Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

A Note on the Author

Philip Lymbery is chief executive of leading international farm animal welfare organisation, Compassion in World Farming (Compassion), and Visiting Professor at the University of Winchester.

His book, Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat, was chosen as one of The Times Writers’ Books of the Year in 2014, and was cited by the Mail on Sunday as a compelling ‘game-changer’.

He played leading roles in many major animal welfare reforms, including Europe-wide bans on veal crates for calves and barren battery cages for laying hens.

Described as one of the food industry’s most influential people, he has spearheaded Compassion’s engagement work with over 800 food companies worldwide, leading to real improvements in the lives of over a billion farm animals every year.

To my parents, Reverend Peter and Evelyn Lymbery, with heartfelt gratitude

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Farmageddon (with Isabel Oakeshott)

Farmageddon in Pictures

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

1 Elephant

2 Barn owl

3 Bison

4 Shrimp

5 Red junglefowl

6 White stork

7 Water vole

8 Peregrine

9 Bumblebee

10 Scapegoats

11 Jaguar

12 Penguin

13 Marine iguana

14 Homo sapiens

15 Living landscapes

16 Nightingale

Notes

Index

Also Available by Philip Lymbery

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I owe a huge debt of thanks to Isabel Oakeshott for editing the manuscript and for being my literary inspiration. I have learned so much from you and am hugely grateful for how you helped shape my writing style, as well as your pin-sharp eye for improving the text.

I am indebted to Jacky Turner for the many hours of painstaking research that form the backbone of this book. I couldn’t have done it without you and offer my sincere gratitude.

Thank you to Tina Clark, my long-suffering assistant, for all the hard work that went into making the field trips come together and for endlessly reading over my words, making right those important details.

To Carol McKenna for huge support throughout what turned into a mammoth project.

To Katie Milward, my cameraperson on the various adventures to Brazil, Sumatra and the USA, and to everyone who came out on the road with me: Leah Garcés, Federica di Leonardo, Dendy Montgomery, Krzysztof Mularczyk, Annamaria Pisapia and Louise van der Merwe.

To Andrew Wasley and Luke Starr at Ecostorm for putting together field trips, arranging interviews and additional research, as well as Jim Wickens, whose early ideas gave me the confidence to make this book happen.

To my commissioning editors at Bloomsbury: Michael Fishwick, Nick Humphrey and Bill Swainson, to my copy editor, Steve Cox, and to my literary agent, Robin Jones, for support and encouragement.

Huge appreciation to all the trustees of Compassion in World Farming for their sponsorship and support for the book, and for having the vision to see so clearly the connections between factory farming and damage to wildlife and human society too: Teddy Bourne, Jeremy Hayward, Valerie James, Mahi Klosterhalfen, Rosemary Marshall, Sarah Petrini, Reverend Professor Michael Reiss, Michel Vandenbosch and Sir David Madden. To Sir David, particular thanks for being my literary mentor and sounding board.

Grateful thanks to all who commented on drafts and provided such helpful feedback – Carolina Galvani, Graham Harvey, John Meadley, René Olivieri, David Ramsden (Barn Owl Trust), Graham Roberts (Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust), Richard Brooks, Joyce D’Silva, Tracey Jones, Daphne Rieder, Peter Stevenson and Angela Wright.

To Joanna Blythman, Charlie Clutterbuck, Tim Lang, Debbie Tann at the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust and Duncan Williamson at WWF UK for conversations that shaped ideas.

Finally, huge thanks to my wonderful wife, Helen, for believing in me and for unstinting support – this book truly would not have been possible without it.

Preface

September in the South Pacific and a life-or-death competition is about to get under way. Nervous youths wait for the cue to throw themselves headlong into the ocean off Easter Island. In the next few moments, they will risk drowning, being eaten by sharks or falling to their deaths in a ritual that every year claims young lives.¹ Before them are small, near-inaccessible islets teeming with seabirds returning to nest. Somewhere on those rocky outcrops, more than a mile across treacherous seas, lies the prize.

A crowd gathers on the headland, and in a flash the young men are off, slipping down a hazardous cliff-face before plunging into foaming water in the ultimate struggle for supremacy. Clutching simple rafts made from reeds, they battle through the surf until, gasping for breath, they reach the islets. They clamber up slippery rocks, distant cheers from the crowd drowned out by screeching seabirds.²

It may take days to find what they are looking for, the first sooty tern egg of the year, and the search is only half the battle: the potential winner is not the young man who first captures an egg, but the one who is first to return it safely to shore.

A sudden cry goes up: a potential victor has emerged. Tucking the egg into his headband, the triumphant youth slips back into the sea, swimming carefully this time to avoid dislodging his precious cargo. Back at last on terra firma, he faces the final stretch of his gruelling ordeal – a perilous climb up a thousand-foot cliff. After a desperate ascent, clinging to anything that comes to hand, he races up the slope to the grassy plateau where his sponsor awaits. He has made it.³

On this isolated island around 1760, winning the egg race would bring great kudos to the youth and his sponsoring chief. The egg was regarded by Easter Island’s inhabitants as a powerful symbol of the renewal of fertility when fresh food became available once more.⁴

For the coming months, the winning chief would be treated like a deity, his every need tended by a servant. Following ancient tradition, he would stop cutting his hair or nails, which grew to an extraordinary length. He became the representative on Earth of Makemake, the creator god of fertility.⁵ When he died, he would be buried on a platform and a stone figure put up in his memory to stand alongside those of his predecessors.⁶

These striking stone statues with their elongated facial features have since become recognised throughout the world as the symbol of the civilisation that was Easter Island’s. One of the remotest places on Earth, its rise and fall is one of the most fascinating stories in human history, and a vivid illustration of what happens when delicate ecosystems are upset by deforestation and rapacious farming.

The monuments took great strength and skill to create, the tallest standing as high as 30 ft and weighing 82 tons.⁷ Made from volcanic rock, they were probably heaved on rollers or dragged from the quarries by large teams of people. That the ancient islanders had the energy, ability and resources to create something so impressive suggests that they were relatively sophisticated people, and yet they exploited their natural environment so recklessly that after a while it could no longer support them and led to decline. Their fate gives an ominous glimpse of what might happen to us.

The island lies some 2,500 miles off the coast of Chile, and its nearest neighbour, Pitcairn, is some 1,300 miles away. The first settlers were probably Polynesian navigators who made the voyage by around ad 1200 in nothing more capacious than an ocean-going canoe. For these adventurers, it must have been the ultimate journey of discovery: a one-way trip with no way of knowing what lay ahead.⁸

Many centuries before satellite navigation systems, they would have sailed for weeks before zeroing in on this isolated rocky triangle measuring 14 miles long by 7 miles wide.⁹ They were probably guided ashore by the island’s teeming seabird colonies. Long before seeing land, they would have noticed a gradual increase in seabird numbers at sea, and so homed in on a previously undiscovered island.¹⁰

These early settlers were part of an extraordinary culture that flourished for centuries before going bust. They ate plenty of fish, which they caught using canoes made from hollowed-out tree trunks, and this seems to have worked well. As the population grew, however, so they felled the forests that once covered the island to make way for fields. They grew crops to boost their diet, but when the last of the trees disappeared, so too did their means of fishing.¹¹ They were left marooned and impoverished.

Nonetheless the population continued to grow, until it outstripped the land’s capacity to provide enough food. War broke out between rival clans. By 1774, when Captain Cook arrived, the islanders were poverty-stricken, at each other’s throats, and down to a fraction of their peak number. They may well have asked if the gods had betrayed them or whether they had betrayed themselves.¹²

Other ancient civilisations, among them the Maya of Central America and the Greenland Norse, have undergone a similar rise and fall. Often their troubles were triggered by the heedless destruction of resources on which their societies depended.¹³ Now we may face something similar. As global population pressure stretches the world’s natural resources, the parallels are unnerving.

Life on Earth has thrived for billions of years. Wonderfully diverse civilisations have evolved, powered by an abundance of natural riches. The world is now home to more than 7 billion people and a multitude of different plants and animals, all with their part to play in the complex web of life.

In the blink of an evolutionary eye, one particular species has gone from newcomer to the dominant force shaping the planet: us. We stand at an almighty crossroads, during a unique period of history. Some scientists consider our era so significant (for a host of wrong reasons) that they believe it merits a special geological classification. They have dubbed this period the ‘Anthropocene’, to denote a new age in which we have inflicted wholesale and irreversible changes to the planet. But it is not too late to prevent more destruction.

If we simply carry on as before, scientists warn of a mass extinction, perhaps the biggest since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Species are already disappearing at a rate 1,000 times higher than previously expected.

While certain creatures are vanishing for ever, others that might appear more robust are also dwindling fast. In the last forty years, the total number of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish has halved.¹⁴ That’s a terrifying statistic.

And the primary reason for all this destruction? Global demand for food. About two-thirds of the overall loss of wildlife is driven by food production.¹⁵

Planet-wide, the way we feed ourselves has become a dominant activity, affecting wildlife and the natural ecosystems that our existence depends on. Nearly half the world’s usable land surface¹⁶ and most human water use is devoted to agriculture.

Industrial agriculture – factory farming – is the most damaging.

Some 70 billion farm animals are reared for food every year, two-thirds of them on factory farms where they chomp their way through food that could otherwise feed billions of hungry people. Indeed, the biggest single area of food waste today comes not from what we discard in the dustbin but from feeding human-edible crops to industrially reared animals. Together they emit more greenhouse gases than all of the world’s planes, trains and cars combined. Yet the global livestock population is expected to near enough double by 2050, further stepping up the pressure on a natural world in steep decline.

As agriculture expands at the expense of dwindling forests, wildlife gets squeezed out of the picture. This happens even more so when farming and nature part company.

Over the last half-century, this new and damaging form of agriculture has developed that involves applying industrial methods and concepts to the countryside. Food production has become just another industry, churning out raw materials in a way that is commonly presented as efficient but is in fact grossly wasteful.

Consciously or not, industrial farming has changed the way we think about food production. The system has switched from focusing on feeding people to producing more, regardless of whether consumed or not. More than half of all the world’s food now either rots, is dumped in landfill, or feeds imprisoned animals.

The history of farming’s industrial revolution spans much of the last century.

First came the capacity to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia in the early 1900s, for explosives and artificial fertiliser. Then came the wartime development of nerve gases, put to use in agriculture as pesticide after the Second World War. Former US munitions factories were redeployed to turn ammonia into fertiliser instead of bombs.

Corn production went into overdrive due to US support for hard-pressed farmers, starting with the Great Depression in the 1930s. Subsidised cereals became so cheap and plentiful that they were seen as little more than animal feed. Cowboys roaming the Great Plains started to become a thing of the past, replaced by corn-fed cattle in ‘feedlots’ – a word we will have to come back to. Pastures were put to the plough for more animal feed.

Inevitably, US-style industrial farming soon made its way to Europe, perhaps with the aid of Marshall Plan money, and began to supplant traditional methods. Aimed at rebuilding war-torn Europe, the massive US aid package helped Europeans first to buy food from the US, and then to buy the means for growing food. As well as removing trade barriers and modernising industries, it provided the perfect conduit for the transatlantic spread of intensive farming techniques. Many of the countries that received most support became Europe’s most intensive farmers, including the UK, Netherlands, France, Italy and Germany. Meat became cheap, but at what cost?

Whole landscapes were swept away by monocultures – carpets of uniform crops, sometimes stretching as far as the eye could see. Birds, bees and butterflies, along with the insects and plants that they feed on, went into decline. Chemical fertilisers and pesticide sprays replaced time-honoured natural ways of keeping soil fertile and problem bugs of all sorts at bay. Laying hens ended up in battery cages, pigs in narrow crates or barren, crowded pens, while chickens were selectively bred and reared to grow so fast that their legs could barely support their outsize bodies.

A competition started for food between people and animals. Where once land served for grazing and foraging – converting things people can’t eat, like grass, into meat, milk and eggs – now it was turned over to crop production to feed incarcerated animals.

The food system became hijacked by the animal-feed industry. Growing animal feed became a massive operation in its own right. Today, one-third or more of the entire global cereal harvest, and nearly all of the world’s soya, is devoted to feeding industrially reared animals – food enough for more than 4 billion extra people.

Yet today we still hear talk of a looming global food crisis and the need to almost double food production by mid-century. The fact that there’s already enough food for everybody – and plenty more – is routinely ignored.

Rather than a shortage of food, it’s what we do with it that now counts. And not just in developing countries. Even in a rich country like Britain, there are signs that the old way of thinking is running out of steam. Food has never been so cheap, yet the use of food banks – emergency food parcels – is rising. So too is the paradoxical scourge of malnourished obesity, a condition suffered when people eat too much of the wrong thing. Access to sufficient food of sufficient quality is the real issue, not the amount of dubious-quality food we can produce. Yet still policymakers pursue the expansion of industrial farming, seemingly at any cost.

The planet is now at a dangerous tipping point where approaching half the world’s meat now comes from industrial rather than mixed farms.¹⁷

For the last twenty-five years, I have seen the effects of industrial farming first-hand. It was a chance meeting with a former dairy farmer that changed my life.

Peter Roberts was founder of the organisation I now run: Compassion in World Farming, the world’s leading farm animal welfare charity.

Before then, he and his wife Anna milked cows and kept chickens on his mixed farm in Hampshire. During the 1960s he watched the rise of factory farming and didn’t like what he saw. Factory farms started springing up where hens, pigs and veal calves spent their whole lives in cages or narrow crates. He became disturbed by what he saw as the pervading notion that animals were biological machines to be churned out as quickly as possible, just another product on an assembly line.

Peter became a leading voice calling for animals to be treated with compassion and respect. He believed farm animals should at least be given lives worth living before they died.

In 1990 I became so moved by what he was doing that I upped sticks from my life as a packaging designer in Bedfordshire to work with him in a small office in Petersfield, Hampshire. Before long I was travelling around the country, then abroad, meeting politicians, journalists, business people and celebrities about the way we rear animals for food. I also started to see industrial farming for myself.

During my first weeks, I suggested that Peter should write a book. Looking back, he probably thought I was trying to butter him up. He replied with nothing more than a wry smile. Twenty-five years later, the book was finally written – by me. I called it Farmageddon: The true cost of cheap meat, and wrote it with the then Sunday Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott. During the course of our research we travelled to remote parts of China, USA, Mexico, Argentina and Peru, to examine the worst – and best – ways of producing dairy products and meat.

I came home armed with fresh insights. I started to see what was happening to farmland birds, bees and butterflies, as well as to all sorts of creatures you don’t associate with farming at all: penguins, polar bears, elephants, jaguars, orang-utans, rhinos. Their fate is intimately connected to industrial agriculture.

These insights are the ingredients for Dead Zone.

I have always been passionate about wildlife. I was a schoolboy conservationist and ended up a professional tour leader for a while. I would take people around the world seeing amazing creatures in places like the USA, Morocco, the Seychelles, the Pyrenees, the Gibraltar Strait, Turkey and Costa Rica.

I now live in a country village in the South Downs of England among farming neighbours. I spend a lot of time walking the fields and forests with my wife Helen and rescue dog Duke. Ours is a village surrounded by mixed farms and islands of rising chalk. A land of hedges and hilltops, pasture and the odd pond.

It is here that I started my journey for this second book. My travels took me crossing continents – Europe, the Americas, Asia and beyond – on a journey more urgent than the last. I wanted to find solutions to the ever-pressing problems closing in on the countryside. I searched for ways not just to reconcile traditionally competing demands of wildlife and food production, but to bring them together. For this is where I believe the future lies. Food and nature can and should go together. And when they do, food tastes better.

From my farming neighbours to lost tribes, from the ashes of forests to pioneering projects to put things back, I discovered stories that can help empower all of us to make a difference three times a day through our food choices. We are perhaps the last generation that can change things without having to look back on a world where the wild things were …

Ultimately, Dead Zone asks the question: What kind of legacy do we want to leave for our children?

While visiting Easter Island, the naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough said: ‘The future of life on Earth depends on our ability to take action. Many individuals are doing what they can.’ Standing amongst the ancient statues, he concluded: ‘Real success can only come if there is a change in our societies, in our economics, and in our politics.’¹⁸

This book explores what needs to change and why it matters to us all.

1

Elephant

WHAT’S THE BEEF WITH PALM?

‘We are really scared for our children,’ a villager told me. ‘What if they are playing while we’re away? Who will help them?’ There had been a raid last night and the community was out in force. Police were already on site. Feelings were running high.

We were in northern Sumatra, in a place called Bangkeh. I shook hands with some locals, who seemed pleased to see us. The presence of a foreign film crew was a chance to tell their story, and they were eager for the outside world to know what they were going through.

A man in ceremonial dress stood stern-faced while excited children skittered around. Some of the adults simply looked shell-shocked.

At the crime scene, there was much finger-pointing and chatter about the assailant’s entry and exit. Evidence of last night’s assault lay broken and splintered on the floor. On the edge of the forest, the side of a simple wooden house had been ripped off. The room, festooned with laundry, was now open to the elements. There was something rather pitiful about the bedraggled clothes. Drying them was now the least of the inhabitants’ problems. After a smash-and-grab raid, the assailant had fled back into the forest, leaving frightened villagers fearing his return.

Perhaps attracted by the smell of cooking, he had come in search of rice, renowned for its quality in the region. Though he left in a hurry, he had taken some persuading to go. Police had been forced to send him packing with gunfire. But that wasn’t the end of the matter.

‘He’ll be back every three months,’ sighed the village leader, Sarifuddw Aji.

So who was the shadowy figure with a taste for good rice? The clue lies in Sumatra’s rich forests, home to an extraordinary array of exotic animals, among them tigers, rhinoceros, orang-utans and sunbears. The forests are also home to the critically endangered Sumatran elephant – and it was one of their number who was responsible for the village raid.

It was no isolated incident. Twenty or so elephants are thought to live in the area. With their forest home shrinking fast, they visit more often now, and are getting harder to scare off. ‘This is the last piece of unspoiled jungle in the country,’ Aji told me. ‘We never went into the jungle but because it’s a good place, the elephants are regrouping here.’

The community is frightened and frustrated. Locals don’t want to harm the elephants, but if the government doesn’t act, they feel they may have no choice. ‘We love the animals,’ Aji told me. ‘The last thing we want to do is hurt them. But if the government doesn’t help, we’ll have to take to jungle rule.’

So how did it come to this, and what is the link between the elephants’ plight and the demand for cheap meat in richer countries?

IN A MESS WITH THE MAHOUTS

First light at the jungle camp of a Sumatran elephant patrol. I had come to see how the Sumatrans are using a small company of elephants that have been tamed and trained to help prevent their wild counterparts coming into conflict with people.

I peered out of my shack, a simple wooden shed where I’d spent a rough night, to catch a glimpse of the darkened forest. The trees made silhouettes against the dawn sky; the sound of wildlife was everywhere.

I was feeling dishevelled from long days on the road and hot restless nights. The airline had managed to lose my luggage, I had little more than the clothes I was wearing, and these were now blood-stained from leech bites. Judging by my stubbly chin, I also badly needed a shave. I didn’t have a mirror, but I guessed that it was not a good look.

All the same, it was a thrill to be in Sumatra, the western teardrop island of Indonesia. The country has one of the most biologically and culturally rich landscapes in the world. Its rainforests contain a tenth of the world’s known plants, 12 per cent of its mammals and 17 per cent of its birds¹ – an irresistible draw for a wildlife enthusiast like me.

Bleary-eyed, I stumbled out, to a chorus of birdsong. Thrilled by the sound, I scoured the trees for signs of warblers and the like – might I tick some new species off my bird-watching list? – but for all their clamour, they were too well camouflaged: I couldn’t see a single bird. I was reminded of just how frustrating it can be trying to see wildlife in a rainforest. You can hear things everywhere, but seeing them is another matter.

Keen for a wash, I clambered down to a nearby river where I’d been told tigers come to drink. I looked around nervously, but couldn’t see anything lurking. Crouching in a quiet shallow of the river, I was washing away the rough night when a flicker of movement caught my eye: rocks downriver burst into life in a flurry of exquisite little birds. They looked like wagtails. Resplendent with spots of black and white, I identified them as lesser forktails, a species I’d never seen before. I was delighted!

The roar of the river drowned out their sound, and pretty much everything else besides. Had a tiger been crouching in the forest, I would never have heard.

By the time I returned to camp, the elephant drivers, known as mahouts, had made breakfast. We gobbled down pancakes and coffee, to a soundtrack of gibbons. I couldn’t see them (they were hidden by the dense foliage) but I could hear them calling and crashing about. They made a heck of a racket.

After we’d eaten, it was time to set off with the elephant patrol. In days gone by, when the operation was well funded, the elephants would have been kept closer to the mahouts in the forest next to the camp. Now there’s no money to buy them food, so they are kept miles away in the thick of the jungle, where their meals are free.

Getting there meant a 3-mile hike through thick swampy vegetation. As we got ready to head off, the mahouts appeared, wearing rubber boots. That was when I discovered that my walking shoes, little better than trainers, weren’t going to be much use. Within a few minutes, I was in a real mess. It amused the mahouts, but without the luxury of a change of clothes, I felt my heart sink a little more with every squelchy step.

Every now and then, I’d discover another leech stuck to an arm or a leg, or even worse, under my clothes – wriggly sluglike things that drew more blood than you’d believe. I looked as if I’d been to war.

We heard the first elephant before we saw her: a swoosh, swoosh, swooshing sound as she swatted at flies with a branch. She was chained. Instinctively I winced: there was something horribly discordant about seeing such a magnificent creature tethered in this wonderful wild place. The mahouts let her go, and she dutifully reeled in her own chain, leaving it in a neat pile.

There were four elephants, the gentlest of giants, with huge brown eyes and bristly eyelashes. On command, each elephant in turn would crouch down and allow their mahout to climb on their backs just behind floppy ears. Then, with a crack of undergrowth, they were off. It was an awe-inspiring sight, this line of one of the biggest living land creatures on Earth, trunks swishing, occasionally reaching for the animal in front. I was amazed at how quickly they blended into the forest. Around them flew butterflies as big as bats. I followed as best I could on foot.

They watched their step, carrying their riders with the care of a mother and child. It was touching to see – but these are no teddy bears. As if to remind me of the wild within, a big male beside me let out the most ear-splitting trumpet blast, making the ground around me shake.

Sumatran elephants are one of three subspecies of Asian elephant – the others are the Indian and Sri Lankan – smaller than their African cousins, with more compact ears that they keep flapping to cool themselves. Standing up to 9 feet tall and weighing 5 tons, they feed on a variety of plants, and drop seeds wherever they go, contributing to a healthy forest ecosystem.²

All the Sumatran elephants on the patrol are former raiders themselves, captured and trained to help keep their wild brethren where they belong in the forest. The idea is that they police the border between villages, cultivated land and jungle. Where they come across wild herds straying too close to the edge, they push the animals back into uncontested territory using fireworks and the like.

The mahouts treated the animals gently, and with respect.

Yet I had been dismayed by what I’d heard about the way elephants are trained for the tourist trade; how, whether born in captivity or captured from the wild, their mind, body and spirit are broken to tame them.³

As one environmental activist told me: ‘It ain’t pretty.’ Although I didn’t know how these elephants had been trained, and hoped it was gentle, I felt uncomfortable about taking up an invitation from the mahouts to ride, even though clambering through the undergrowth was filthy and uncomfortable.

With every passing day, the patrols are more necessary. Pressure is growing on what’s left of Sumatra’s rich jungle heritage, and the conflict between elephants and people is escalating.

Northern Sumatra, in particular the province of Aceh and a vast area of tropical rainforest known as the ‘Leuser ecosystem’, is one of the most important remaining wilderness areas in Southeast Asia. Covering over 2.6 million hectares, the Leuser ecosystem, which stretches from the coast of the Indian Ocean to the Malacca Strait, encompasses two huge mountain ranges, two volcanoes and nine major river systems. It is the last place on Earth where it is possible to see Sumatran elephants, tigers, rhinoceros and orang-utans in one area.⁴ Parts are still relatively untouched – primarily because they are very inaccessible – but swathes of the richest areas, where the remaining wild elephants live, are under serious threat.

The rate of deforestation in Sumatra is staggering. Since the turn of the century, 1.2 million hectares of lowland forest cover and 1.5 million hectares of wetland forest have been lost.⁵ Half a century ago, more than four-fifths of Indonesia was covered with tropical forests. Now with one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, less than half of the country’s original forests remain.⁶

For Sumatra’s elephants, orang-utans and tigers, this is bad news: their homeland is literally disappearing under their feet. More than a third of the jungle habitat of the critically endangered Sumatran elephant has gone within just a single elephant generation. As a result, over the last twenty-five years, entire populations of elephants have disappeared.⁷

Though they face their own threats, African elephants are doing fine by comparison. Half a million of these magnificent beasts still exist in the wild, whereas official estimates suggest the critically endangered Sumatran elephant is down to its last 2,500.⁸

It is by far the most endangered elephant in the world, but its plight is little known. In Africa, ivory hunters are the big enemy. In Sumatra, poaching is not unknown, but the real enemy is something far less sinister-sounding: palm plantations.

Dominated by multinational networks based in Asia, Europe and North America, the global palm trade is worth some $42 billion a year.⁹ On the face of it, it’s an innocuous-sounding business. From the air, the plantations look like giant green carpets. Hard to imagine, then, that these luscious-looking canopies, reminiscent of holiday pictures, could be a source of so much harm.

Sadly, the truth is that they are no better than any other monoculture: plantations made up of mile upon mile of a single species of tree, supported by the usual barrage of herbicides and pesticides, creating a barren landscape. A single hectare of Sumatran rainforest (an area equivalent to roughly two football pitches) can hold more species of tree than there are native tree species in the whole of the UK.¹⁰ By contrast, palm plantations are just that – palm, and more palm. Once the forest is gone, it’s gone.

Over the last twenty years, deforestation has been driven chiefly by the expansion of palm-oil plantations.¹¹ It’s in demand from the food industry as a cooking oil and in products such as margarine and ice cream. With a long shelf life, it is extraordinarily versatile. According to WWF, it can be found in about half of all packaged products sold in supermarkets.¹² Production has more than doubled since the year 2000, with most of the global supply coming from Indonesia and Malaysia. Since the end of the 1990s, the area under palm monocultures in Indonesia has increased up to fourfold.¹³

None of this is any secret. Indeed, in 2004, an industry group called the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) was formed to work with the palm-oil industry to address concerns about the devastating environmental impact of felling trees to make way for the plantations.¹⁴

What is less well known is that palm products are being widely used to feed factory-farmed animals. The oil is derived from the reddish pulp of the fruit, but there’s more to palm than the oil. Dig deeper into the fruit and you come across the edible seed or kernel. The industry renders these nuts down into kernel oil and palm-kernel meal or ‘cake’. This palm-kernel meal is then transported as a protein source to the feed troughs of industrially reared animals all over the world, but especially in Europe. According to Malaysian researchers, it can be used to feed all manner of livestock including cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, poultry and even farmed fish.¹⁵

World production of palm-kernel meal more than doubled to 6.9 million tonnes a year in the decade to 2011.¹⁶ The European Union (EU) is the biggest importer, accounting for around half the world’s production in 2012. By country, the biggest users of palm-kernel meal are the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, the UK and China. And it’s not only palm kernel ending up in livestock feed troughs. According to UK government figures, some 150,000 tonnes of crude palm oil and its derivative (known as palm fatty acids distillate)¹⁷ was also reported as having been used for animal feed in 2009.¹⁸ Most palm feed goes to cattle. Under normal practice, up to a fifth of their rations can come from kernel. Up to a tenth of fodder for sheep can come from kernel; while the figure for calves, lambs and finishing pigs is up to 5 per cent.¹⁹

What I’ve found is that few people realise that palm kernel is being used for animal feed, and often those that do, don’t like it. One environmental activist now working in Sumatra told me how he stopped working on dairy farms in his native New Zealand when he realised that palm kernel was going into the cows’ feed hoppers. The South Pacific island nation that prides itself on its green image has become a top buyer of palm kernel. It’s seen as a ‘life-saver’ by some dairy farmers, helping to feed their cows when grass is sparse. Yet the increasing spotlight from environmentalists has begun to unsettle some in the industry,²⁰ so much so that the major multinational dairy company in New Zealand, Fonterra, has been trying to persuade farmers to cut back on using palm kernel for fear of consumer backlash.²¹

But few shoppers realise that the milk, beef and bacon they buy may be coming from palm-fed animals, let alone contributing to the demise of iconic wildlife in the world’s remaining jungles.

In Sumatra, the result of this booming industry is to force elephants to venture where no safety-loving wild elephant would roam: the forest edge. Unfortunately, they like the same flat lowland terrain as people.

In the competition between the two species, the elephants