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THE BEST WAY to see what is happening to the Borneo rainforest is from
the air. It looks like a dog with mange. Areas of dense virgin forest are
interspersed with large naked patches, ripped out by bulldozers and chainsaws.
Through the forest, great meandering rivers such as the Baram run red with
silt washed from the bare hillsides after the foresters have gone. And,
even from high in the sky, you can see logs, tied together in rafts up to
400 metres long, floating downstream to coastal ports such as Miri and Bintulu
for loading onto ships bound for Japan, Taiwan or the US.

Such were the sights that would have greeted Lord Cranbrook, a zoologist
and a member of Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, during
his three visits over the past six months to Sarawak, the large Malaysian
state that occupies the northwest of the island of Borneo. He and nine colleagues
were on an international mission to investigate the state of Sarawak’s forests.
Between flights over the forest, they were told by foresters and local politicians
that all was well, that the forests were well managed and regrew swiftly
after logging. But scientists, environmental campaigners and the natives
of the forest warned that one of the oldest rainforests in the world is
being massacred rather than managed, and that before the decade is out,
the 25 000 square kilometres of surviving virgin forest in Sarawak will
be gone.

The findings of Cranbrook’s mission are due to be reported next week
to a meeting of the International Tropical Timber Organisation, a trade
‘club’ of governments representing nations that produce and consume tropical
timber, which commissioned the study. The ITTO, set up in the mid-1980s,
has given itself the job of promoting the ‘sustainable development’ of tropical
forests – that is, harvesting timber without destroying the forests. It
is a hard task. A study commissioned by the ITTO from a British forestry
consultant, Duncan Poore, who was also on Cranbrook’s mission, found that
less than 1 per cent of the world’s tropical forestry is managed sustainably.

Much hangs on the outcome of the mission. International environment
groups such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Friends of the Earth
see the ITTO as their main forum for promoting conservation of the rainforests.
Much of the money contributed by people who respond to leaflets urging them
to help save the rainforests goes to pay the groups’ campaigners to travel
the world lobbying the ITTO’s meetings. Next week, they will all be in Bali
to hear Cranbrook’s findings. If he fails to wave a big stick at the Malaysian
authorities, more radical green campaigners will renew their complaint that
the ITTO is a worthless talking shop and that the establishment greens have
been led up a blind alley. They will call for a boycott of the ITTO.

Sarawak is the largest source of unprocessed tropical timber on the
international market. That market has been dominated for years by Japan,
which takes about two-thirds of Sarawak’s current output of more than 15
million cubic metres of timber. When Sarawak’s timber is gone, Japanese
firms and new rivals in Taiwan and Thailand will move on once more, continuing
their destruction elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Other nations have been this way before. In the days of President Marcos,
local entrepreneurs with good connections in Japan stripped most of the
Philippines of its rainforests. The Japanese then moved on to Indonesia
before that government banned the export of logs in 1985 and announced plans
to build up its own plywood and pulp industries. Sarawak and its smaller
neighbour Sabah have filled the gap. Next in line to supply the Japanese
are Papua New Guinea, Burma, Laos, then maybe Fiji and Vietnam.

Cranbrook’s mission will not be short of advice. When the zoologist
arrived last summer in Malaysia for preliminary talks, he was greeted by
James Wong. Wong is a flamboyant and controversial figure who combines his
job as Sarawak’s minister for the environment with a controlling stake in
Limbang Trading, which holds concessions to log across some 300 000 hectares
of Sarawak. One of Wong’s partners was the Japanese trading giant, C. Itoh,
until the company pulled out in 1987 in the wake of a scandal over the discovery
that Japanese government aid money had been spent on building roads to one
of Limbang Trading’s largest concessions.

Wong pioneered the Sarawak timber industry, and has been in business
since 1949. He insists that logging does not destroy the forests and that
the trees largely regenerate within five years of the bulldozers departing.
‘All the animals and birds are back . . . with more fruits and nuts than
before . . . logging is good for the forest,’ he says.

Such views are hard to square with the aerial views of the state afforded
from an aircraft. Large areas of coastal forests – around Miri, for example
– were logged years ago, yet remain a treeless wasteland. Cranbrook heard
other voices to contradict that of Wong. One is SC Chin, a former colleague
from Cranbrook’s days at the University of Malaysia during the 1960s. Chin
says: ‘The forest situation is now critical. It is necessary to face the
problems of degradation and destruction squarely and honestly . . . At the
present rate of logging the primary (virgin) forests will be finished in
seven or eight years.’ Within a few more years, he says, the less productive
secondary forests, which have already been logged once, will be cleared
and the state’s forestry business will expire.

A policy of wishful thinking

At the heart of the argument is the concept of sustainable forestry,
the concept that almost every logging company and forestry department pays
lip service to. Wong claims that his logging is ‘sustainable and will go
on for ever and ever’. But Chin calls Sarawak’s forestry industry ‘hit-and-run’
logging.

Roughly half the Sarawak concessions are on state lands, where the removal
of all trees (known as clear-cutting) is allowed. In the rest, in so-called
protected forests, the aim is to manage the forest sustainably, usually
by ‘selective logging’. The theory is that loggers remove a maximum of 10
large trees per hectare of forest. They should leave behind enough medium-sized
trees undamaged so that when the chainsaws return (typically after 30 years),
there will be a new crop of large trees to harvest.

Unfortunately, says Chin, logging is not scientifically planned and
executed in Malaysia, nor is it properly supervised and controlled. ‘Several
important studies have shown that logging which removes 6 to 12 trees per
hectare (less that 10 per cent of the total) also destroys 50 to 70 other
trees in the process,’ he says. These trees are either torn down as the
harvested trees fall or are bulldozed to the ground as the logs are removed.
‘This results in about 40 per cent of the logged forest becoming open spaces.’
In practice, many logging firms ignore the guidelines on selective logging.
Because their concessions typically run for 10 to 20 years, they have no
incentive to leave trees behind. Some studies have found that less than
a third of the forest is left after the ‘selective loggers’ have been through.

Heavy machinery used in modern forestry churns up the exposed soils,
compacting them and making them impermeable. This process, coupled with
the loss of the canopy which normally protects the forest floor from rainfall,
can cause both waterlogging and severe soil erosion. In neighbouring Sabah,
there are huge increases in the amount of soil reaching streams in logged
catchments. According to the federal Malaysian government, most of Sarawak’s
rivers now suffer from an excess of sediment – ‘soil pollution’. The water
becomes turbid and stocks of fish, the main source of protein for many forest
dwellers, dwindle.

Ministers in the state government and the people who run the timber
companies often blame the destruction of the state’s forests on shifting
cultivation by native forest dwellers. Perhaps 200 000 people in Sarawak
live in this way. Chin, who has spent more than a decade researching shifting
cultivation in Malaysia, calculates that a typical family clears just 2
hectares of forest a year, making a potential clearing rate of 72 000 hectares
a year. This is small compared with the estimated 500 000 hectares logged
by timber companies each year – and insignificant if Chin is right that
only 5 per cent of the land cleared by shifting cultivators is virgin forest,
the rest being previously cultivated plots. Unlike the loggers, shifting
cultivators have an intimate knowlege of the forest. They know how to use
its resources in a genuinely sustain able way. To blame peasant farmers
for the loss of the forests, says Chin, is ‘completely misleading and can
only be intended to confuse’.

Sarawak is a state that has recently grown very dependent on the logging
business for its prosperity, though it is a prosperity reserved for the
few. During the 1980s, the annual harvest of logs doubled. Timber now generates
about Pounds sterling 2.5 billion a year in export earnings, while levies
and the sale of logging concessions provide the state with half of its revenues.
Some 90 per cent of the exports are of high-quality hardwood logs. Sarawak
completely dominates the world market in hardwood logs, exporting around
15 million cubic metres a year, while no other country (let alone a state
within a country) exceeds 1 million cubic metres.

The boom began in the mid-1980s in response to the gap in international
trade created by the fall of Marcos in the Philippines and Indonesia’s ban
on exports of logs. Sarawak’s state government handed out concessions to
timber firms to exploit large areas of inland forests for the first time.
And the firms began to move their heavy equipment to areas inhabited by
people whose survival depended almost entirely on the products of the jungle.
A few village elders were bought off; a few young men got jobs with the
timber gangs. But otherwise the communities gained little. Two years ago,
a report by the ITTO concluded: ‘Some huge fortunes have been made by the
concessionaires in Sarawak. (Yet village) people appear to be on roughly
the same standard of living as 20 years ago.’

In 1987, at the height of the scramble to gain access to the inland
forests, an extraordinary public row between the state’s chief minister
Abdul Taib Mahmud and his predecessor and uncle, Tun Rahman, exposed endemic
corruption in the system for awarding concessions. It began when Taib froze
timber concessions covering more than 10 000 square kilometres (a quarter
of the state’s concessions), alleging that the licences had been corruptly
handed out by Rahman ‘to many of his allies (and to) companies in which
his relatives have interests’. Concession-holders included three of Rahman’s
brothers-in-law and three nephews as well as his daughters. The ageing Rahman
hit back with his own equally long list of ‘Taib’s misdeeds’. Malaysia’s
main newspaper, the New Straits Times, concluded that virtually every assemblyman
in the state legislature and many of their relatives had become millionaires
through timber concessions. Not that many of them actually engaged in the
timber business: this was done by Chinese subcontractors, who have succeeded
in sharing in the wealth without wallowing in the scandal.

The consequences for the inhabitants of the forests when the loggers
arrive to make their fortunes can be horrific. A report by officers for
the Baram district, at the heart of the logging boom, described the effect:
‘The logging operators bring along tonnes of their equipment and plant .
. . building criss-cross roads and railways, bulldozing hills, mountains
and plains with devastating effect. Sometimes it has to cross over the local
peoples’ customary land, paddy farms, gardens, cemeteries, pipelines and
catchment areas (for water) and other private properties. Extraction of
timber has caused extensive and irreparable damage to the natural land surface
and vegetation.’

From 1986 the local people began to fight back. Initially, they arrived
at logging camps demanding money, but soon, helped by Harrison Ngau, a young
local activist employed by the Malaysian branch of Friends of the Earth,
they began to organise. They gave up extortion and instead substituted passive
protests, and they made legal representations that the government and the
loggers were ignoring native land rights in their rush to remove timber
from the forests.

Ngau, a native Kayan, had seen the destruction of the ecology, local
economy and social life of his own native longhouse, at Long Kesseh on the
River Baram, that had followed the arrival of loggers. Elders had been corrupted
by bribes; there was no longer food left from their gardens to sell in local
markets; people went hungry; there was alcoholism.

The first blockades were erected early in 1988 by groups of Penan, a
small tribe of some 10 000 hunter-gatherers from the remoter parts of Baram.
From there the protests swiftly spread and by May members of the Penan,
Kelabit, Kayan and Iban tribes across much of northern Sarawak had begun
to erect barricades across the logging roads onto their land, sometimes
halting logging operations for months on end. The timber companies lost
millions of pounds.

Since then, despite hundreds of arrests and trials (during which the
local judiciary have shown remarkable independence – not finding a single
native guilty, so far), the blockades have continued, with new ones erected
in March this year.

Ngau’s office in the forest frontier town of Marudi has become a centre
for the tribal rebellion, providing legal advice, messenger service, secretariat
and international press centre for the people of the Sarawak forests. Through
his links to Friends of the Earth offices in London, Washington and elsewhere,
the native protests have become known worldwide. Ngau has brought international
pressure to bear on the state and perhaps particularly the federal government
in Kuala Lumpur. It was this pressure that forced Taib to invite an ITTO
mission to visit Sarawak and to make recommendations for the management
of the state’s forests. Opponents of logging see the invitation as an attempt
to buy time. Certainly, some foresters see it that way. Many of them now
operate 24 hours a day in the belief that their operations might soon be
shut down.

Cranbrook’s mission is the first of its kind and is being made to a
region where the international trade in tropical timber is most vulnerable
to charges that it is ransacking the rainforests. The attention that major
environment groups give to the ITTO ensures that Cranbrook’s report will
be read around the world. Yet there remain serious doubts about whether
the ITTO should have become an arbiter on the state of the world’s rainforests.
Is a club of governments representing nations that produce and consume tropical
timber the right forum for decisions about the ecology of forests, let alone
the fate of the people who live in the forests? The mission contains no
social scientists or lawyers to investigate the complex issues of land law
at the heart of the natives’ case. Its terms of reference, while requiring
the mission to look at ‘ecological balance’, make no mention of native peoples
at all.

Brian Johnson, a noted British forestry consultant, complained in a
lecture recently that scientists are increasingly being put in the position
of ruling on issues in the rainforests that are essentially political, economic
and legal. The suspicion must be that, for their different reasons, both
environmentalists and forestry diplomats have done precisely that in asking
Cranbrook to pronounce on the fate of Sarawak.

For the people that live in them, forests are about much more than timber.
They contain animals to be hunted, fruit and nuts and manioc and rattan
and many other products that sustain hundreds of thousands of people. A
recent study by Julian Caldecott for WWF Malaysia concluded that the production
of ‘bush meat’ in Sarawak is 20 000 tonnes per year, with a market value
of around Pounds sterling 80 million. It is clear that the non-timber products
of the forest are a cornerstone of the state’s economy, though they rarely
turn up in official economic statistics.

This local economy is already under threat. Consumption of bush meat
has fallen to a fraction of its former level, says Caldecott, who blames
the timber industry for frightening animals away. Other studies blame the
destruction of the forests for declining local markets in fish, nuts and
resins, and in rattan and bamboo goods. The Penan recently called for a
ban on the export of rattan that had not been woven into products such as
baskets or furniture. Few of these issues are within the remit of the mission.

The president of Friends of the Earth in Malaysia, Mohamed Idris, believes
that the ITTO is the wrong body to make recommendations for the conservation
of rainforests. ‘This is a body interested in promoting timber trade,’ he
says. ‘The forest to them is a source of profit.’ For Idris, the battle
for the forests of Sarawak is ‘a clash of different systems, of different
civilisations – on one side a powerful modern system motivated by greed;
on the other a traditional system that is oriented towards fulfilling human
needs. Despite the so-called greatness of knowledge of modern science and
technology, the modern man is far less knowledgeable, in fact far more stupid,
than the indigenous, native man who lives close to nature.’

Is this romantic whimsy? Wong would say so. He and his government believe
that the Penan – ‘a likeable, simple people’ – must be persuaded to abandon
their nomadic ways and to ‘settle down’. While the Penan are relatively
unchanged by modern ways, other groups have already seen many changes. Angry
tribespeople who travel downstream from their longhouses to visit Friends
of the Earth’s office in Marudi see no contradiction about returning home
clutching a Yamaha outboard motor, toilet rolls and bars of Cadbury’s chocolate.
But are they to be despised for wanting the best of the new and old worlds?
Jewin Lehnan, chairman of the newly formed Sarawak Penan Association, says:
‘It’s simply wrong to say we don’t want development. But by development
we don’t mean timber companies invading our land. We want the right to live
here, and use our land, without disturbance. Then we want development in
terms of schooling for our children and clinics to treat illnesses. But
all these things we can only get when the logging stops and our rights are
°ù±ð³¦´Ç²µ²Ô¾±²õ±ð»å.’

One Western scientist who knows the Sarawak forests better than most
is Robin Hanbury-Tenison. He spent more than a year with the Penan in the
1970s, while head of an international science expedition to the Gunung Mulu
area in highland Sarawak. More recently, he joined environmentalists on
a fact-finding tour of the state and, as president of Survival International,
sent a memorandum to the ITTO calling on Cranbrook to explore native issues.
‘Far from being wild nomads,’ he said, ‘the Penan have an intimate association
with and detailed knowledge of their forest.’ His scientific expedition
had contained some of the best biologists in the world, yet, he says, ‘it
was universally acknowledged by those scientists that the Penan were their
forest professors. It is with the Penan that the real wealth of the rainforest
±ô¾±±ð²õ.’

Fred Pearce is the author of Green Warriors, a study of the international
environment movement to be published this autumn by Bodley Head.