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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS

Asian Crisis "Welcomed" by Penan in Malaysia

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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises

http://forests.org/

8/18/98

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE

There's nothing like a regional recession (particularly when the

region is in the midst of a wholesale natural resource liquidation to

artificially prop up growth) to give forests and their peoples a

fighting chance. Malaysia's Penan people could use a lucky break

after decades of encroachment and environmental piracy. Indigenous

peoples and their homelands continue to be violated and abused

worldwide. Papua New Guineans, Solomon Islanders, Russians and others

are being given a reprieve from imminent destruction by Malaysian logging

companies due to the current uneconomic nature of industrial rainforest

logging. Now is the chance to stop the inappropriate industrial logging

land management model and strive for preservation and ecologically

sustainable, community based land uses.

g.b.

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Title: Borneo forest-dwellers ``welcome'' Asian crisis

Source: Reuters

Status: Photocopy, contact source for permission to reprint

Date: August 18, 1998

Byline: By Suzanne McElligott

SINGAPORE, Aug 18 (Reuters) - East Asia's recession may have benefited

at least one society in the region -- Borneo's nomadic Penan people

whose forests are no longer being so heavily logged.

``It's one of the best remedies,'' Bruno Manser, founder of the Swiss-

based Association for the Peoples of the Rainforest, said on Tuesday.

Logging on Borneo was progressively depriving the nomadic Penan

peoples of the environment they needed to survive, Manser told the

Foreign Correspondents Association of Singapore.

But the recent slowdown in demand caused by the Asian crisis had put

some of the smaller logging companies out of business and slowed the

rate of deforestation by some of the larger ones.

Manser is a Swiss national and environmental activist who advocates

the rights of the indigenous peoples of the Borneo rainforest, with

whom he lived illegally for six years.

The 260-member Penan group, who live in the Malaysian state of Sarawak

-- which shares Borneo island with Brunei and Indonesia's East

Kalimantan state -- survive as hunter gatherers and feel the loss of

the rainforest ``in their bellies,'' he said.

The logging of rainforest not only robbed the Penan of their home, but

also their traditional foods, he said.

The polygamous Penan people eat mainly wild boar and monkeys, which

they hunt with blow pipes, poison darts and, increasingly, rifles.

They neither rear livestock nor plant crops and depend on the

shrinking forest to feed them, Manser said. Erosion caused by logging

has silted up streams and killed fish, he added. Manser blamed

logging, to clear land for plantations, combined with drought for

turning East Kalimantan rainforest into a tinderbox that ignited in

uncontrollable fires last year.

Manser has been arrested on Borneo several times and escaped several

times since staging a 1985 logging protest, which included erecting

barriers to disrupt logging operations.

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Networked by Ecological Enterprises, gbarry@forests.org