Malaysia's indigenous hit hard by deforestation

Liu Kang

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ENVIRONMENT
Malaysia's indigenous hit hard by deforestation
The clear-cutting of forests is thought to have played a role in Malaysia's worst flooding in decades.
Jarni Blakkarly | 02 Apr 2015 07:07 GMT | Environment, Asia Pacific, Malaysia

Temiar people hold a Sewang ceremony to seek guidance from the spirits and nature [Jarni Blakkarly/Al Jazeera]

The Temiar place a high value on respecting the environment and its destruction by outsiders is threatening their way of life.

The logging businesses have long had a presence in the region's expansive jungles, but the rate of deforestation has increased in the past decade as private companies clear-cut the forests.

Ussain Bin Anjang told Al Jazeera that this deforestation was making indigenous communities' traditional way of life difficult to maintain.

"They are logging close to the water source, so in dry season the river dries up. There is much less water than before. Sometimes it is contaminated and people get sick. We can't hunt, and it's very difficult to get our traditional medicine or gather food from the forest," he said.


Rivers run dry and food sources are threatened as a result of persistent logging, threatening the way of life for the indigenous people living in Malaysia's forests [Jarni Blakkarly/Al Jazeera]

Indigenous peoples' claims of ownership to their land are rarely acknowledged by the Malaysian government when it decides to grant logging concessions to private companies.

Clearing the forests

From a vantage point high up in the mountains, the scale of the destruction is striking. Bald hills stretch as far as the eye can see.

According to a 2012 study by the University of Maryland using Google Maps data,Malaysia has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. Most of the land is cleared for palm oil or rubber plantations, which have played a major role in Malaysia's economic growth. After decades of rapid development, the country is now one of the richest in the region.

While those in Kuala Wok have been told by local contractors that 3,000 hectares of land will be left to them after the logging, no formal contract has been signed - and already, the entire area surrounding the villages has been cleared.


Malaysia has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world with most of the forests being cleared for palm oil or rubber plantations [Jarni Blakkarly/Al Jazeera]

The same University of Maryland study estimated that the state of Kelantan lost around 15 percent of its natural forest between 2001 and 2012.

According to the CIA World Factbook almost 12 percent of Malaysia's population belongs to one of dozens of indigenous ethnic groups, each with their own individual language and culture. Most indigenous Malaysians live in the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo.

The term Orang Asli is used to refer to the various indigenous tribes of peninsular Malaysia. The roughly 180,000 Orang Asli make up less than one percent of the country's population.

The Malaysian government have long sought to remove the Orang Asli identity by categorising them as members of the dominant Malay ethnic group. The government also promises basic infrastructure projects such as housing, electricity and roads as an incentive for villages to convert from their traditional animist beliefs to Islam, the dominant religion in the country.


The indigenous populations of Malaysia constitute only one percent of the population and mainly live in the states of Sabah and Sarawak on the island of Borneo. They complain that the government mainly ignores their rights to the land they inhabit [Jarni Blakkarly/Al Jazeera]

'The government closes their eyes'

Youth indigenous leader Dendi, who only goes by one name, told Al Jazeera that logging and plantations had destroyed many sites of sacred religious importance and that local graves had been desecrated.

Local indigenous customs require that the dead be buried along with their possessions. Al Jazeera was shown areas where the remains of clothes and other possessions could be seen after the earth was dug up for plantations.

"Sometimes the government close their eyes, close their ears. They don't care about Orang Asli," Dendi told Al Jazeera.

"When all the forest is gone, how will the small children know about the stories? They won't know about how to use the forest to provide, how to go hunting maybe next year or another year, when everything's destroyed," he said.


The logging not only threatens the livelihood of the indigenous people, but also desecrates their past when the digging takes place at grave-sites [Jarni Blakkarly/Al Jazeera]

Many environmental activists and some scientists believe deforestation was a contributing factor to the size of the flooding that hit the region in December last year, killing 23 people and forcing more than 200,000 from their homes. While flooding is an annual occurrence, December's floods were the worst on record in Malaysia for 30 years.

"If you don't respect the forest, this is what happens," Dendi told Al Jazeera.

Villages higher up in the mountains were cut off from the outside world for a month due to landslides, but were spared the worst of the flooding. Those living further down in the valley, however, were not so lucky.

Slow rebuilding effort

The Malaysian government has promised millions of dollars for infrastructure repairs, housing and aid. However, more than two months since the floods, there were few signs of reconstruction in the Gua Musang region, one of the worst affected by the flooding, when Al Jazeera visited in February.

Whole families who lost houses in the floods can be seen huddled together along the highway, either in makeshift camps of bamboo and tarpaulins, provided by the Malaysian government, in tents from international aid organisations such as Rotary, or donated by the Chinese government.


The scale of deforestation has changed the consistency of the land causing landslides and flooding during the rainy season [Jarni Blakkarly/Al Jazeera]

There is a lack of information on the ground, and villages don't know when or even if their houses will be rebuilt. The fact that many indigenous people do not own formal deeds to their land may prove to be an obstacle to receiving compensation or financial assistance to rebuild.

Mohamed Thajudeen bin Abdul Wahab, secretary of the National Security Council, the government body that oversaw the response, told Al Jazeera that the government's response and rescue operations had kept casualty numbers low, despite many people not following the instructions to evacuate before the floodwaters rose.

"There has been no major issue in aid delivery. In fact, there was an overabundance in supply of food sources. It is not true that people didn't receive enough help," Thajudeen said.

He explained that the Malaysian government would not rebuild houses along riverbank areas due to the risk of future flooding, and that the reconstruction of 400 houses was already under way, with the work to be completed by June.

"Being poor, most of them are squatters and do not own land," said Thajudeen. "They were squatting on land not belonging to them. As such again, the government couldn't rebuild these houses. As land was a state matter, not a federal matter, the federal government [has] had to wait for the state government to identify suitable land for reconstruction of these houses."


Many victims of the devastating floods still live in temporary shelters provided by aid organisations [Jarni Blakkarly/Al Jazeera]

But Colin Nicholas from the Centre for Orang Asli Concerns (COAC), a Malaysia-based non-governmental organisationthat assists in legal cases and advocates for Orang Asli rights, told Al Jazeera that the government had essentially left NGOs to provide services to some Orang Asli villages affected by the flooding.

COAC plans to build 28 houses, and has already begun construction in the devastated Temiar village of Sintip.

Nicholas said that while the state of Kelantan was one of the worst for indigenous land rights and deforestation, the same issues had affected indigenous communities across the country for decades.

Follow Jarni Blakkarly on Twitter: @jarniblakkarly

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/fe...s-hit-hard-deforestation-150329101349832.html
 

Matt504

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People who are used to being self sufficient have to rely on outside aid, the men can't provide for their families and once the forest is completely gone, they will turn to drugs and alcohol.
 

Matt504

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Making an attempt to get out of the forests and joining civilization.

they have their own civilization, the civilization you're suggesting they join is completely unsustainable as evidenced by the fukking deforestation, what will happen to this "advanced civilization" once all the trees are gone?
 

Billy Hoyle

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http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/01/3641643/adm-no-deforestation-announcement/

This is a pretty big move. I hope other companies follow suit.

Agribusiness Giant Adopts Historic No-Deforestation Policy
BYNATASHA GEILING POSTED ONAPRIL 1, 2015 AT 5:15 PM

2,962Share This285Tweet This
"Agribusiness Giant Adopts Historic No-Deforestation Policy"

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shutterstock_19735894-638x426.jpg

A soy field cuts into a forest in Brazil.

CREDIT: SHUTTERSTOCK

On Tuesday, one of the world’s largest traders of agricultural commoditiesvowed to help curb forest lossby instating a “No-Deforestation” policy for soy and palm oil in its supply chain.

Archer Daniels Midland’s no-deforestation policy will be the first of its kind to cover soy production outside of the Brazilian Amazon. It also comes at a crucial time for theAmazon rainforest, which is especially affected by soy production and has seen a recent uptick agriculturally-driven deforestation. As of 2012, soybean production had caused the loss of80 million hectaresof forests in the Amazon basin.

Under the new policy, Archer Daniels Midland — known as ADM — will work with the Forest Trust, a non-profit group dedicated to improving the sustainability of company supply chains. The groups will work to map ADM’s supply chain, making sure that none of its soy or palm oil products come from areas where ecosystems are threatened. The company will formally announce the plan, along with more details, on May 7.

Deforestation is a leading driver of climate change. According toScientific American, loss of tropical rainforests releases more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the sum total of all cars. Though tropical deforestation is primarily caused byexpanding agriculture, ADM’s announcement is just the most recent in astring of commitmentsby food and agriculture companies to begin ending tropical deforestation.

“ADM has a steadfast commitment to the development of traceable and transparent agricultural supply chains that protect forests worldwide,” the company’s chief communications officer Victoria Podesta said in an emailed statement. “We are confident that our No Deforestation policy is both strong and appropriate for our company. It combines a clear commitment to no deforestation with progressive action focused on our most critical supply chains.”

ADM, based in Chicago but with a market reach that spans six continents, buys all of its soy and palm oil from third parties. And while the palm oil industry has seen remarkable improvement in its deforestation policies — with nearly96 percentof the market controlled by no-deforestation commitments — the soy industry has lagged behind in adopting similar policies, making ADM’s commitment to ending deforestation in the soy supply chain the first of its kind.

“While there’s still a lot of work to be done to implement these palm oil policies on the ground and to reign in rogue actors, we’re really looking to now spread this transformation to other commodities that drive deforestation in other parts of the world — soy in Latin America being top among them,” Ben Cushing, a spokesman for the advocacy group Forest Heroes, told ThinkProgress.

Over the last decade, Brazil appeared to be making huge strides in curbing deforestation in the Amazon, thanks in large part to pressure exerted by activists on soy and cattle farmers. Instead of cutting down forests to make way for farmland and grazing areas, farmers started to think of ways to make existing farmland more productive. It seemed to be working, with deforestation in Brazildropping 70 percentbetween 2005 and 2014.

Part of the slow in deforestation also came in 2006 when major soybean traders — ADM among them — agreed to not buy soy grown on deforested Amazon land in Brazil. Known as the Soy Moratorium, the agreementreally did helpslow the pace of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon.

But signs suggest that the pause in deforestation is over — and that loss of the Amazon rainforest is spreading beyond Brazil to peripheral countries like Peru and Bolivia, where the Soy Moratorium doesn’t exist. The moratorium also fails to protect other areas of Brazil, like theCerrado, a vast tropical savanna whose waters feed crucial river basins like the Amazon. And as the world’s growing economy increases the demand for meat,the demand for soy will also increase, because75 percentof the world’s soy is used as animal feed.

“We’re at a critical juncture now to break the link between agriculture, especially for soy production and deforestation in Latin America,” Cushing said. “The recent progress on palm oil shows that this is possible, and now ADM’s announcement is a major step forward for the soy industry.”

Investor advocacy played a crucial role in encouraging ADM to commit to the policy, with Green Century Capital Management, an environmentally responsible investment company, teaming up with the New York State Pension Fund file a shareholder proposal that raised concerns about deforestation in the company’s supply chain. The New York State Pension Fund, which is the third largest pension fund in the nation, currently holds around 1,795,201 shares of ADM worth around $83.1 million.

“Shareholders are essentially the only stakeholder that corporations are required to respond to,” Lucia von Reusner, Green Century’s shareholder advocate, told ThinkProgress. “As a shareholder we have a unique voice at the board level that other stakeholders don’t have.”

In the past year, Green Century also encouraged Kellogg’s, Smuckers, and ConAgra to commit to purchasing palm oil from sources that don’t contribute to deforestation.

Now, they’ve set their sights on influencing the world’s largest distributors. At the same time that Green Century filed a shareholder proposal with ADM, they filed a similar proposal with Bunge, a direct competitor. So far, von Reusner said Bunge has not responded to the proposal, but she expects that it will head to a board vote near the end of May.

“The fact that ADM has made this commitment has such huge influence over the global agriculture supply chain and global food production,” von Reusner said, noting that it’s difficult for farmers to prioritize long-term sustainability over short-term cost cutting unless large companies use their influence to demand it. “It’s important that these companies that are setting the market are saying that, in addition to a low price, it’s important that our suppliers adhere to sustainable practices.”
 
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Liu Kang

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@Billy Hoyle, I've put the article out of spoilers because sometimes they are annoying on mobile devices. Better to put the whole text out.
 

88m3

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the photos I've seen from south america

:to:


every tree that's cut should be replaced by 10... we're going to kill everything if we keep this up.
 

Billy Hoyle

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Pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and destroy the mechanism that regulates it breh. :wow:
 
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