NGOs, officials trade blame as Malaysian forest conservation project is scrapped

With an internationally backed project to protect core forest in Malaysia’s Sarawak state now quashed at the request of the state’s forest department, both NGOs and Sarawak forestry officials cite difficulties working together on what was pitched as a collaborative project.

The project, one of two operated in the region by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO), aimed to protect 283,500 hectares (about 700,500 acres) of land in the Upper Baram Forest Area, an area encompassing 79,000 hectares (about 195,000 acres) of primary forest as well as more than 20 villages of four different Indigenous ethnicities. Its $1.3 million budget would have been primarily supported by the Malaysian government, with the remaining $556,885 coming from the government of Japan, the Bruno Manser Fonds (BMF), a Swiss NGO, and the government of the Swiss canton of Basel.

The Sarawak government told the ITTO that it would “endeavour to seek alternative funding to complete the implementation of this project,” said ITTO executive director Sheam Satkuru.

There’s still one active ITTO project in the Upper Baram Forest Area supporting forest management training and landscape restoration, but that project, valued at $479,500, is scheduled to end in November, Satkuru said.

Timber wood A new timber concession

A key point of contention between the government and NGOs is the existence of an active timber concession within the Upper Baram Forest Area (UBFA). Sarawak officials say planning for the ITTO project always accounted for the existence of this concession. By contrast, the director of a Sarawak-based NGO says the 79,000 hectares of primary forest at the heart of the project cannot be safe while the logging company is active.

The area in question was originally granted in the 1990s to subsidiaries of the Malaysian timber giant Samling under forestry timber licenses covering 170,000 hectares (about 420,000 acres). In 2023, reallocated to Borneoland Timber Resources Sdn. Bhd., a Malaysia-based company opened in 2022 to run plantations and sell wholesale logs, sawn wood, plywood and veneer. It’s not immediately clear if Borneoland’s concession shares exactly the same boundaries as the two former Samling concessions, as a Sawarak forest department (FDS) representative did not answer questions about the size and scope of the new concession.

Environmental NGO SAVE Rivers and the Penan Indigenous rights NGO Keruan published photos earlier this year of deforestation and logging road networks that they attribute to Borneoland. Satellite monitoring by the University of Maryland’s Global Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) lab and Global Forest Watch also indicate tree cover is being lost within the old Samling concessions.

Celine Lim, managing director of SAVE Rivers, told Mongabay that the remaining ITTO project — which is a sustainable forest management project and will therefore incorporate the timber concession — will not guarantee that primary forest will be protected from logging.

Lim also said she couldn’t accept that the Borneoland concession should be classified under the “sustainable forest management” category, noting that the concession is not listed as being certified under the Malaysia Timber Certification Scheme.

“Now [UBFA] is within a logging concession, there is no certainty that this area will be absolutely protected, which is what we were selling to outside donors,” she said. “I know [the] city of Basel signed on because that was the core [element] of this project.”

However, a representative of FDS, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely, said the ITTO conservation project never guaranteed that protections would be upgraded for land within the project.

“Please be informed that it was agreed from the very beginning by all stakeholders of the projects that UBFA projects do not change the existing land use including settlements, agriculture area and forest timber licences,” they wrote in an email.

The representative also said that the NGOs’ claims that the Borneoland concession was granted without community consultation (published in a press release on Oct. 15) were misleading because the FDS did gain consent from residents of 11 different villages. However, the department didn’t share how many people were consulted.

Satkuru, the ITTO executive director, said her organization felt the Malaysian government had gained sufficient consent for granting the Borneoland concession, and that both UBFA projects were awarded with the concession’s existence in mind.

“We are fully aware that as part of the implementation of this project, tremendous outreach activities have been conducted with the communities involved,” she said in an email. “To the contrary, some of the activities conducted by the civil society organizations have raised serious doubts within the communities on whether or not they conducted free, prior and informed consent in its true spirit.”

Timber wood ‘Different aspirations’

Satkuru had called the ITTO project in Upper Baram Forest Area “one of the first of its kind” involving both local community actors and local government management.

After its closure, a government official and NGO leader both expressed frustration over the different interests at play.

The forest department official said in their email that partners on the conservation project were “making it very challenging to continue” operation of the ITTO project, adding they “encountered interference from local and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), notably BMF and Save Rivers.”

The official cited the NGOs’ public campaign activities as problematic to FDS, including submitting letters to officials, holding demonstrations in countries outside Malaysia, and publishing articles that the official called “unsubstantiated” and “damaging” — without specifying what offensive things the NGOs had published. They also said Indigenous residents supported the project as FDS had proposed it, rather than the NGOs’ interpretation of the project’s goals, noting that the community wanted more roads and infrastructure.

Satkuru echoed the Sarawak official: “The civil society organisations involved have demonstrated through their actions on the ground, submission of letters and issued media releases showing that their aspirations deviate from the elements in the project document.”

Lim of SAVE Rivers said she felt Indigenous residents and NGOs were at a disadvantage in the project because FDS was the executor of the ITTO projects, while other stakeholders were classified as partners, advising rather than running the project. She suggested that Indigenous communities, while included in the meetings, might not feel able to express their interests. She noted that Indigenous village leaders, though elected within their tribes, are influenced by the decisions and recommendations of the Sarawak government, and may fear they could lose infrastructure investments if they don’t comply.

“The setup of that system in itself makes it so hard to really express their preferences or their beliefs,” she said.

Residents told Mongabay in 2023 that they looked forward to the conservation in the Upper Baram Forest Area as a way to preserve the remaining forest and protect their traditional lifestyles. But they also expressed a dire need for more connectivity and resources, particularly improved roads and village facilities like schools and clinics, which are sometimes provided by logging companies operating in remote areas.

The FDS later put out a press release saying NGOs were attempting to “manipulate” the ITTO project. FDS director Hamden Mohammad said the NGOs were speaking to the media about their own interests and that the majority of Upper Baram residents wanted developments like roads and facilities, rather than living traditional or nomadic lifestyles within remote areas.

Lim said she and others felt blindsided by the FDS decision to terminate the project, noting that this ITTO project had been developed together with technical staff from FDS. SAVE Rivers, an organization originally established to represent Indigenous interests, has long conducted livelihood projects and surveyed different villages on their interests, despite a lawsuit against it and its leaders. One of SAVE Rivers’ main campaigns is for the creation of the Baram Peace Park, a landscape preserve in the same Upper Baram Forest Area originally called the Penan Peace Park and initially proposed in 2009 to protect both primary forest and Sarawak Indigenous villages. Lim said she felt the government was undercutting the peace park plans, which had been developed over many years with input from the included Indigenous villages.

“There were officials from [FDS] that were very helpful with helping design the [ITTO] working paper,” she said. “The concept of the working paper came from community and NGOs, but we also expanded it from officials advising on how to curate the working paper.”

Lim added that she felt that the government was trying to frame SAVE Rivers as having separate interests from Indigenous Sarawak residents, and the government’s portrayal of NGOs paying “lip service” was inaccurate.

“I would like to put up the mirror to the other side,” she said. “We call this projection.”

Banner image: A logging truck in Sarawak in 2008. Image by andrew garton via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Malaysian logger Samling’s track record leaves Indigenous Sarawak questioning its plans

FEEDBACK: Use this form to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.