The NGO Human Right Watch has, in collaboration with other international organisations, today issued a devastating report on Sarawak’s timber industry as it urges the European Union to categorise all Sarawak products as “High Risk” in advance of new laws to counter deforestation.
The critique follows on the heels of last week’s arrest of illegal immigrants found working for Borneoland Timber Resources in Baram, after both the Sarawak Forest Department and Malaysian Chief Executive of the International Tropical Timber Organisation had for months ignored complaints of logging by the crony company in the Suling Sela’an Protected Forest area.
A joint statement to the European Commissioner for the Environment, Oceans, and Fisheries by Human Rights Watch, RimbaWatch, SAVE Rivers, KERUAN, Bruno Manser Fonds, and The Borneo Project explains:
Under Malaysia’s federal form of government, individual states have jurisdiction over the administration of land and forests… we have concluded that the state of Sarawak has not effectively enforced measures to tackle deforestation and protect human rights, and it has not made relevant data available. Its legal framework has failed to uphold Indigenous peoples’ rights to own and control their land, participate in decision-making, and access important information that impacts their rights and livelihoods. Where laws and standards do exist, they have rarely been enforced.
The report follows a year long study into Sarawak’s failings which focuses on the stunning lack of transparency over the granting of concessions combined with failures of basic consultation of native communities that stand out even in Malaysia:
“Unlike other states in Malaysia, Sarawak does not require public participation in the elaboration of environmental impact assessments. When these assessments are completed, they are also not made available to affected communities. In addition, it does not publish information on Indigenous land it has surveyed or timber and oil palm concessions it has granted.”
Moreover, “Sarawak’s current land code imposes insurmountable obstacles for Indigenous communities to gain and maintain title to their ancestral lands, while effectively allowing companies to ravage the rainforest. The EU anti-deforestation law should factor in Sarawak’s dismal track record in its benchmarking process. ‘High risk’ is the only reasonable classification.” [Human Rights Watch]
The EU is due to enforce the so-called EUDR regulations (European Union Deforestation-Free Products) next year. Under the EUDR the Commission will designate countries or parts thereof as under the categories of “low, standard, or high risk” by December 30, 2024, based on the likelihood of being compatible with the regulations.
Any product from a High Risk country would require EU member countries to triple their customs checks on imports of timber and palm oil products from Sarawak, say the NGOs.
EU companies importing these products would also have to conduct more rigorous due diligence to mitigate environmental and human rights risks. The Commission would be required to collaborate closely with Malaysian officials to identify measures to reduce risk.
According to the very limited information available (for which both Malaysia and EU countries are culpable, according to Human Rights Watch) EU countries are amongst the top buyers of Malaysian timber and the 3rd largest market for Malaysian palm oil.
The report says that Malaysia is one of five countries that account for the lion’s share of ‘tainted timber’ imported into Europe, together with Côte d’Ivoire, Brazil, Indonesia and Ghana. Much of that wood is being plundered from Borneo where the NGOs point out monitoring and assessments are abysmal.
“Forest management in Sarawak is overseen by the state’s Forest Department, which lacks a real-time deforestation monitoring system. Ad-hoc assessments that the federal government has published produced deeply questionable results. For example,.. it reported 845 hectares of forest land converted to cropland in 2019, in contrast with the 120,000 hectares of naturally regenerating forest loss recorded by Global Forest Watch that year.50
Recently, the minister of natural resources, environment, and climate change said that “generally, the total forest area is obtained from legal gazettement notifications,” which means that any land gazetted by state governments as forest and subjected to the National Forestry Act are considered “forest cover.” This includes timber plantation concessions, meaning that the 2.4 million hectares of predicted deforestation caused by the expansion of timber plantations will not affect the “forest cover” numbers reported by the Malaysian government.
The Ministry of Natural Resources, Environment, and Climate Change estimated forest cover in 2017 at 18.3 million hectares, or 55.52 percent of the country’s total land area. However, in 2020, Malaysia reported to the FAO that forest cover stood at 19.2 million hectares instead. Such inconsistencies add to the concern that Malaysia’s monitoring and reporting of its own forest resources is unreliable.
The Malaysian government restricts access to any geospatial data related to its forest cover reporting, meaning that it does not share information about where forests actually are, RimbaWatch found. Maps of timber concessions are outdated and do not consider new areas zoned for plantations. Further, maps are not commonly available on Forestry Department websites, and there is no publicly available list of Environmental Impact Assessments for Sarawak. The Malaysian Palm Oil Certification Council said it would publish maps of oil palm concessions in Malaysia in 2019 but has yet to do so. [emphasis by Sarawak Report]
It is for the above reasons that the NGOs have declared that the much questioned Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme [MTCS] should be treated as an unreliable and unrecognised standard.
This is the certification that Sarawak has mandated for its logging concessions as part of its highly publicised “green policy”. However, the report says that:
Local and international civil society organizations, have identified serious deficiencies in the MTCS certification process that have allowed companies to effectively deforest with impunity. These systemic weaknesses include a lack of transparency from auditors, absence of a functional grievance mechanism, and inability of the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC), which oversees MTCS, to suspend certification when anomalies are discovered. The MTCC is governed by a board of trustees that includes representatives from the Sabah Timber Industries Association and Timber Exporters’ Association of Malaysia. The MTCS has yet to introduce reforms that could address these criticisms.”
In summary, the certification process in Malaysia is dominated by the timber industry itself and once a concessionaire has obtained a certificate there is no mechanism to remove it whatever violations might subsequently take place!
Malaysia has been lobbying frantically to prevent the implementation of the EUDR and Sarawak is spinning propaganda alleging green policies.
It is time to take proper steps to conserve what is left of Malaysia’s high value forests; to stop pretending foreign acacia plantations are the same as natural forest cover; to adopt basic transparency and to stop abusing the rights of its native peoples so that certification claims can be tested and believed.
Meanwhile, Sarawak and its timber companies with their now global reach remains listed as one worst deforesters in the world and destined to be categorised as “High Risk” for western markets from 2025.
[Featured maps are courtesy of Rimba Watch]