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March 19, 2011Progress vs. Deforestation in Borneo
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown drove some attention last week to the work of his sister, Clare Rewcastle, on the subject of deforestation in the Borneo rainforest. Rewcastle claims that the prognosis for the region indicates incredible degrees of deforestation - to the point that she predicts 90 percent deforestation by the year 2020, mostly due to oil palm production in the region (it's widely used as a cooking oil). An excerpt from Brown's oped:
What Clare Rewcastle is exposing through her local informants is that over this period, particularly during the 1980s, Malaysia's once vast pristine jungle has been stripped bare and enormous areas have been planted with oil palm in an environmental nightmare that shows no sign of slowing. Deprived of their livelihoods, some of the world's poorest people have been further impoverished by the deforestation.The recent Sarawak Report exposes how pressures continue to force families to leave the forests and give up on their traditional livelihoods. These families are being pressed to accept "compensation", often of only £80, for land whose wood is worth millions.
The courage being shown by local Sarawak people gives us all a chance to stop the destruction. If the world fails now we are not guilty simply of a sin of omission; we will be actively condoning the destruction of a nation's future by people too greedy to see the trees for the wood.
Of course, this sparked pushback from the local authorities - in this case Deputy Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Planning and Resource Management Datu Len Talif Salleh, who denounced Rewcastle and Brown as repeating false information and lacking any real knowledge of the situation on the ground:
“Firstly, Gordon Brown has never been to Sarawak. Clare Rewcastle, his sister-in-law, may have been born in Sarawak and resided here for about eight years but this does not make her an expert in our land use or to comment on the situation in the country. How can they have the cheek to tell us what to do?” he asked.He said Rewcastle made an erroneous statement that Sarawak was 100 per cent green in the 80s and that today the state is 95 per cent deforested with only five per cent still untouched, which he claimed even small children would find preposterous.
“A hundred years ago Britain was 100 per cent forested but now less than 10 per cent is forest. More than 60 per cent is agriculture land. But Sarawak wants to turn only 25 per cent of its vast forest into agriculture land and yet they blame us for destroying our forest,” Len Talif lamented.
This is one more instance of a challenge I've written about in the past in the context of a middle-income trap: a nation trying to avoid hitting a plateau status in development, and having to balance those concerns of the demand for rapid progress against environmental protection. This has been noted by their own officials concerning hydropower and other discussions, and it's a challenge for every nation.
Personally, I have a hard time accepting Rewcastle's numbers on face value. The idea of 90+ percent deforestation sounds more like hyperbole to me. A study from a similarly minded environmental group, while also critical, found a much slower progression - roughly 10 percent over the past 5 years. This is still deforestation, and seems par for the course for Len's nod to 25 percent shifted to agricultural use - but it's hardly the disastrous situation Brown describes as "probably the biggest environmental crime of our times."
The irony, of course, in all of this: one of Brown's initiatives as prime minister was a dramatic increase in the use of biofuels - including palm oil - as a fuel alternative. How often our Western leadership forgets that when something becomes a green policy mantra in the West, it can drive deforestation and agricultural steps elsewhere around the world in a vicious cycle.
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