杏吧原创

THE PACKS of plywood and veneer stacked up in the warehouse at Samling Plywood鈥檚 factory on the River Baram in Sarawak bear the message that they are manufactured 鈥渇rom sustainable resources鈥�. This should mean that every tree chopped down from the surrounding forest to feed the factory is replaced by another. 鈥淥h yes, we are sure of this,鈥� says Yoshimisha Nakajima, the jovial Japanese manager of the factory. 鈥淲e buy from many suppliers. But all Sarawak鈥檚 timber is sustainable.鈥�

The environmentalists鈥� watchword of sustainability is often heard in Sarawak, the Malaysian state that occupies the northeastern slice of the island of Borneo. 鈥淥f course we protect our forests,鈥� Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak鈥檚 chief minister, who hands out logging concessions, told me. 鈥淧eople here love nature. I started arguing for sustainable forestry as long ago as 1966.鈥� He claims that Sarawak is close to meeting the recommendations made in 1990 by a mission from the International Tropical Timber Organisation, the industry鈥檚 regulatory body. But the state鈥檚 own statistics tell a different story. They show that timber companies operating in Sarawak are harvesting more than twice as much timber as they should, in what many greens regard as the world鈥檚 most unsustainable timber operation.

Flying over the River Baram upstream from Samling鈥檚 factory, you can watch boats guiding huge rafts of logs down the river. At almost every bend there seems to be a timber yard. Everywhere the hills are marked by great yellow weals of skid tracks and roads, where logs are dragged from the forest to be driven away. In the heavily logged areas silt reddens the river鈥檚 muddy-brown waters. And in its upper reaches, where the logging roads are only now starting to penetrate, forest dwellers are leaving their longhouses to man blockades on the logging roads in a desperate last bid to protect their hunting grounds, burial sites and forest gardens.

The forests of Borneo, once among the most remote on Earth, are now alive with the sound of chain saws and tractors crashing through the undergrowth. 鈥淣owhere in the world are the forests being chopped down with such ferocity and speed as in Sarawak,鈥� claims Sahabat Alam Malaysia, the local branch of Friends of the Earth. Around 16 million cubic metres of timber will emerge from the Sarawak forests this year, virtually all of it hardwood. But the benefits for locals are limited: only a fraction of the timber is processed in Sarawak at factories like Samling鈥檚. Most is shipped as logs to Japan, Korea and Taiwan, and a small amount goes to Europe. Two-thirds of all the tropical hardwood logs sold internationally come from Sarawak.

For several years, the environmental case against Sarawak鈥檚 timber industry has captured the headlines. More recently, Malaysian officials have been striding back with claims that Sarawak has entered a new era of sustainable logging. This year, Malaysia鈥檚 Minister of Primary Industries, Lim Keng Yaik, invited journalists on all-expenses-paid trips to 鈥渟ee for themselves鈥� what is going on. Some have come back impressed: Richard Evans reported in Geographical magazine that forestry in Sarawak had 鈥渃hanged for the better鈥�. But the party I travelled with was struck more by the disparity between what scientists and officials said in formal meetings and what they confided privately. On forest walks, the thin veneer of sustainability quickly peeled away.

Logging onslaught

Sarawak is an empty land almost the area of England but with a population of around 1.5 million. Just over 70 per cent, or 8.7 million hectares, is still covered by natural forest, the state government says. Until about twenty years ago, most of the state鈥檚 forestry took place in the accessible mangrove and peat swamp forests along the coast. Logs were dragged off the flat, often boggy land along networks of wooden rails, some of which can still be seen from the air near the River Baram. But by the 1970s, most of these forests had been exhausted, and the valuable reserves of slow growing ramin wood in the peat swamps had largely gone. So the loggers moved inland, to the forests that cover Sarawak鈥檚 hills. Timber output from these forests has quadrupled over the past decade or so. The key question is whether they can survive this onslaught.

As elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the dominant tree family is the Dipterocarpaceae. Dipterocarp forests have a distinctive pattern of occasional large trees emerging from a thick cauliflower-like canopy, and are biologically extremely diverse. Among the trees are hardwoods such as meranti and keruing, which go to make furniture, panelling, doors and plywood. These hardwoods currently fetch up to $350 per cubic metre, which makes logging a lucrative business. The timber industry is the biggest employer in Sarawak and provides a third of the state government鈥檚 revenues. No wonder state publicity calls the forests 鈥済reen gold鈥�.

But will the hill forests go the same way as the peat swamp forests? Sarawak鈥檚 state forest department claims that they won鈥檛. Two-thirds of the forest land, it says, is zoned to become part of the 鈥減ermanent forest estate鈥�. In other words, about half the entire state will be harvested for timber, but with logging managed in a way that will keep it tree-covered forever. A further 1 million hectares of forest is to be totally protected in parks and reserves. Only the remainder, designated 鈥渟tateland forest鈥�, will eventually be cleared for agriculture, housing or other developments.

There are two big questions. How permanent will the permanent forest estate really be? And what impact is all this activity having on the people who have traditionally lived there and on the forest鈥檚 wildlife?

Exploitation of the permanent forest estate is officially governed by the selective management system, which aims 鈥渢o remove selectively in a single felling operation the mature and over-mature trees, while leaving behind a residual stand with a sufficient number of trees 鈥� to form the next crop鈥�. Foresters are supposed to cut between 8 and 12 trees per hectare, leaving behind a minimum of 32 trees with a trunk diameter of more than 30 centimetres. They are also supposed to leave behind all dipterocarps with a diameter of less than 60 centimetres. In fact, many of the trunks I saw piled up at Samling Plywood were thinner than that.

Malaysian foresters say that the hill dipterocarp forests regrow easily. On research plots, 20 000 new seedlings per hectare are growing four years after trees were felled there. Many are commercially valueless, but a quarter of them will be dipterocarp species. 鈥淭his is a very crowded forest, so we don鈥檛 have to do enrichment planting,鈥� says James Mamit, head of environment at Sarawak鈥檚 Ministry of Resource Planning. Even so, the most valuable trees, such as the meranti, are the slow growers. It takes 70 years for the trunk of a meranti to grow to a diameter of 70 centimetres.

Misleading claims

Under the management system, each logging concession is divided into sectors, or 鈥渃oupes鈥�, which are logged in rotation. When the 25-year logging cycle is complete, every coupe will have been logged once and the loggers will start again at the beginning. That, at least, is the theory. In 1989, under intense pressure from environmentalists, the Sarawak government invited the International Tropical Timber Organisation to send a team of foresters, led by the British naturalist Lord Cranbrook, to examine what was happening in practice and advice on improvements.

As we were being shown round by Malaysian officials, we were repeatedly told that the state had now implemented most of the team鈥檚 recommendations. But this is palpably not so. The most quoted conclusion of Cranbrook鈥檚 1990 report was that the 鈥渟ustainable鈥� timber yield from the state鈥檚 forests was 9.2 million cubic metres a year. Malaysian officials insist that, with yield in the permanent forest estate down to 9.5 million cubic metres, they were close to meeting the target.

This claim is seriously misleading, for two reasons. First, Cranbrook鈥檚 target figure, as his report makes clear, relates to the whole of Sarawak鈥檚 forest, not just the permanent forest estate. Output from the entire state this year, say officials, will be 15.8 million cubic metres. That is 70 per cent over the target.

What鈥檚 more, this target assumed a dramatic improvement to forestry practice. But as Cranbrook told New 杏吧原创, the government 鈥渉as not carried out many of the management recommendations that would make it sustainable鈥�. Top of his list was 鈥渓iberation thinning鈥� 鈥� a method of weeding out noncommercial tree species to encourage growth of the commercially valuable trees. He warned that liberation thinning would be costly, because it requires trained crews, and 鈥渨ould have to be applied throughout current logging areas, starting promptly鈥�. But today, the forest department says 鈥渓iberation thinning is not widely applied鈥�. It claims new research findings have shown it to be unnecessary.

Without liberation thinning, Cranbrook said, the maximum sustainable yield from the permanent forest estate and the entire forest would be 4.1 and 6.3 million cubic metres respectively. Put another way, the forest is still being logged at more than twice the rate that the ITTO report said would be sustainable with existing techniques.

Whichever way you look at it, Sarawak is destroying its forests. A key problem is that the 25-year logging cycle is much shorter than Cranbrook believes is sustainable. Using research from Sarawak research plots, he concluded that to maintain current target yields of 38 cubic metres per hectare, the logging cycle should be 40 years using liberation thinning, and 45 years if not. Officials in Kuala Lumpur do not go out of their way to defend the policy. 鈥淪arawak tells us 24 years is sufficient for them,鈥� says Kannan Narayan, deputy secretary general at the Malaysian Ministry of Primary Industries. 鈥淲e take their word for it.鈥�

Sarawak鈥檚 forest department insists that its forest can keep up. It says that economically valuable timber grows at between 2 and 3.6 cubic metres per hectare per year. The lower figure would give 50 cubic metres of growth over a logging cycle, so the logging is sustainable, it argues.

But does commercial timber really grow as fast as this? The World Bank, in a report on Malaysian forestry in 1991, said that the state was 鈥渆xcessively optimistic about the rate of regrowth of commercial timber鈥�, and suggested that the true growth rate could be only 1 cubic metre, half the state鈥檚 lower estimate. Unless there was an immediate drastic slowdown in output, 鈥渁 collision with reality 鈥� is unavoidable鈥�, the report predicted.

Broken trees

Another imponderable is the damage done to the forest in extracting the timber. State officials say that they 鈥渢ake account of damage to forests鈥�, but on our trip no one could show us how or where. The department claims that 鈥渟elective harvesting does little damage鈥�. Nobody really believes that, not even the department鈥檚 researchers.

The latest data come in a report by forest department engineer Danny Chua Kee Hui, which compares the environmental impact of conventional tractor logging and helicopter logging. This study found that during tractor logging on hilly terrain of the kind routinely logged today, an average of five trees, mostly noncommercial species, were left broken on the forest floor for every tree cut down and taken for sale. Most were deliberately removed to clear the skid trails, which occupied 6 per cent of the area being logged.

Sarawak tractor drivers are a notorious breed: careful forest husbandry is not their style. 鈥淭hese guys are suicidal,鈥� said an incredulous American helilogger as we watched a tractor career down a hill track on two wheels, while carrying a five-tonne log in its grab. From the air, the long-term damage from roads and skid trails is obvious. Yellow weals scar the landscape even where there has been no logging for many years. There are some old tracks turning green with new vegetation, but not many.

Chua鈥檚 report found that the silt load in streams increases 12-fold during logging, mainly because heavy machinery erodes the hillside by damaging vegetation and churning up soils which are then washed away. Chua also said that more than 18 per cent of the forest canopy was opened up by tractor logging, half of this from the construction of skid trails and roads.

There is, in any case, widespread flouting of the regulations, often by the networks of subcontractors who do most of the work in the forests. The World Bank report noted that most concessions run only for a single logging cycle, so the concession holder has no incentive to preserve the forest for the next cycle. All this suggests that the World Bank could have been right to conclude that the logged areas of the permanent forest estate in Sarawak would not be ready for logging again until the middle of the next century and that forestry in Sarawak would shortly become a 鈥渟unset industry鈥�.

Damage on this scale also threatens the prospects of any regeneration of the forest. 鈥淚f you open the forests too much, you get increased runoff and soil erosion,鈥� says Harry Cheah of the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM). 鈥淭he sun dries up the soil and then seeds won鈥檛 grow.鈥� The risks are increased, he says, because logging is carried out by heavy machinery, which compacts the soils.

The forest鈥檚 ecology is bound to be put at risk. Animals will flee from the commotion caused by mechanised logging, which is why around 10 per cent of the permanent forest estate is set aside as logging-free refuges from which the forest will, in theory, recolonise. However, Steven Adler, a forester from ITTO working with the Sarawak government, says: 鈥�90 per cent of the biodiversity in the forest is insects, and these are very difficult to study. We don鈥檛 know how important they are to the ecosystem.鈥�

One of the state鈥檚 parks managers told us candidly: 鈥淭he foresters have no real data on sustainable forestry as regards biodiversity. The permanent forest estate is useless for conserving biodiversity. The forest will take hundreds of years to recover.鈥� So we asked if the forest department could show us some forests logged 25 years ago, to see whether they had recovered. They could not. Not even a research plot. According to Adler, none of the hill dipterocarp research plots in the Niah forest reserve near Bintula has been monitored for longer than 17 years after logging.

However good or bad the rules in the permanent forest estate, only a little over half of the timber from the Sarawak rainforest is cut from it. The rest, an estimated 6.3 million cubic metres this year, comes from the stateland forests earmarked for eventual clearance as part of the Sarawak鈥檚 drive for economic development. Nobody pretends that sustainable forestry is being practised here. Over the past four years, 265 000 hectares of stateland has been cleared of forest. The clearance rate in 1993, at 75 000 hectares, was 40 per cent up on 1990, the time of Cranbrook鈥檚 mission. We failed to establish what environmental safeguards there were to prevent soil erosion and protect streams during this clearance. And we remained unclear about whether the forests could be cut only where there was a specific need to provide land for development, as is the case in mainland Malaysia. On this point the Malaysian authorities said only that 鈥渃oncessions in stateland forests are by its [sic] very nature part and parcel of development plans.鈥�

Degraded scrub

We we told that stateland forests were badly needed to provide new land for development of Sarawak. Yet only 500 000 hectares of the state, about 4 per cent of its area, has so far been used for crops 鈥� mostly rubber and oil-palm trees. And in our flights over the state we saw large areas of degraded scrub crying out to be put to some economic use.

Back in Kuala Lumpur, Lim, the primary industries minister, confided that 鈥渋n the permanent forest estate, they have to give the concessions to the professionals in sustainable logging. But to be candid, they give the concessions in the stateland forests to their friends.鈥� The state government鈥檚 main asset is its right to allocate use of land. About 10 concession holders now dominate a business worth $2 billion annually, say officials in Kuching, Sarawak鈥檚 capital.

What about the native peoples of the forests and the shifting cultivation and hunting they practise? The most famous of these peoples, the nomadic Penan, have their own reserve, but the rest are regarded as economically backward and ecologically destructive. 鈥淭he most serious threat faced by the state鈥檚 forests is that posed by shifting cultivation,鈥� claims the Sarawak Forest Department. It says that Landsat images from 1985 revealed that 3.3 million hectares of forests, amounting to about a quarter of the country, has been 鈥渁dversely affected by shifting cultivation鈥�. Adawaiah Zakaria, undersecretary for forestry in Kuala Lumpur, says that such land had been 鈥渄evastated鈥� and, unlike selectively logged forests, 鈥渃annot regenerate on its own鈥�. Many scientists denounce such claims. But in any case, everybody admits that shifting cultivation is on the decline. It is 鈥渁lmost finished now鈥�, says Taib. 鈥淭he people know they can go and work in the timber industry.鈥�

The demonology is contradictory. The people who lived this way of life are painted alternately as destroying the forests and abandoning them. Both arguments are used to justify the state鈥檚 attempts to eat away at traditional 鈥渘ative customary land rights鈥�. These rights cover most of the stateland forests and enshrine in law the rights of forest dwellers to continue to use the forests that they occupied, cultivated or used as burial grounds or places of worship before 1958.

In October this year, Taib announced a new forest policy under which 鈥渋dle鈥� native lands 鈥渨ill be developed 鈥� to ensure sufficient supply of logs.鈥� The authorities told New 杏吧原创 the idea was 鈥渢o rehabilitate lands denuded by shifting cultivation with forest plantations鈥�. But Marcus Colchester of the Malaysia-based World Rainforest Movement argues that this 鈥渋dle鈥� land is 鈥渙ften forest fallows, an integral part of the cycle of shifting cultivation, or forest reserves used for hunting鈥�.

The Malaysian federal government is embarrassed at what is going on and has tried to rein Sarawak in. Lim says he 鈥渧irtually forced鈥� the state to accept Cranbrook鈥檚 ITTO mission. He has also attempted to persuade the state government to end the export of logs and to require companies to process their timber before exporting it, but without much success. Officials say that the federal government fears to use the big stick in case it leads to Sarawak trying to break away from the federation. In this political no-go area, the trashing of Sarawak鈥檚 forests goes on, supported by the fiction of 鈥渟ustainability鈥� and the notion that it will help to industrialise the state.

Far from investing their large profits in Sarawak, however, the local timber barons are exporting their cash. In the expectation of reduced pickings at home as the forests become logged out, they are buying up logging rights to virgin forests elsewhere, and are taking their logging methods with them. Take Tiong Hiew King who is, according to the Asian Wall Street Journal, one of the world鈥檚 richest timber magnates through his 1 million hectares of logging concessions in Sarawak, mostly along the River Baram. His company, Rimbunan Hijau, has bought concessions to 3 million hectares of forest in Papua New Guinea. Already he is reputed to control two-thirds of that country鈥檚 timber exports.

Malaysia has set itself the ambitious task of industrialising its economy by the year 2020. By the time it gets there, most of Sarawak鈥檚 鈥済reen gold鈥� will have gone. And the people of the state may be left wondering precisely what happened to the sustainable economic development they were promised.