Farmers in Thailand are still using monkey labour to supply coconuts to the international market, according to new information from the Asia branch of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).
This comes about six months after the animal rights organisation released findings from a 2019 undercover investigation. The report spurred coconut product companies, supermarket chains, and the Thai government to give assurances that monkeys would no longer be forced to harvest coconuts.
Thailand is the world’s third largest exporter of coconuts, after Indonesia and the Philippines, exporting more than 500,000 tons in 2019. The popularity of coconut milk as an alternative to dairy milk has grown steadily during the past five years, says Avinash Desamangalam, research manager at Mordor Intelligence, a company based in India that studies the market for alternatives to dairy products. He says the industry’s growth rate is expected to nearly double in the next five years.
But since PETA’s first investigation, some retailers of coconut-based products have reported a decrease of up to 30 percent in sales, Desamangalam says. Meanwhile, retailers such as Waitrose and Boots, Target and Costco have announced that they’ll no longer stock products from companies found to use monkey labour.
“There is a paradox here, right?” Desamangalam says. Consumers expect coconut milk to be cruelty-free since it doesn’t come from animals, but in reality “there is a lot of cruelty involved in terms of using monkey labour.”
PETA has documented how pig-tailed macaques are trained, sometimes in “monkey schools,” to climb trees to pick coconuts. When the monkeys aren’t working, they’re often kept chained and transported in cages too small for them to turn around in, according to PETA footage. Many were likely illegally captured from the wild as babies, PETA says. The investigators found monkeys alone and in distress—screaming and pacing repeatedly, a sign of anxiety. Some were missing their canine teeth, removed to prevent injury to handlers, farmers told PETA.
PETA is “right in stating nothing changed” since its first investigation, says Edwin Wiek, an animal welfare advisor to Thailand’s parliament. Wiek, who is also the director and founder of Wildlife Friends Foundation, a sanctuary for wild animals, estimates that as many as 3,000 monkeys are used on coconut farms in southern Thailand, the main source region for the coconut milk industry.
Pig-tailed macaques are protected by law in Thailand, where it’s illegal to own them unless they’re captive-bred. Violators can be fined or sentenced to two years in prison, although such a sentence has never been handed down, Wiek says. He says he believes that about half the monkeys used by coconut growers have been captured from the wild and therefore are kept illegally.
Wiek fears that some nervous coconut growers have been releasing monkeys into the wild, where they’re ill-equipped to survive after a lifetime in captivity.
He says the four newest rescues came from individuals who used them to harvest coconuts for personal consumption. Two were young and likely hadn’t yet been trained to pick coconuts, but the other two—named Saen and Mhuen—were older and “in a bad state,” according to Wiek.
When he went to pick them up, he found them chained to a post, with no cover from the rain or sun, and they had no drinking water. They were also missing their canine teeth, Weik says, and Saen had a large hernia that required immediate treatment.
But now they’re adjusting well to their new life, enjoying healthier diets—fruits and veggies instead of leftover chicken and rice—and interacting with the other monkeys. After a life of being chained up alone, it’s a “culture shock,” Wiek says, but Saen is “an extremely friendly guy.”
The practice in Thailand of using monkey labour to pick coconuts is slowly dying, Wiek says. As with elephant rides and bullfights, people are beginning to rethink old cultural practices that involve animal suffering. He estimates that 15 years ago, as many as 15,000 monkeys laboured on coconut farms, compared to the 3,000 today.
To lower the number even further, Kent Stein, PETA’s corporate responsibility officer, suggests that the Thai government could subsidise the purchase of coconut-harvesting equipment, so farmers and hired workers, instead of monkeys, could do the work.
If Thailand’s coconut growers and exporters hope to survive, Desamangalam says, the government must implement a reliable system for independently auditing coconut farms to ensure that they don’t use monkey labor—just as quality-control procedures and regulations apply to organic farms. Harvesting costs will increase, he acknowledges, but consumers are willing to pay more for cruelty-free products.
“From every standpoint, it makes sense for all the parties involved to completely eliminate monkey labor,” Desamangalam says.
Wildlife Watch is an investigative reporting project between National Geographic Society and National Geographic Partners focusing on wildlife crime and exploitation. Read more Wildlife Watch stories here, and learn more about National Geographic Society’s nonprofit mission at nationalgeographic.org. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to [email protected].
