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• #Island in sarawak series

Since 2011, SAVE Rivers has brought the affected communities together in fighting the SCORE dam projects. Working with the nonprofit he founded, communities have mapped their ancestral lands and won the recognition of their land rights in important court cases. Bruno Manser, who had lived with the Penan for many years, raised international attention for the showdown in Sarawak through hunger strikes and other actions. Starting in 1987, courageous activists like Mutang Urud and the human rights lawyer Harrison Ngau organized protests and built blockades on logging roads. The Indigenous communities did not stand by while their ancestral territories were destroyed. “And yet, the value of the trees that have been felled is estimated to exceed $50 billion.” “Many of the people of Sarawak are as poor as they were when I was born’” says Mutang Urud, an Indigenous activist. Indigenous peoples, who have lived with the forest for at least 40,000 years, have been recklessly pushed aside, robbed of their communal forests, and moved into resettlement camps for the dam projects. Taib companies also supply cement and cables for hydropower stations, build resettlement camps, and own the conference center in which the International Hydropower Association held its 2013 world congress.Īfter 50 years of deforestation, only 11 percent of Sarawak’s rainforests remain. A breath-taking video by Global Witness documents how timber and palm oil contracts oil the politician’s own palms. The dams will have a capacity of 7,000 megawatts, even though the electricity demand in the province was less than 1,000 megawatts in 2008.Īgain, the Taib family profited at every turn. If the scheme is completed, the dams will inundate 1,600 square kilometers of rainforest and displace 30,000-50,000 people from 235 Indigenous communities.

#Island in sarawak series

The latest scheme to turn Sarawak’s ecosystems into quick profits is the SCORE project - a series of 12 hydropower dams, of which the Bakun and the Murum dams have already been built. By 2005, oil palm plantations covered 42,000 square kilometers in Malaysia – more than the land area of Switzerland. Since the 1990s, they have increasingly turned deforested areas into oil palm plantations – vast monocultures that were completely devoid of any other trees or animals. The family empire includes industrial and banking conglomerates in Sarawak, a stake in 400 businesses overseas, and iconic properties in San Francisco and Seattle.Ĭutting down rainforest is not a sustainable business model, and the loggers of Sarawak soon lost patience with slow-growing secondary forests. In his book, Money Logging, Lukas Straumann estimates the fortune of the Taib family at $15 billion. The bribes which changed hands for the concessions allowed Taib to invest in a business empire at home and abroad, engage in a lavish lifestyle, and pay for generous election hand-outs. Within his first six years in power, the powerful politician handed out concessions for an area almost the size of Belgium to his family members and associates. Starting in the 1960s, Taib handed out valuable logging concessions to his friends and family without any checks and balances. Money Logging: On the Trail of the Asian Timber Mafia, a gripping new book by Lukas Straumann, the executive director of the Bruno Manser Fund, documents the local politics, international complicity, and desperate resistance in the struggle over one of the world’s last paradises.Īt the heart of Sarawak’s deforestation sits one man: Abdul Taib Mahmud, the politician who has ruled the island province for more than 50 years as a minister, chief minister, and now governor. The greed and corruption of a small clique are now turning Sarawak’s rainforests into a monoculture of oil palms and hydropower reservoirs. Photo by Waxk Land is cleared for oil palm in Sarawak. The forest is also home to orangutans and tree leopards, hundreds of bird species, and frogs that can glide up to 20 meters through the air. The local Penan communities have names for more than 1,300 of the plants they live with. An average hectare of Sarawak rainforest contains more tree species than all of Europe. Sarawak, the Malaysian province on the island of Borneo, has long been one of the six world regions with the highest biodiversity. A version of this review appeared in The Huffington Post