Over 500 orangutans on trade in Indonesia annually

JAKARTA - More than 500 Kalimantan`s orangutans (Pongo Pygmaeus), one of the endangered species included in appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), are illegally traded in the Indonesian market a year, an activist said.

"Those traded are their babies. Hunters kill their mothers in order to catch them," Arbi Valentinus of the Orangutan Conservation Service Program (OCSP), told a journalist training here on Monday.

He said that if the orangutan hunting was not stopped, the species would extinct in the next 50 years. After all, orangutan`s habitat in Kalimantan continued to decrease by about 3 sq km a year.

Law No. 5 / 1990 on Bio-diversity and Ecosystem has actually included orangutans in the list of protected species and unlicensed domestication is a violation.

"A year before the issuance of Government Regulation (PP) No. 7/1999 on Animal Stuff, a directorate general decree on the permit to raise wild animals was issued in the runup to the issuance of the PP. Sadly, the decree has yet to be scraped though the PP is already issued," he said.

He said it was believed legal sanctions were not taken against violators of species domestication so far because the PP had not yet been lifted.

Orangutan expert from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), Jito Sugardjito, said there were only four great ape species in the world, three of which were found in Africa while the other one in Indonesia and Malaysia, namely orangutans. (*)