Amid Pandemic, Malaysia Grants Timber Giant Logging Permit on Indigenous Land in Borneo

Concession to extract timber from 148,000 hectares in upper Baram was granted despite repeated objections from local communities.

Main photo: Communities like Long Tungan are working hard to find a way to protect their lands and save some of the most valuable carbon and biodiversity stocks we have left. Photo courtesy of The Borneo Project.

A wild boar hightails it into the forest as we approach the village of Long Tungan in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, some 556 miles northeast of the state capital, Kuching. In the driver’s seat of our pickup truck, Erang Ngang says that if his gun had been within reach he could have given the beastie a run for its money. He is exhausted from our eight-hour drive up the corrugated logging road, but he isn’t joking.

It’s January 2020, prime fruit and hunting season in the region, so spirits are high and bellies are stuffed with rambutan, roast boar, and crackling. We’re here to visit our field technicians for the Baram Heritage Survey — a project that hires indigenous citizen scientists to patrol and monitor their own lands. At Borneo Project, where I work, we are excited about this project that honors indigenous knowledge. In the middle of an extinction crisis and a climate crisis, communities like Long Tungan are working hard to find a way to protect their lands and save some of the most valuable carbon and biodiversity stocks we have left.

From this point on the village is only accessible by boat, so we stuff our packs into garbage bags on the riverbank and stack them on the waiting boat. Birds bicker over ripe fruit in the trees above, interposed with the occasional thud of fruit hitting the ground. The phone signal here won’t be strong enough to read the news for the next couple of days, but we’ve heard about the nasty virus making its way around China. No one yet knows the havoc the coronavirus is about to wreak on the world. We’re also blissfully unaware that the Malaysian timber company, Samling, is about to receive approval to log the very land on which we stand.

Home to the Kenyah Jamok people, Long Tungan is a magnificent place. The terrain of the Baram region is carved out with limestone cliffs, leafy trails, dipterocarp trees and roots, and mossy streams. Snaking its way through the middle is the mighty Baram river — lifesource for dozens of villages, around 20,000 indigenous people, and a multitude of endemic plant and animal species.

After dumping our bags in the longhouse, we head to the kitchen, where our hosts crack open three local species of durian for us to try, awaiting our reaction to the creamy, sweet taste. We are joined by Christie Apoi and Jeremiah Ngang, our field technicians for the Jamok cluster. The two men patrol 32 kilometres every month, monitoring the forest for signs of its spectacular array of primates, felines, reptiles, and birds.

In November last year, I had tagged along with them when they opened their first transect path. I spent most of my time flicking bugs off my tucked-in socks and sliding butt-first downhill when the soil gave way. I spotted precisely zero animals. Apoi and Ngang, on the other hand, pointed out the faint sound of nearby barking deer and showed me the bite marks where a palm civet had munched on some figs.

Field technicians like them, who have lived their entire lives by these forests, see what outsiders are blind to. They have no trouble spotting sun bear claw marks on trees, or mud rubbed on trees as a sign of deer, or pangolin nests. They can distinguish between the sounds of the six different hornbills that live there and can tell if a rambutan was eaten by a binturong or a civet, and of course whose poo belongs to whom.

Ngang and Apoi feed their sightings back to a database using the Baram Heritage Survey smartphone app, and the sightings are then analyzed by local and international researchers. John Jau Sigau, a community leader of Long Tungan, hopes that this baseline data can inform future forest management plans and strengthen their claims against logging. “We are working hard on community conservation to create long-term sustainable jobs in our forests,” he told me over WhatsApp in May. “Not to chop it all down for short-term gain.”

Octogenarian matriarchs who have lived in Long Tungan their whole lives. It’s heartbreaking to think that this magnificent place is scheduled to be scarred by more logging, and that this way of life might be gone within a generation. Photo courtesy of The Borneo Project.

After dinner, we go in search of our favourite octogenarian matriarchs, their ears stretched long with the brass ornaments that represent power and cultural pride. These women have lived in the village their whole lives and although I can’t speak a lick of Kenyah, we communicate via grin-nodding, handshakes, and rice wine. It’s heartbreaking to think that this magnificent place is scheduled to be scarred by more logging, and that this way of life might be gone within a generation.

On April 12, months after I was back in Melbourne, and while Malaysia, like most countries across the world was in lockdown due to the pandemic, the Malaysia Timber Certification Council gave the timber giant Samling permission to extract timber from the 148,000 hectare Gerenai Forest Management Unit, a forested area ten times the size of San Francisco. The Jamok community is particularly concerned about its communal forest reserve, a community-protected swath of forest within the logging concession area where no one is allowed to cut any plant or hunt any animal without the express permission of the community. Long Tungan has done everything in its power to fight the Gerenai concession, and they don’t want to resort to physically stopping the bulldozers, which is what they had to do in 2018 when Samling illegally entered their forest reserve. This time, Samling will have all their paperwork in order.

It’s hard to believe that this concession went through during a lockdown despite repeated objections from the village. What is harder to believe, is that the concession was approved without a single person from the logging company or the certification body speaking to a single person from Long Tungan. But our sources in the region say that is exactly what happened.

We are told by other villages in the Gerenai concession that even when the company does conduct community consultations, they are totally inadequate. Sometimes they handpick a few people from the village, bring them over to the logging camp, have a chat, and grab some signatures. They can then tick the box that says they obtained free, prior and informed consent.

This lack of real consultation is in direct contravention of the Malaysia Timber Certification Scheme to which Samling is bound. Without the certification, the company can’t sell the timber it harvests in international markets. The people of Long Tungan will now have their ancestral carpet ripped out from under them so that we in the West can buy supposedly guilt-free door frames and coffee tables.

“The Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme is supposed to protect indigenous rights,” explains Peter Kallang, Chairman of local advocacy group SAVE Rivers. “But the story of Gerenai is just one of the many examples that demonstrate how the system is toothless in practice.”

I hope that the people of Long Tungan don’t need to put bodies in the path of bulldozers again in order to save what is rightfully theirs, what we know should be rightfully protected as the black and indigenous lives matter movements start to burn bright around the world. Maybe this recognition won’t make it to the right boardrooms in Sarawak any time soon, but I hope that when I am as old as the matriarchs of Long Tungan there will still be birds squabbling over fruit and beasties to chase. For now, we will have to wait and see whether the timber certification body rethinks its motivations and starts to listen to voices on the ground, to those who know the forest best.

Fiona McAlpine

Fiona McAlpine is the Communications Manager for The Borneo Project: an Oakland based non-profit that has worked with grassroots activists in Malaysian Borneo for over 25 years. You can find out more about The Borneo Project here or support their work here. The Borneo Project is a project of Earth Island.