The banana skins were the first sign. Then the broken branch, stripped to reach the fruit. Less than a minute’s walk from where Edi Ramli and his family slept, something had been eating through his crop.
Edi, 55, runs a small farm on the edge of Borneo’s rainforest in West Kalimantan, growing sweetcorn and tomatoes with his wife and three adult children. That October afternoon, a neighbor’s child came running back from the river, frightened. He’d seen an orangutan. Edi followed — and found it: an adult male, roughly 90 kilograms, with the broad cheek pads of a dominant animal. High in a nearby tree, an intricate nest of bent and broken branches marked where it had been sleeping.
A farm on the edge of the wild
Edi and Siti Munawaroh didn’t end up in Borneo by chance. They chose it deliberately. A decade ago, Edi was laying bricks in Java while Siti ran a sewing machine in a garment factory. Java — home to more than 157 million people — had started to feel suffocating. In 2016, the family joined Indonesia’s transmigration program, a scheme with roots in Dutch colonial administration. Each family receives a plot of land, a modest house, and a small cash grant — roughly 4 million rupiah, or about £170. Around 150 families were relocated to Edi’s area from Java. More than 100 have since left.
Gunung Palung national park sits almost on his doorstep, home to around 2,500 wild orangutans — one of the largest populations in West Kalimantan. His farm lies near the park’s buffer zone, intended to separate protected forest from human activity. But there are no ditches, no fences, no markers of any kind. Orangutans can live up to 45 years and carry detailed mental maps of their territories; they do not consult land registries. When the adult male appeared, Edi did not reach for a weapon. He felt nervous, he said, and got on with his day.
Palm oil and the disappearing forest
The economic logic of palm oil is difficult to argue with. On a per-hectare basis, it produces six to ten times more oil than alternatives such as soybean. Indonesia now accounts for 59% of global output, a trade worth roughly £26 billion a year. At the peak in West Kalimantan in 2012, an area of ancient forest slightly smaller than Greater London was cleared in a single year. Karmele Llano Sánchez, a vet who has worked in the region since 2005, describes that period as relentless: chainsaws, crashing trees, displaced animals wandering through smoking clearings.
For farmers like Naha, 54, palm oil was transformative. He switched five years ago and now earns two to three million rupiah per harvest — with up to 24 harvests a year. Middleman Iskandar, 55, earns roughly five and a half times the average local salary. A growing number of smallholders are clearing forest to plant their own palms, often sidestepping regulations, and supply chains at this scale go largely unmonitored. The forest keeps shrinking, patch by patch.
When orangutans become ‘the problem’
Researcher Gail Campbell-Smith, who has worked at Yiari for 15 years and was the first to study orangutans in human-dominated landscapes in Sumatra, documented behavioral shifts up close. Orangutans began sleeping later to avoid contact with people, added oil palm shoots to their diet, and spent more time on the ground — where they move slowly and are far more vulnerable.
Naha walked us to a field where more than 50 seedlings had been torn and flattened — a third of his new crop, destroyed in a single visit. Iskandar’s sister sent a voicemail to Yiari warning that “something unwarranted might occur” if seedlings were not replaced. Last summer, a mother orangutan was found near Edi’s farm with a wound five centimeters deep in her back — a spear that had reached her kidney. She died after a week, and her infant was taken to a rehabilitation center.
The rescue debate: does moving orangutans help or harm them?
Since 2009, Yiari has relocated 72 wild orangutans, each microchipped and logged in a database. A study by Julie Sherman of Wildlife Impact and Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University, found that between 2005 and 2022, at least 988 orangutans were captured for translocation in Indonesia. Their paper argues the approach is traumatic and may not resolve the underlying conflict — some animals find their way back even after being moved more than 30 miles.
Campbell-Smith pushes back on what the alternative looks like in practice. “When you’ve got farmers shooting at orangutans, or the forest on fire, what should we do? Should we leave the animal to die?” During our final reporting day, a mother and infant were spotted near a petrol station. The mother — “Mama Ris” — had been moved before and appeared to have returned. After an hour-long operation, both were released into restored peatland forest, climbed a tree, and disappeared.
Can humans and orangutans share the same land?
Sherman and Wich argue that energy spent on translocation would be better directed toward coexistence — workshops where villagers and local NGOs negotiate practical solutions together. Financial compensation for crop damage and insurance schemes are among the tools they advocate. Paul Thung of Planet Indonesia notes that meaningful change requires sustained investment and time. “There are so many very smart ideas,” he said. The gap between a good idea and a functioning program in a remote West Kalimantan village is considerable.
Llano Sánchez is not convinced that translocation works as a long-term strategy. “We will run out of forest to move the orangutans to,” she said. The buffer zone around Gunung Palung has already shrunk from 10 kilometers wide to 2 kilometers over recent decades. Edi’s farm, Naha’s seedlings, Mama Ris’s return journey, the spear wound in a dead mother’s kidney — these are not separate stories. They are the same story, told from different positions along the same shrinking boundary.