By SINDYA N. BHANOO

Gorillas don't seem to be facing the obesity epidemic that humans in modern society are.

That's because our primate brethren follow a lean diet with protein concentrations similar to the American Heart Association's recommendations for humans, says Jessica Rothman, an anthropologist at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Dr. Rothman and her colleagues studied mountain gorillas in Uganda and found that they eat a protein-rich diet, supplemented with fruits. Protein makes up about 17 percent of their total energy intake, close to the 15 percent protein intake the heart association recommends for people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07obgorilla.html

03/06/2011
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By Caroline Lucas

While governments commit to biofuels as a solution to reduce emissions, they are contributing to a destructive palm oil trade

In my mail bag at the end of last week was a letter from the minister for agriculture and food, Jim Paice, responding to queries I made recently about the UK's policy on palm oil. I had written to urge the government to back an amendment - originally tabled by Greens in the European parliament - to the EU directive on the provision of food information to consumers, which would enforce mandatory labelling of products containing palm oil. Unfortunately, it appears that even this moderate step isn't something our government is willing to support.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jun/01/palm-oil-global-emissions

01/06/2011
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JAKARTA, 30 May 2011 (IRIN) - A long-awaited moratorium by the Indonesian government on new forest concessions, aimed at curbing deforestation, has been welcomed by palm oil farmers but activists believe it does not go far enough.

"We support the government's decree on the moratorium," Maruli Sitorus, a palm oil farmer in Labahan Batu in North Sumatra Province, said. "We have seen outrageous expansions of big plantation companies at the expense of small farmers whose land has been shrinking. We hope the moratorium can limit this." 

More than 100,000 hectares of peatland in Southeast Asia are being converted annually into plantations for palm oil and pulpwood, according to the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR).

Peatlands store enormous quantities of carbon and their destruction releases large amounts of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change.

http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=92841

30/05/2011
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PNAS | Justin S. Brashares et al. | May 2011

Abstract

The harvest of wildlife for human consumption is valued at several billion dollars annually and provides an essential source of meat for hundreds of millions of rural people living in poverty. This harvest is also considered among the greatest threats to biodiversity throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Economic development is often proposed as an essential first step to win-win solutions for poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation by breaking rural reliance on wildlife. However, increases in wealth may accelerate consumption and extend the scale and efficiency of wildlife harvest. Our ability to assess the likelihood of these two contrasting outcomes and to design approaches that simultaneously consider poverty and biodiversity loss is impeded by a weak understanding of the direction and shape of their interaction. Here, we present results of economic and wildlife use surveys conducted in 2,000 households from 96 settlements in Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, and Madagascar. We examine the individual and interactive roles of wealth, relative food prices, market access, and opportunity costs of time spent hunting on household rates of wildlife consumption. Despite great differences in biogeographic, social, and economic aspects of our study sites, we found a consistent relationship between wealth and wildlife consumption. Wealthier households consume more bushmeat in settlements nearer urban areas, but the opposite pattern is observed in more isolated settlements. Wildlife hunting and consumption increase when alternative livelihoods collapse, but this safety net is an option only for those people living near harvestable wildlife.

23/05/2011
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LONDON, UK: - HRH The Princess Royal (Princess Anne) tonight presented one of the world’s top prizes for grassroots nature conservation – a Whitley Award – to Dr Hotlin Ompusunggu, a Sumatran dentist working in West Kalimantan, Borneo, for her work to improve the health and well-being of rainforest communities while also safeguarding a globally important habitat for gibbons, hornbills and orangutans, among many other species. 

www.whitleyaward.org

12/05/2011
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Bonobos communicate where to find their favourite food using barks and peeps, scientists have found.

11/05/2011
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