PHUKET—The southern Philippines is one of the most notorious trade routes for wild animals from neighboring Indonesia and serves as a transshipment point to other countries, an animal rights activist and wildlife conservationist said Tuesday.
Dr. Willie Smits, a world authority on orangutans and founder of conservation group Orangutan Outreach, said syndicates use the seaport in General Santos City to smuggle in endangered animals from Bitung in North Sulawesi, the Indonesian island closest to the Philippines.
“The Philippines is the worst,” Smits told the Inquirer on the sidelines of the Microsoft Regional Innovative Education Forum here.
“We’ve done undercover work with smugglers in the Philippines and see all the orangutans in the amusement centers, all of them smuggled,” said Smits, who delivered the keynote address on deforestation and orangutan conservation to open the conference on Tuesday.
He said that rare animals—leopards, orangutans, sun bears, gibbons, birds of paradise—are taken by boat from the port of Bitung, through the Celebes Sea, and on to General Santos from where they are forwarded to other destinations.
Animal destinations
“From the Philippines, a lot of animals go on to Japan, to Taiwan, to America and other countries, but also quite a lot end up in amusement parks and private zoos in the Philippines, with wealthy individuals,” said Smits.
His group is working with Philippine authorities and conservation groups to shut down the Bitung-GenSan wildlife trade. He withheld details of the operation as it is underway.
“We cannot give out information because we hope to chase down those involved. We’re gonna try to bring some orangutans from the Philippines back to Indonesia now,” Smits said.
Smits said wildlife trafficking is a billion dollar a year industry in Indonesia, with syndicates operating at least three routes: Bitung to General Santos; North Sumatra to Guangzhou, China; and from Jakarta to other countries.
“From Indonesia, $1 billion worth of wildlife is smuggled every year. And we have huge losses there … an even bigger loss to nature really,” said Smits, an Indonesian citizen who was originally from the Netherlands.
There were some 56,000 orangutans on Borneo in 2002 (the latest figures) but [thousands] are known to be taken from forests and traded overseas, Smits said.
“So if you look for every baby that enters the trade, the mother was killed as well, and not all of them make it into the trade. Then you know it’s very serious,” he said.
Borneo conservation
A forester and microbiologist, Smits has been working for the conservation of Borneo’s endemic orangutan species since the 1980s. His brainchild, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, is known as the world’s largest orangutan conservation organization.
He has partnered with Microsoft for the DeforestAction project, which hopes to gather 10 million student volunteers from around the world to monitor illegal logging operations on 90 million hectares of forest cover in Borneo.
Set for launch in May, the project hopes to halt deforestation in Borneo within a year and prosecute those involved in illegal logging.