Word: sarawak
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When timber interests first came to Ngau's area in the state of Sarawak in 1977, several thousand natives lived entirely off the forests. But logging and settlement plans have reduced that number to fewer than 500 Penan tribesmen, who still cling to nomadic ways. Even these remaining nomadic clans are threatened by a powerful alliance of Japanese trading companies, merchants and local politicians, who continue to push logging operations ever deeper into the interior...
Ngau, now 30, became concerned about logging in the late 1970s when its devastating effects began to become apparent. In 1982 he set up a branch of Friends of the Earth in Sarawak to help preserve the forests the Penans call "our bank and our shops." Ngau and his colleagues became investigators, exposing links between logging companies and politicians. Later, when the Penans found the courts stacked in favor of timber interests, they took the desperate step of blockading logging roads. Ngau and Friends of the Earth provided legal help and made the Penans' plight the focus of international protests...
Nearly 90% of the lumber now comes from Sarawak and Sabah, the two Malaysian states on Borneo. On paper at least, Malaysia, a well-off country with a relatively small population (17.4 million), has a model plan for the "sustainable development" of its forests. The reality is that neither the overall plan nor specific regulations have had much impact, and logging operations continue essentially uncontrolled. "In theory everything is fine," says S.C. Chin, a Malaysian forestry expert. "But 20 years ago, Thailand and the Philippines said everything was fine too, and now they have largely been stripped...
Environmentalists fear that the same thing will happen in Sarawak and Sabah, which contain some of the oldest rain forests on earth. Chin estimates that careless, wholesale cutting will denude the remaining forests of their commercial timber within as little as seven years. Local officials have given loggers access to an estimated 95% of Sarawak's forests that are outside existing or proposed parks and protected areas. Even those tracts are coveted by corrupt politicians. According to Harrison Ngau, a Sarawak native being held under house arrest for taking part in antilogging protests, some forests have been excised from protected...
Many of the tribal blockades have been set up on the Limbang road, which is one of the main logging arteries in Sarawak. Construction of the road during the mid-1980s was partly financed with a 200 million yen ($842,000) low- interest loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency ostensibly to benefit the very people who are today fighting the logging traffic. Since JICA is not supposed to give funds to support Japanese commercial ventures abroad, the road has provided ammunition for those who argue that increased foreign aid by the Japanese will only further jeopardize the global environment...