Oct. 14, 2005 — Malaysia's palm oil industry denied Thursday accusations that it was driving orangutans to extinction.

Environmental campaigners Friends of the Earth last month said demand for palm oil, which is widely used in processed foods, could cause Asia's only great ape to be wiped out within 12 years unless there was urgent intervention in the palm oil trade.

The Malaysian Palm Oil Association, Malaysian Palm Oil Board and Malaysian Palm Oil Promotion Council denied the charges, saying that palm oil was a strategic, well-planned agricultural industry which supported the preservation of wildlife including the orangutan.

"These allegations are not well founded and contain a number of factual inaccuracies," they said in a joint statement to the national Bernama news agency.

"The industry is far better regulated and the orangutan far better protected than is suggested in the report," they said, adding that the industry often preserved jungle reserves and wildlife sanctuaries as part of efforts to maintain the existing biodiversity found in plantations.

A recent survey showed that thousands of orangutans remained in and around the Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary in east Sabah state on the island of Borneo, they added.

In a report that Friends of the Earth dubbed the "Oil for Ape Scandal," the environmental group said that wildlife centers in Indonesia were overrun with orphaned baby orangutans that had been rescued from forests being cleared to make way for new plantations.

"Almost 90 percent of the orangutan's habitat in Indonesia and Malaysia has now been destroyed. Some experts estimate that 5,000 orangutans perish as a result every year," it said.

"Oil palm plantations have now become the primary cause of the orangutan's decline, wiping out its rainforest home in Borneo and Sumatra."

Palm oil is found in one in 10 products on supermarket shelves, including bread, chips, cereals, lipstick and soap, it said.

The red-haired apes are found only on Borneo, which is shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, and on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Their numbers have dwindled to less than 60,000 from a population that once spanned Southeast Asia.

As well as forest clearing, they are threatened by commercial logging, forest fires, hunting and poaching for the bush meat and pet trades.