The world’s biggest palm oil agribusiness is destroying rainforests in Indonesia to make way for palm plantations — even though it’s against the law.  Last month, one of Wilmar International’s suppliers was caught bulldozing crucial rainforest in the Leuser Ecosystem, an important. wildlife habitat and the last place on earth where you can find endangered animals like Sumatran orangutans, tigers, elephants, and rhinos living together.  Wilmer supplies big users like Nestlé and Colgate- Palmolive.

Thanks to grassroots pressure worldwide, the Indonesian government has placed a moratorium on new oil palm plantations. Wilmar itself has even pledged to stop its role in deforestation.

Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s primates are in deep trouble. There are as few as 20 or 30 Hainan gibbons left in China, and the trapdoor of extinction is gaping for the Javan slow loris. Even numbers of Madagascar’s iconic ring-tailed lemur have slumped to around 2000.

These could be the next primates to disappear from our planet. But overall, the picture is even bleaker, with 60 per cent of all primate species globally predicted to vanish within between 25 and 50 years.

That’s the gloomy conclusion from the largest ever review of the survival prospects of the world’s 504 known species of non-human primate, 85 of them discovered since 2000. “This paper is a synthesis of the factors, at all scales, that are causing declines and extinctions,” says Anthony Rylands of Conservation International, joint lead author of the report (Science Advances, e1600946).

The biggest harbinger of doom is clearance of forests for agriculture, both by local farmers and by big agro-industrial producers of commodities such as palm oil and rubber. Between 1990 and 2010, for example, agricultural expansion into primate habitats was estimated at 1.5 million square kilometres, an area three times that of France.