Born Free Foundation - Keep Wildlife in the Wild

Since September 2006 Born Free has been supporting research in North Sumatra, Indonesia, in an area where local farmers experience crop raiding by a small and isolated group of orangutans. The PhD study has looked at the causes of this conflict and at different ways of protecting the crops, and analysis of the data is underway.

In the meantime, however, the project leader has come up with an innovative and practical way to compensate the villagers for the crop losses they suffer.

With funds from Born Free and Humane Society International, Gail Campbell-Smith organised the villagers and provided tools and materials for them to improve the local road system, making travel and communications vastly easier for them.  Very low impact, these 18 inch wide cement tracks called "setapak" are a real benefit to communities living with wildlife.

Supporting the construction of roads in a rainforest may not seem like an obvious activity for Born Free to support … that is until you see the roads! In an area where most people travel through the forest on small motor bikes, a strip of concrete less than two feet wide is enough to make local journeys much quicker and more pleasant than the rutted, muddy tracks that were there before. At the same time the environmental impact is very low, and the new network certainly does not present any opportunities for hauling out illegally felled timber as larger roads might.

This is an improvement that was requested by the villagers themselves, and since they know Gail and her work with the orangutans it sends them the clear message that international conservation organisations care about them as well as the wildlife that they live with.