Malaysia

The High Court in Kuching, the capital city of the East Malaysian state of Sarawak in the island of Borneo, has made a landmark decision when it ruled out on last 20 February that any joint venture agreement between a non-native and native in oil palm plantation is in contravention of the Land Code that provides that ‘a person who is not a native of Sarawak may not acquire any rights or privileges whatever over native customary right”.

The Penan have been living in the rainforests of Sarawak since time immemorial. They used to hunt and gather food from the rainforest and they lived on sago, a starch extracted from the pith of sago palm stems, until the 1950s, when they decided to settle at village locations where they live today. (1)

On the World Indigenous Peoples Day – 9th August 2009 – the Malaysian Indigenous Peoples Organisations Coalition called on for Malaysian State governments “to stop large-scale plantations and other extractive activities on our customary lands until effective measures to safeguard our rights and the environment are in place”.

Heavy rains started pouring on January 14 and continued for almost one month in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak, hitting especially the central and northern region. 

Oil palm firms are making a fortune in Malaysia particularly with the current agrofuel rush. But none of it goes to those who put their blood and flesh to make the money come out from oil palm plantations (see WRM Bulletin Nº 134). Migrant workers from Indonesia appear to be among those who get the worst deal.

In Malaysia, palm oil expansion goes hand in hand with deforestation –despite government officials claiming otherwise. A press release issued by Sahabat Alam Malaysia [SAM] Friends of the Earth, Malaysia, on August 6, 2008, reveals that some 2.8 million ha of largely forest land in Sarawak has been handed out for plantation concessions of mainly oil palm and fast-growing pulpwood trees.

In  last month’s WRM bulletin we recalled the long standing battle that local communities had waged for Sarawak’s forests, notably through road blockades for stopping the entry of logging trucks into their territories.

In Europe and the US, palm oil is being promoted as an agrofuel that will allegedly prevent the increase of carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere. Of course, it is the large scale and not the small-scale diversified model which is being implemented and in fact it’s just a way of delaying the imperative need of changing energy-intensive production, consumer and trade patterns. Oil palm plantations for agrofuel just add to the already damaging effects of palm tree plantations for industrial use.

In 1989, WRM and Sahabat Alam Malaysia (Friends of the Earth) produced the publication “The Battle for Sarawak’s Forests”, which documented not only the destruction of forests and forest peoples’ livelihoods in Sarawak, but also the local resistance process, which included major road blockades established as from 1987 by local communities for stopping the entry of logging trucks into their territories.

Pesticides negatively impact the health and lives of millions of agricultural pesticide users, their communities and consumers worldwide –they also cause great damage to biodiversity and the environment. The pesticides used in oil palm plantations have adverse impacts on human health and the environment. Agricultural workers in oil palm plantations are heavily exposed to pesticides and suffer a range of dangerous acute and chronic health effects, though many remain tragically ignorant of the causes.

The present expansion of monoculture tree plantations has not happened by chance or just because some governments got this idea. On the contrary, it is the result of the action of a group of actors that set out to promote such plantations. In the fifties, the FAO became the main ideologist behind the large scale monoculture eucalyptus and pine plantation model in the South (as part of the so-called Green Revolution, promoted by this organization), as a response to the needs of large industrial companies that were exhausting their traditional sources of raw material.

An article from Jennifer Mourin, deputy executive director of Pesticide Action Network’s regional office for Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP), referred to a situation which is hardly unique in the Malaysian oil palm sector: “Rajam worked as a pesticide sprayer on an estate earning a daily wage of RM18. The main pesticide she sprayed was paraquat [herbicide]. She was not provided any protective clothing such as boots, masks, gloves, goggles or apron.