Sarawak, Malaysia--Earth's Oldest Rainforest Being Decimated

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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

5/8/96

OVERVIEW & SOURCE by EE

Following is an article detailing the continued destruction of

Sarawak, Malaysia's rainforests. Since the 1970s, the forests of

this portion of Borneo have been decimated to make scaffolding,

chopsticks and paper, mostly for the Japanese market. This

despite huge local and international protest. Half of Sarawak, a

state nearly the size of England, is zoned for logging, 8 percent

is to be permanently protected and the rest deforested for

development. The Penan tribal peoples way of life has been

drastically impacted, and environmental impacts are severe. The

point is made that these rainforests are essentially finished as

an intact forest ecosystem. Industrial forestry equipment is now

being loaded to go to Papua New Guinea, and elsewhere, where the

few remaining virgin forests exist. The challenge for the forest

movement is to not let this social and environmental tragedy be

repeated. This is a daunting task as Malaysian style industrial

forestry has established significant toeholds in Papua New Guinea

and the South Pacific, Africa and South America. Millions of

species and their combined evolutionary history are being

sacrificed to feed the developed world's throw away societies.

Time is short to save remaining rainforests.

g.b.

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Quest for 'green gold' fells one of Earth's oldest rain forests

May 7, 1996

LONG WIN, Malaysia (AP) -- Deep in one of the world's oldest rain

forests, this small tribal settlement awakens most mornings to

grinding motors and the thud of falling trees -- sounds that

herald the end of its traditional ways.

"I just want to cry when I hear the bulldozers and saws. But what

can I do? Nothing," says Juwin Lihan, a leader of the Penans, who

have depended on the Sarawak region's once boundless and bountiful

forests for generations.

Starting in the 1970s, and accelerating during the last decade,

logging has swept like a wave across Malaysia's part of Borneo

island, from coastal mangroves eastward to the highlands bordering

the Indonesian state of Kalimantan.

In the rush to extract hardwoods to be turned into scaffolding,

chopsticks and paper, the loggers have degraded an irreplaceable

forest gene pool that had stood largely undisturbed for millennia.

The lives of the Penans and other forest people have been forever

fractured.

There have been protests -- from U.S. senators to Penans armed

with blowpipes and poison arrows, who threw up roadblocks and

destroyed logging equipment.

But native people and environmentalists are conceding defeat.

"We seem to have accomplished so little to stop the logging," said

Mary Asunta of the Malaysian affiliate of the international

conservation group Friends of the Earth.

"The timber companies have left a trail of destruction. Clean

rivers have turned the color of tea with milk. Communities where

people have lived for ages are being bulldozed after a stranger

comes in and flings a document in their face."

_"Green Gold"_

The governments of Malaysia and Sarawak state take a different

view on the harvesting of what they call "green gold."

Officials say the $1.5 billion in yearly timber exports has

propelled Sarawak from an exotic backwater into an outpost of the

modern world. The industry provides jobs for 100,000 people, while

logging roads have opened up once isolated, impoverished areas,

they say.

"Even without logging, all human beings exploit nature. We cannot

eat the egg without cracking the shell," James Wong Kim Min, the

state environment minister, said in an interview.

And while conceding that loggers had caused damage, he blamed

slash-and-burn cultivation by some tribal groups for most

deforestation.

Half of Sarawak, a state nearly the size of England, is officially

zoned for logging, while 8 percent is to be permanently protected

and the rest deforested for development.

Asked about World Bank warnings that logging in Sarawak will prove

a "sunset industry" if it is not reined in, Wong contended timber

is being cut prudently to allow a "sustainable" industry. "Logging

will carry on forever," he said.

Sarawak's "selective management system" calls for the felling of 8

to 12 mature trees for every 2-1/2 acres, replanting and then

allowing the area to regenerate for 25 years until the next

harvest cycle.

Environmentalists say the system may be sound on paper but is

greatly abused on the ground. They say companies riddle the forest

with erosion-causing trails, then destroy plantlife and animal

habitats as they power their way toward the trees they can legally

fell.

Ms. Asunta said that when timber companies talk about

"sustainability" they mean having a constant supply of logs,

whereas conservationists define it as harvesting that does not

injure any of the life in an ecosystem, including that of human

dwellers.

_The effect of deforestation_

The Penans say widespread logging has devastated their lives.

"When the forest was not destroyed life was easy," said Liman

Abon, chief of Long Block, another remote Penan settlement in

northeastern Sarawak ringed by loggers. "If we wanted food, there

were wild boar. If we wanted money, we could make mats and baskets

for sale from rattan. If we were sick, we could pick medicinal

plants. Before, our clinic was the forest."

Long Block elders say a company gives the settlement the

equivalent of $8,000 a year for logging on its land. That is

meager when divided among some 200 inhabitants, they say, and does

not compensate for boar that have fled, medicinal bark that has

disappeared or the fruit trees that loggers bulldozed in 1994.

"The government says it's our land, but when the companies come

they just take what they want. They don't care," the chief said.

Thomas Jalong, who heads Friends of the Earth in the Baram River

region where the Penan settlements are located, says the companies

-- backed up by the government -- almost always win disputes over

land. None of the legal cases lodged by tribal people is known to

have gone against the loggers.

Jalong charges that tribal people are often tricked or put their

thumbprints to agreements they barely understand. Officials sent

to check that loggers observe environmental and legal safeguards

are bribed, he says.

"The biggest problem in Sarawak is that loggers and government are

one and the same," said William W. Bevis, an American academic who

recently published "Borneo Log: The Struggle for Sarawak's

Forests."

Sarawak's chief minister, Abdul Taib Mahmud, also serves as the

forestry minister, grants logging concessions and approves

environmental impact statements. Wong, the environment minister,

personally holds a large concession and pioneered hill logging

with bulldozers.

Bevis said that while the government still upholds traditional

land tenure, it began eroding the rights enjoyed by tribal groups

over their areas in the mid-1950s. By the mid-1980s, when the

assault on Sarawak's rain forests intensified, handing out

concessions had thus become easier, he said.

_An around-the-clock, year-round operation_

By 1991, even the International Tropical Timber Organization,

which environmentalists regard as pro-logging, warned that Sarawak

would be denuded within 13 years if cutting was not drastically

reduced.

Logging has tapered off. But environmental groups say the harvest

is still ruinous, and they contend the lower volume is due more to

the rugged, less productive terrain now being worked.

Malaysia remains the world's largest supplier of tropical wood.

Along the Baram River, cranes rapidly pluck tons of mahogany and

ironwood from trucks that have careened through the jungle to its

banks. The logs are stacked in barges, which are towed down to

vast marshaling areas near the river mouth in an around-the-clock,

year-round operation.

"It's pretty much over in Sarawak. The battle is now moving to

other places," Bevis said. "The bulldozers are on ships, steaming

toward Papua New Guinea and other fresh rain forests."

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