| 00.08 | Narrator | The wild orang-utans are under threat.
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| 00.15 |
| They are the victims of our greed for one particular raw material.
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| 00.21 |
| Palm oil.
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| 00.24 |
| Energy provider of the future.
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| 00.42 |
| Palm oil plantations require space – a lot of space – without consideration for the rainforest.
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| 01.08 |
| No shine on a lady’s lips without palm oil. Up to half of a lipstick consists of the fat from the tropical oil palm. Many call it the new gold.
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| 01.24 |
| Also in the supermarkets: palm oil is used in chocolate, biscuits and cleaning products.
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| 01.34 |
| This raw material is of particular importance for the food industry. Companies such as UNILEVER make margarine from palm oil.
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| 01.47 |
| This is what palm oil looks like. Palm oil is the most important part of margarine, the butter of the health-conscious. Palm oil is essential for UNILEVER in order to make a spreadable fat from sunflower oil.
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| 02.07 |
| Now palm oil is to go into car engines. In two years 3% of our fuel is supposed to come from plants. The Food and Agriculture Organisation FAO warns that in this manner food for two million people will be simply burnt. And the hunger for this new gold is rising.
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| 02.34 |
| Palm oil is now also used to produce electricity. Such as here in Uelzen in Germany.
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| 02.46 |
| In this pretty little town the people think of themselves as close to nature and environmentally minded. The local power stations claim they use 100% biofuel. The local energy provider is called mycity. It runs one of around 1,000 power stations in Germany that use palm oil as fuel.
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| 03.09 |
| Many people in Uelzen are convinced about the benefits of biofuel.
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| 03.16 |
| This man thinks that biofuel is a good thing; he has switched.
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| 03.20 |
| He thinks that it’s better for the environment. It would be better still if it were cheaper.
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| 03.29 |
| Indonesia. The archipelago is the biggest producer of palm oil in the world.
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| 03.39 |
| There is still some pristine rainforest.
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| 03.48 |
| Our closest relative, the orang-utan, still lives here.
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| 04.09 |
| But on Borneo alone a thousand trees are felled every day.
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| 04.22 |
| Other areas, such as on Sumatra, have already been logged.
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| 04.38 |
| The orang-utan is becoming extinct.
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| 04.43 |
| Fire follows the chainsaw. This is what land preparation for palm oil looks like.
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| 04.53 |
| Because of slash and burn Indonesia is the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide. More than 90% of the orang-utan forests have been destroyed.
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| 05.07 |
| A young orang-utan is looking for his mother. We are on a palm-oil plantation in Indonesia. It belongs to a company from neighbouring Malaysia, called IOI. The Borneo Orang-Utan Survival Foundation, BOS for short, can give this animal a chance for survival.
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| 05.41 |
| The animals are distressed and can only be caught with a tranquillizer gun.
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| 05.59 |
| For the workers on the plantation the apes are vermin because they eat the young oil palms.
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| 06.08 |
| It looks brutal but is the only chance of survival for this orang-utan.
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| 06.36 |
| This owner is glad to be rid of the orang-utan. The new plantations are made for the European greed for fuel.
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| 06.48 |
| Back in northern Germany we meet Jörg Dürre. He sells palm oil. His supplier is the Malaysian company IOI. The company promotes the use of palm oil, for which allegedly no rainforest is destroyed. And is therefore sustainable. Dürre and his colleague Konrad Bohnekamp persuaded the power station in Uelzen to use palm oil.
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| 07.18 | Jörg Dürre, palm oil dealer | Well I guess I am responsible too, when Mr Bohnekamp came by and we already had a few interested parties, we started actively promoting palm oil. 07.30
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| 07.34 | Narrator | Here in Uelzen the power stations produce electricity and heat. 5,000 tons of palm oil are used as fuel every year, generating power for 3,000 households and heat for the dairy. Marketing slogan: 100% biofuel. We want to know from mycity where the palm oil comes from. An attempt at an interview.
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| 08.03 | ATMO |
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| 08.10 | Narrator | Polite enough, but no information. Enquire in writing, he says.
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| 08.14 |
| mycity answer our written enquiry by referring us to the internet. There it says their palm oil comes from Malaysia. Not even the dealer believes this.
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| 08.29 | Jörg Dürre, palm oil dealer | In the end it is impossible to say. It’s like going to a supermarket and buying a bottle of rapeseed oil. You might find out which press in Germany produced it but to find out which field it grew on, I simply don’t have the resources to find out. 08.46
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| 08.48 | Narrator | Back in Indonesia. Here the supplier IOI is making new plantations. There is no more space in Malaysia. IOI is involved with plantations in Indonesia using subcontractors. Here alone 20 million hectares are to be made available, this is equivalent to the size of Great Britain. How is this sustainable?
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| 09.17 |
| And what about the orang-utans that have to be rehabilitated in captivity?
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| 09.31 |
| Here at BOS it is mainly the young animals that receive help from humans. They reach maturity aged seven.
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| 09.46 |
| Willie Smits, forester, is protector of the orang-utans.
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| 09.54 |
| Over 1,000 baby apes live in the BOS nursery.
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| 10.00 |
| The biggest problem: many orang-utans are ill when they arrive at BOS, and are suffering from hepatitis and diarrhoea. The idea is to release the healthy ones back into the wild.
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| 10.16 | Willie Smits, BOS | Well Dodo is healthy. He is eating, and no longer traumatised. He will definitely manage. But in which forest? The invading oil plantations are getting closer to the areas where we used to release them, closer to the last refuges of orang-utans. 10.35
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| 10.40 | Narrator | Every year 5,000 orang-utans die. BOS cannot save them all. They asphyxiate or starve on the burnt areas.
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| 10.52 |
| Humans are displaced along with the animals.
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| 11.01 |
| This is Din Perulak, once proud chief of the Orang Rimba tribe of Sumatra. His face is drawn with misery, his distress obvious.
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| 11.21 | Din Perulak, Chief | Stop logging the rainforest! Not a single tree should fall again. We have been here for an hour and it is unbearably hot. Our bodies are suffering. It is as if our mother is dying. We are deeply wounded because the forests are being logged. My home is forever destroyed. 11.44
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| 11.57 | Narrator | Logging camps in Indonesia. To date around 60 million hectares of rainforest have been destroyed. This is the area of France.
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| 12.23 |
| Since the 1990s credits and guarantees have been made by Germany too. The lenders thought about the consequences for the rainforest as little as they thought about climate change. Once, there were intact stores of carbon dioxide here, the gas mainly responsible for climate change.
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| 12.49 |
| The SINARMAS corporation alone built three factories to produce paper.
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| 12.58 |
| This subsidiary company produces 1 million tons of paper annually, which goes to European markets.
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| 13.14 |
| Together with the Malaysian IOI company they are now investing in the new gold: palm oil.
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| 13.25 |
| The result: even less rain forest. Simply the drying out of the formerly damp peat soil releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Monoculture instead of biodiversity.
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| 13.45 |
| As this plant does not tolerate competition and requires very dry soils.
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| 13.54 |
| Palm oil is good business, the price per ton has trebled – within a year.
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| 14.12 |
| Some of the produce comes to Europe via Malaysia. For example from this palm-oil press, run by IOI in Indonesia.
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| 14.24 |
| Back in Uelzen. The local energy supplier mycity is still silent, referring us only to the internet. The palm oil comes from Malaysia after all. We would like to know if it comes from Indonesia via Malaysia. However interviews are refused. Maybe because biofuel pays. There is money. A subsidy for the use of renewable energies. A fixed-price guarantee.
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| 14.59 |
| And what about the Green Party, the environmentalists that encouraged the energy suppliers to use palm oil? We confront Wolfgang Sest with our research.
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| 15.08 | Inge Altmaier, (OFF) | These images are from 28 November 2007 and show an IOI plantation that was opened in central Kalimantan, 8 hours from Palankarala. This footage is from 5 December 2007. 300,000 hectares of new palm oil plantations are being prepared for IOI, the supplier of mycity.
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| 15.38 | Wolfram Sest, Green Party | I have been trying since last year to get the power stations to use rapeseed oil instead of palm oil. They will do so at the latest when the renewable energy subsidies run out. The power stations decide these things from a commercial standpoint. It is the decision-makers who need to encourage them. 16.05
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| 16.08 | Narrator | There is a law relating to all this: the Renewable Energy Law.
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| 16.16 |
| He wants to be an eco-friendly businessman: Hendrik Kempfert from Stade near Hamburg. He is fuelling his own little power station from plant oil. His aim: using raw materials to produce energy that are not finite like oil, but can be harvested again and again. Like rapeseed oil.
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| 16.37 |
| Hendrik Kempfert wanted to take part in a good thing.
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| 16.43 |
| The heat that is produced by his power station is used by a brickyard for drying. But he can no longer afford rapeseed oil. Mr Kempfert is in the palm-oil trap, as this raw material is cheaper. Too much rape ends up in biodiesel. The surplus electricity that he produces is fed into the national grid at fixed rates, thanks to the renewable energy subsidy. That he has to use palm oil instead of rapeseed oil torments him.
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| 17.17 | Hendrik Kempfert | I would like to avoid the use of palm oil. It was the only affordable fuel at the beginning of this year. I wanted to continue using local rapeseed oil but it was not possible. The price for soya oil also rose a lot. The renewable energy law gave me the choice of a renewable fuel plant. There were no restrictions. I started using palm oil then because it was affordable, I didn’t know about the background then. 17.40
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| 17.47 |
| A visiting group from the German government arrives. December last year. Also on board for the rainforest trip to Indonesia is the architect of the renewable energy law, the Joan of Arc of the Green Party, Bärbel Höhn.
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| 18.07 |
| Most of the group are in Indonesia for the first time Amongst them is the Social Democrat environmental expert Marco Bülow and Bavarian forester representing the conservative CSU party, Josef Goeppel.
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| 18.22 |
| Well protected against the mosquitoes.
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| 18.40 |
| Snapshots with apes.
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| 18.53 |
| Willie Smits explains the rainforest to the delegates.
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| 18.57 |
| His explanations are hands on and detailed.
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| 19.12 |
| Rainforest to admire and touch.
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| 19.28 |
| A view of the three square kilometre reserve.
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| 19.36 |
| A little adventure included.
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| 19.40 |
| The few intact rainforests of Indonesia can only be reached after boat journeys of a few days.
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| 19.50 |
| New revelations for Josef Göppel.
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| 20.02 |
| He learns where the carbon in the rain forest precisely is: in the cells of the vegetation. Not in the soil. Destroy the vegetation, and you’ve destroyed the carbon sink.
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| 20.19 |
| Many are in the rainforest for the first time.
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| 20.22 | Josef Göppel CSU | The sense of space is impressive. It is a green filter 60 metres high, and this forest stores around 400 tons of carbon per hectare. One can see how important the rainforests are for the Earth’s climate. It is best to leave the remaining rainforests standing. It is a very effective way of sequestering carbon. 20.54
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| 20.56 | Narrator | Back to the orang-utan reserve. The next item on the programme: inspection of a large palm oil plantation. Public subsidies for this raw material are not hot on the political agenda. But large plantations are not shown to us, journalists are not welcome here. Without press accompaniment the group goes by bus to a different location. The politicians will do our filming for us.
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| 21.35 |
| Oil palms close-up. But hungry politicians have a brief attention span: the owners of plantations know this, and hospitality can win hearts and minds. Because the owners of the plantations are fighting for a seal of approval. What they are doing makes ecological sense, after all, they say. This plantation however has reached the end of its life. No palm lasts longer than 15 years. What is presented here wasn’t worth coming to see.
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| 22.08 |
| Despite the disappointing visit the certification, the approval, is being discussed.
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| 22.17 |
| Travel broadens the mind. After three days of wilderness in Indonesia Bärbel Höhn changes her mind in a TV interview. An ecological stamp of approval is no longer an option.
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| 22.33 | Bärbel Höhn | The situation in Indonesia is such that we should not import palm oil to Europe or Germany. Even if it is certified – because the government is currently not capable of monitoring whether the certification is based on genuine data. There is always corruption, which leads to the devastating situations that exist there, and to the burning of rainforests. 22.58
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| 23.00 | Narrator | Back in Germany. For decades palm oil was mainly found in food products. A different war is being fought here. A price war. Since rapeseed and palm oil are being used for electricity and fuel food prices are rising.
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| 23.17 | Woman from UNILEVER | If the farmers plant more energy crops and sell these to the energy industry then the food industry will get left behind. Either because they can no longer afford the costs or because the raw material is no longer available. 23.31
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| 23.33 | Narrator | Back in Uelzen. There, like in many other communities in Germany, energy is made from palm oil. We still are not granted an interview.
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| 23.47 |
| And our parliamentarians?
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| 23.52 |
| Back from the jungle camp, they are beating a hasty retreat. Palm oil is no longer worthy of subsidy.
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| 24.02 | Marco Buelow, SPD | We started the discussion about the criteria after we had discussed the subsidy and that was our mistake. We have to learn from this and see to it that money goes into the upkeep of the rainforests without any plantations. 24.18
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| 24.20 | Narrator | The penny may have dropped for the German politicians, but too late for Din Perulak. His forest has been logged. His tribe has been shrinking. Instead of orang-utans and tigers as neighbours there are now feral cats. Instead of living in harmony with nature he and his people have to beg from others who aren’t much better off than themselves.
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| 25.01 |
| For Din and his Orang Rimbas there is not even a reserve. In a way, his displacement was funded by German subsidies. Despair hangs over the plantation.
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| 25.17 | Din Perulak, Chief | You have to trust us and work with us. Nobody will be harmed or disappointed, you will see. If you first ask us, the people of the forest, where to invest and how to treat the rainforest then we all have a chance for the future. 25.32
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| 25.35 | Narrator | The foundations of the destruction of the Indonesian rainforest were laid in part by German governments.
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