Wrong to paint entire palm oil industry as orangutan killers, says plantation CEO

(Dec 17): Carl Bek-Nielsen, who’s about to give a tour of the palm oil plantations he runs in Malaysia, is reflecting on a story by the New York Times earlier this year about an orangutan that was shot 74 times and found close to death on an oil palm estate in Indonesia.

“I mean, what is this?” he says. “We in the industry also take sharp objection to such crazy behaviour. It’s mad. These are things which cannot go on.”

But then comes the caveat. “Having said that, it’s also wrong that the sceptical fraternity or the NGO fraternity continues to paint the entire industry with the same brush,” he says. “There has never been a wild orangutan in the whole of peninsular Malaysia right up to Bangkok,” he says. “But yet we are painted with the same brush.”

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