferociously. The orangutan disappeared into the undergrowth.

Edi, 55, and Siti, 51, live on a small farm in southern Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, in a remote spot on the west coast. Originally from Java, the island home to more than 157 million people, they found Java stifling—the crowds, noise, and pollution. A decade ago, Edi worked as a builder and Siti as a machinist in a garment factory. Then they discovered the government would pay to move them elsewhere.

In 2016, Edi and his family joined a scheme to relocate people from Indonesia’s overcrowded inner islands to less populated outer islands. Known as transmigration, it was a form of experimental population engineering on a grand scale, started in the 19th century by Dutch colonialists and peaking in the 1980s when 2.5 million people were resettled between 1979 and 1984. Each family receives land, a house, and a small amount of money—about 4 million rupiah, or £170.

Edi and his family loved their new home, a haven of light and space after the city. But unbeknown to him, he had been encouraged to settle near one of the largest populations of wild orangutans in West Kalimantan. About 2,500 live in Gunung Palung National Park, almost on his doorstep. His farm sits close to the park’s buffer zone, a strip of land meant to cushion the protected forest from human development—but it is not demarcated. There are no deep ditches or high walls. Orangutans do not know boundaries. Besides, the land Edi now cultivated had once been their territory. Orangutans can live up to 45 years and have strong territorial instincts; they carry on visiting areas they have always ranged in, even when those areas are violently changed.

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

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

Most people see orangutans as adorable, with tufts of red hair and solemn eyes. They are known as devoted mothers, with hands very like ours. 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 to protect orangutans and their habitat. Yiari had been receiving 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. While orangutans had not directly attacked humans according to Yiari—though there had been occasions where they charged—humans had attacked orangutans.

As the population of southern and western Kalimantan has increased, and farms and settlements have expanded, conservationists have been sending rescue parties to catch orangutans that come into conflict with humans. The apes are tranquilized and moved to a more remote area, where they are released into the wild. This approach has become common, but according to a recent study that 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 that territory has been violently altered. The solution, said Julie Sherman, director of conservation nonprofit 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.

Yiari has rescued 270 orangutans at risk in the past 12 years and defends the practice. ‘A large number are babies from mothers that have been killed,’ said Llano Sánchez. ‘I’m not saying that 100% of the orangutans we’ve rescued and released have survived, but if we hadn’t rescued them, they would be 100% dead, for sure.’

‘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 roaring chainsaws, vehicles, crashing trees, and people yelling. The bulk of palm oil expansion occurred 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 slightly 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, slight woman in her late 40s, Llano Sánchez speaks forcefully, as if running out of time to get her message across. She showed a video shot in Ketapang district, West Kalimantan, in 2013. Orangutans clambered 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 dense fronds. Palms are planted nine meters apart, and fruit is harvested by hand with a machete, chisel, or long-handled sickle. The oil extracted from the flesh and kernel is highly versatile, appearing in about half of all supermarket products globally, from pizza dough to lipsticks.

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

Besides major commercial plantations, villagers in remote areas are clearing land for their own palm oil smallholdings. Oil palms have changed fortunes. Villagers have fixed up houses, bought motorbikes, set up hair salons.

In many ways, it is a remarkable crop. On a per-hectare basis, it produces between six and 10 times more oil than equivalents like soybean. But palm oil has been calamitous to wildlife, not just orangutans. Plantations are hostile environments for monkeys and birds—quiet, oddly dead places—but paradise for snakes and rats. Rats eat palm oil kernels; snakes feast on rats.

Despite pressure from environmental campaigners, preventing illegal deforestation is not easy. The palm oil industry is enormous, supply chains are complex, and they include independent farmers with plots as small as two hectares. 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 regulations that restrict companies and finding pristine forests to slash open.

On a hot, soupy morning on October 26, I traveled with photographer Fergus Thomas to remote West Kalimantan, 850 miles from Jakarta’s skyscrapers and gridlocked streets, about 1,000 miles from Bali’s beach resorts. The port town of Ketapang, one of the region’s largest, has no public transport and only three traffic lights for a population of 93,000, who mainly get around on motorbikes.

Edi lives in a village two hours north of Ketapang. To reach his farm from the road, we rode a motorbike for 10 minutes down a dirt track, through pools of muddy water and over an unsteady wooden bridge. A lean man with smiling eyes, hardy and resourceful, Edi wore Wellington boots, battered shorts, and a T-shirt with the face of former President Joko Widodo, who stepped down in 2024—a freebie from the transmigration scheme.

About 150 families were moved here from Java. More than 100 have since moved back. ‘It’s a very different life to the big city,’ said Edi. ‘You have everything in Java but nothing here.’ It was the rainy season, and the ground was a quagmire. I slithered in mud. Water gushed from the corrugated tin roof of the family shelter. But Edi remained cheerful. ‘We knew the conditions before we moved here,’ he said. ‘We adapt to the weather.’

Edi and his family live in a makeshift wooden shelter with a raised wooden platform like a raft. It is basic, but they prefer it to the house in the nearby ‘transmigration village.’ They have all they need: sleeping bags, solar panels to charge mobile phones and the water pump, a one-gallon plastic water container, and a gas camping stove. Their home is surrounded by orderly cultivated fields with a boundary of banana palms.

There are restrictions on people who arrive from the city. Recipients are not allowed to sell the land, but plenty do. ‘They get the land for free, sell it and then walk away,’ said Llano Sánchez. We used a drone for a bird’s-eye view. It’s a hodgepodge of forest fragments and small domestic plots with rambutans and jackfruit—crops for the family to eat and sell at market. The brown of the transmigration village is visible near the verdant forest. There is a sand mine supplying high-quality silica for glass, construction, and other industries. Then, in a mixed mosaic with other crops, the distinctive green fronds of oil palms sprout upward like a pattern on a carpet.

Oil palms lined both sides of every road we drove. They sprouted on riverbanks and scrubland. It might seem like a haphazardly self-planted weed, but it has been planted with care. Edi had about 200 seedlings in pots lined up next to the deep furrows of his tomato plants. He grew them from seed at a cost of 20,000 rupiah. At three years old, the palms will start bearing fruit. Edi expects two harvests a month, driven by 2 kg of fertilizer every three months. Families can earn about £100 per hectare (about 140 to 160 plants) per harvest.

The next day, I had coffee with a group of women in a nearby village who patrol the forest checking for wildfires, a big problem in this area. It is much cheaper for farmers and developers to clear land by burning trees than to hire a digger. Set up by Yiari four years ago, the Power of Mama is a surveillance team of 118 women from eight local villages who take turns patrolling the forest on motorbikes; some are being trained as firefighters.

Protected forests are meant to remain wild and shielded from human activity. But that has not been the case. The buffer zone around Gunung Palung has been whittled from 10 km wide to 2 km over the past few decades. In 2003, illegal loggers began cutting trees within the actual research site where orangutans are monitored.

Orangutans forced out of their home territory quickly get into trouble. Early one morning last summer, a baby orangutan was spotted clinging to the tall, slender trunk of a jabon tree, half a mile or so from Edi’s farm. An hour later, the mother was found hidden in tall grasses nearby. She had a wound 5 cm deep on her back. The weapon, likely a spear, had penetrated her kidney. It took a week for her to die. The baby was taken to a rehabilitation center and eventually released into the forest alone.

As climate breakdown and human populations have brought chaos to the natural world, translocation has become a core conservation tool. It can restore almost-extinct wildlife—kakapo in New Zealand; return species to where they used to be—beavers in Great Britain; or move them somewhere never before—Western swamp tortoises in Australia.

In conservation circles, translocation is controversial, especially if wildlife is moved because it is seen as a ‘problem’ to people—wrecking harvests, eating livestock, or scaring children. ‘It’s a very human response to move things out of our way that we don’t want there, but it’s about our interests and desires, as opposed to the orangutans’,’ said Julie Sherman, based in Portland, Oregon. ‘Globally, [translocation] is not generally an effective way to resolve conflicts with wild terrestrial animals.’

In 2015, Sherman and Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University, became interested in the fact that translocation was being promoted to protect orangutans in Indonesia. In their research, they found that between 2005 and 2022, at least 988 orangutans were captured for translocation in Indonesia. The mechanics of translocation—usually uprooting an orangutan from familiar territory and framing it as a ‘rescue’—worries Sherman and Wich most. NGOs increasingly rely on Instagram and TikTok to fundraise and engage with the public, and the drama of a ‘rescue’ is great for engagement. ‘What is really disturbing is seeing videos of animals fleeing towards a forest and people continue to pursue it for whatever reason,’ said Sherman. ‘It’s very hard on the animal.’

As a species, orangutans seem particularly ill-suited to being moved. Wild orangutans have a mental map of the forest built up over many years. They know which trees are fruiting and when. Translocation is an alarming intervention in their social fabric. Sherman speaks about orangutans in somewhat human terms: an older male is a ‘grandfather’; they have ‘friends’, ‘neighbors’. ‘You are pulling that animal away from its family and friends and putting it in a group of strangers,’ she said. When relocated, they risk attack by hostile animals on whose territory they arrive unannounced, said Wich, who was also on the call. ‘These are highly intelligent animals, so it must be very traumatic for them.’

No one really knows what happens to wild orangutans after they have been moved. Tracking devices to monitor them are expensive and invasive. Fitting a global positioning system tracker requires surgery plus a two-week recovery period. ‘There just isn’t the human capacity to follow all these animals, the funding or the time,’ said Sherman. She asked: Should we be moving animals we aren’t equipped to monitor?

Wich and Sherman believe that rather than moving them to unfamiliar areas, more effort is needed to achieve peaceful coexistence. ‘It’s really key that we work with local communities and companies to find a solution,’ said Wich. Sherman mentioned financial compensation and insurance as possible solutions. Wich and Sherman developed a program of pilot workshops where villagers talk with local NGOs and decide how to live alongside orangutans without killing or removing them.

On a hot day in 2009, Llano Sánchez stopped at a house in Pontianak, the largest city in West Kalimantan. A large male orangutan was chained to a low wooden platform in the backyard, exposed to sun, rain, and raw sewage and wastewater running underneath him. Jojo, as he was called, had been kept as a pet for 10 years. ‘It was so painful to see,’ Llano Sánchez said.

Llano Sánchez grew up in Spain, where she trained as a vet. In 2003, at age 25, she came to Indonesia to volunteer at a rescue center in Java. In 2005, she met her husband, Argitoe Ranting, an expert on orangutans with profound knowledge of the forest. He is from the Dayak tribe, the original forest dwellers of Kalimantan. A year later, they set up a rescue center for macaques and slow lorises in Java. She was working in Central Kalimantan when asked to check on Jojo. At that time, keeping a pet orangutan was a status symbol, even though it was—and is—illegal.

Jojo was malnourished, with rickets and pneumonia. ‘The chain had gone into his flesh and it had got quite infected,’ she said. She cleaned the wound and put the chain back on Jojo’s other ankle. ‘I had to leave him there as there was nowhere else to take him.’ The following year, Llano Sánchez and her husband launched a second rescue center, this time for orangutans in West Kalimantan. ‘The first orangutan we rescued was Jojo.’

Today, the center occupies a peaceful enclave of about 200 hectares (500 acres), a 30-minute drive north of Ketapang. It includes a veterinary clinic, rehabilitation center, and forest school to teach survival skills to orphaned orangutans. Llano Sánchez’s charity, Yiari, employs nearly 300 people across three sites—Java, West Kalimantan, and Sumatra—plus casual staff, patrol teams, and field experts. Its partner, International Animal Rescue, is based in the UK. Yiari currently has 60 orangutans in this sanctuary, including Jojo.

Yiari has translocated 72 wild orangutans since 2009. Each ape is given a name, entered into a database, and fitted with a microchip implanted between its shoulder blades. From this data, Yiari discovered that only 3% of those 72 orangutans had previously been moved. But there may be more, cautions Gail Campbell-Smith; they only come across the ones that have become a problem.

Campbell-Smith has worked at Yiari for 15 years. She was the first to study orangutans in a ‘human-dominated landscape’ in Sumatra, making detailed observations of how orangutan behavior changed around humans. Rather than rising and retiring with the sun, orangutans would lie in their nests until late afternoon, ‘waiting for humans to leave.’ Their diet adapted to include oil palm shoots. ‘An odd one, as that is not a tree that orangutans usually like,’ she said. They also spent more time on the ground. Orangutans are normally arboreal, but they do not swing by their arms like monkeys; they ‘tree-sway,’ using branches like a pole vaulter, letting their weight bow the branch to propel themselves in tremendous arcs. ‘They move from tree A to tree B using their bodies to swing,’ Campbell-Smith explained. ‘But they couldn’t go to tree B, because it had been cut down. So they had to go to tree C, and to get to tree C they were forced on to the ground.’ They are slow and lumbering on all fours, and when outside protected areas, they are vulnerable to humans who want to kill them.

Llano Sánchez does not disagree with Wich and Sherman that capturing and moving orangutans is invasive and frightening for the animals, but in the moment, they see no alternative. ‘We are dealing with emergencies,’ she said. ‘We are on the frontline.’

Palm oil has made many local people far richer than they ever imagined. As a boy growing up in the village of Simpang Tiga in Ketapang province, Iskandar would run from his home to the nearby forest and fill his pockets with wild rambutans and mangoes. ‘Just like the monkeys!’ he said.

Five decades on, the place where he grew up is a boom town. It consists of a roadside strip lined with a Catholic church and many small businesses: coffee stalls, restaurants offering grilled fish, chunks of giant jackfruit in coconut sauce, fried tempeh, mounds of rice. The town is now surrounded by 100 square miles of oil palm plantations owned by two companies: Bumitama Agri Ltd (BGA) and Sinar Mas, one of Indonesia’s largest conglomerates.

Iskandar’s home is set back from the main road. We sat drinking coffee on his tiled patio next to a tank of ornamental catfish as trucks barreled past. Iskandar, 55, is glossy-looking with good teeth. The house where he lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter has three bedrooms and ornate furniture. He owns a Toyota Rush, two dump trucks, and a pickup. ‘I grew up poor and wanted something better for myself,’ he said. He has his own oil palm plantation, which earns him about £9,600 a year—about five-and-a-half times the average salary. He also has a deal with BGA, acting as middleman and quality controller for smallholders selling their crop to the company.

Every day, about 20 to 30 dump trucks from across the region pull up outside his house, loaded with spiky oil palm heads. Iskandar checks paperwork to ensure the oil palm heads are not stolen—palm oil theft is a growing problem—and after the consignment is dropped off at BGA, he pays the drivers.

For Iskandar, orangutans are a familiar problem. Last May, a male orangutan appeared in his neighbor’s garden. This particular animal had been spotted on several occasions crossing the main road, slow and awkward on all fours, near the coffee shop and the church. After complaints, he was captured and moved to Gunung Tarak protected forest, a four-hour drive away. ‘He couldn’t stay here,’ said Iskandar. ‘His life was in danger.’

Other smallholders in the area had been troubled by orangutans and demanded they be removed, or else they would kill them. Naha, 54, who lives in the village of Kuala Satong across the river from Edi’s house, wanted to take us to the scene of a recent attack on his crops. Small and muscular, he marched ahead, machete in hand. It was late morning and the sun was hot. Thwack! He chopped down some sugar cane for us to chew.

An experienced farmer, he has only recently started making money. For years, he grew rice and produced only enough to feed his family of six. The land is too swampy and salty for rice, it turned out. But five years ago, Naha switched to oil palms. He now earns 2 to 3 million rupiah per harvest, ‘and you can have two harvests a month. Twenty-four a year!’ he said. He has extended his home and sends his grandchildren to school. ‘I feel wealthy!’

After an hour of walking, we arrived at a hut on the riverbank, a place where he likes to rest and smoke cigarettes. His oil palm plantation was nearby. One field was full of mature plants; the other had seedlings interspersed with scrub and tangled vegetation. This was a new field he was cultivating. The shoots had been torn and flattened; more than 50 had been eaten, a third of his crop. ‘Who will compensate me?’ he asked.

Farmers feel resentment toward orangutans, said Paul Thung, director of conservation at Planet Indonesia, an NGO based in West Kalimantan. Orangutans can wreck crops, but farmers are not allowed to shoot them as they would a macaque, which the government recognizes as a pest.

‘I’m angry,’ Iskandar said. His sister was angry too. ‘If there is no replacement for the seedlings,’ she warned in a voicemail to Yiari, ‘something unwarranted might occur.’ She continued: ‘We do not own a large plantation, and we do not own any other land. So, please, we ask for your immediate help.’

On my last day in Borneo, I went out on a rescue mission. It started with a call from the Orangutan Protection Unit, a rapid response unit that patrols places where orangutans are known to be a problem—20 villages at last count. They wanted to show us an orangutan they were worried about.

It was still hot and humid at 5 p.m. We heard a rustle of leaves in the high branches and walked toward the sound. Twenty or so feet up, we glimpsed a baby orangutan clambering on its mother’s back. The mother glanced down at us. She reached out and pulled branches in around her like a cloak, attempting to hide. Leaves and twigs dropped onto the forest floor.

The orangutan and her infant were in a tiny strip of about 100 rubber trees in Tempurukan village, a 40-minute drive from Ketapang. There were houses with picket fences and bougainvillea in terracotta pots. She was close to a main road with a petrol station and an outdoor cafe.

This mother was known to Yiari as October. She had been spotted nine times in the previous four months, once by the owner of a jackfruit plantation. ‘Move it!’ the owner told Yiari. There was a risk the animal would come to harm. ‘People put poison in fruit quite frequently,’ Argitoe told me. He had relayed his concerns to the West Kalimantan Natural Resources Conservation Agency, which oversees animal capture and movement. It visited the site and agreed: the orangutans needed to be moved.

On the day of our trip to the rescue site, Argitoe was holding a tranquilizer gun. ‘It’s very difficult to rescue a mother and child,’ he said. There was a risk the baby would be hit by the dart aimed at its mother.

We were joined by trackers, field staff, an official from the conservation agency—his senior position reflected in superior footwear—plus motorbikes and two pickup trucks, each with a cage. A cameraman filmed Argitoe for his YouTube channel, where his words would be dubbed into American English. The group of about 25 was predominantly male, apart from Fina Fadiah, the vet, and Maratul Halimnafiah, known as Fia, a student trainee.

Up in the trees, October was scared. She showed her fear by emitting ‘kiss-squeaks’—a sharp sound made by pursing her lips to form a trumpet. In her stress, she peed. Argitoe followed as she moved from branch to branch trying to escape. Trackers cut a path through the undergrowth. Argitoe stopped and looked up. The infant was spread-eagled on its mother’s back. He had to wait for it to clamber onto her chest to lessen the risk of hitting it. Every time October shifted, Argitoe followed with his gun. And every time Argitoe moved, a dozen others followed. ‘Quick, quick, quick, come quickly!’ he shouted. We heard a sudden cry—’Arrrrgh arggggh!’—someone had swung a machete into a bees’ nest.

Finally, a dart hit October. She started to fall, but the sedative’s effect was delayed, and with one hand she tried to hold onto a tangle of vines. A net was held out about a meter above the ground. October fell into it. But her baby was gone.

The orangutan was carried to a clearing, monitored, and a blood sample taken. She was about 20 years old and weighed 35 kg. She was still lactating. Fina found her microchip and declared that this wasn’t October; it was Mama Ris. She had been moved before. She may have returned to this spot because land was being cleared in her new location.

Half an hour later, Fina was checking the baby orangutan, now unconscious. Argitoe had used a blowpipe—an air rifle is too powerful for something so small. She was about three years old and weighed 2.5 kg. Her stained teeth showed she was eating bark. There wasn’t much fruit, and she was hungry.

Mama Ris was in a cage lined with foliage, given drugs to keep her calm. Meanwhile, Fia tried to wake the baby by tickling her nostrils with a blade of grass. Mother and baby were reunited while still drugged and groggy. They were driven in the same cage to a restored peatland forest, 30 minutes away. Porters carried the cage deep into the forest. At times, the swampy water was knee deep. When the team found a good spot, mother and baby clambered out and climbed a tree. The day had been an ordeal for them. Even watching it unfold was upsetting.

Yiari does all the research it can about the best place to release an orangutan. But things do not always go to plan. A couple of weeks after the relocation of an orangutan electrocuted by a pylon, he was spotted lying by the side of a road, electrocuted again. He recovered and was rereleased in April 2023, deeper in the forest this time. He hasn’t been seen since.

Llano Sánchez has spent 20 years trying to help orangutans whose home is being destroyed by palm oil companies. She does not believe translocation is ultimately the answer. ‘We will run out of forest to move the orangutans to,’ she said.

A big challenge is to devise alternative schemes that put as much money in people’s pockets as oil palms, without further harming orangutans. Compensation against damage, for example, can backfire because it is hard to prove orangutans are to blame; macaques are just as destructive.

‘There are so many very smart ideas,’ said Thung. For instance, farmers could grow coffee instead of palm oil, a crop orangutans dislike. But it takes significant money and effort to make changes. ‘Working with communities in a meaningful, in-depth, collaborative way takes a lot of investment, a lot of time.’

But for now, all is not lost. ‘There are still many orangutans out there,’ Llano Sánchez said. ‘The main thing is to protect what we have left. Because giving up hope isn’t going to help anyone.’

Support for this article was provided by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.