Contradictions in our logging industry

By Himanshu Bhatt, The Sun

The government of Kedah recently announced that with prudent emphasis on tenders and accounts, it had managed to rake in revenue totalling RM53 million from administering logging concessions in its vast forests.

This, state authorities claimed, made for a grand leap from the relatively paltry RM8 million brought in by the previous government in 2007 for logging within the very same annual forest size allowed for felling.

Inevitably, questions have now been raised about how such great disparity can exist between incomes brought in by two different governments from the same commercial activity in the state’s prized timber industry.

More pertinently, the state’s present leaders are now wont to assert how they have managed to bring about increased revenue to state coffers from this industry, as compared to what was done by the previous administration.

That may be true, but the sum effect of chopping age-old trees in our precious tropical rainforests is not as simple as all that. For while the economic scenario may have altered, the ecological consequences have hardly changed.

About the same time that the Kedah authorities were boasting of the rejuvenated profits from the timber industry, two villages in Baling had found their water supplies from a natural catchment nearby polluted with mud.

Ever since logging operations began close to their settlements, the villagers of Kampung Tanjung Nering and Kampung Bok Bak have been forced to reckon with muddied water from the streams and waterholes nearby. A survey by the Consumers Association of Penang found that the situation had exacerbated recently with the onset of the rainy season.

There are now fresh anxieties about soil erosion and flash floods that may come about due to the logging activities. And these concerns are by no means isolated; they have been cropping up in various areas all over the country where timber felling is being carried out.

The very industry espoused to bring financial benefit to a state has, on the other hand, also been wreaking environmental havoc to its ecology.

This situation in Kedah is symbolic of the contradictions and dilemma posed by the timber industry throughout the region. For while it may bring about much sought-after money, it is impossible for the industry to do so without ushering untold damage to the sensitive forests that it destroys.

One of the key problems in this whole affair has been that more than half of the forests in Malaysia have yet to be classified in any legal category for protection under the National Forestry Act 1984 thus opening them to be exploited for logging and adverse commercial activities.

NGOs like Sahabat Alam Malaysia have frequently called on the federal government to classify vast tracts of forests including the Ulu Muda area which has been earmarked by the Kedah government for logging.

For if a forest is not placed in any of the 12 categories for protection, it is by default considered a “production forest” which can be logged or subjected to development projects. The categories provided for in the Forestry Act include those for research, catchment, education and recreation.

Most of the Ulu Muda Forest has not been categorised under the Forestry Act. And the areas that have been designated as water catchment zones are principally water bodies like dams; the forests that are responsible for retaining water have not been categorised.

In 2008, the Kedah government caused a bit of a furore when it announced plans to log the Ulu Muda Forest for revenue since the federal government had not given the state its due compensation of RM100 million a year. What particularly caused alarm was that the targeted area included the three lakes of Muda, Pedu and Ahning, which store water derived from the surrounding catchment forests.

So while one may claim that the economic scenario has improved, the environmental costs have certainly not. Like it was in years before, farmers are still going on petition drives against logging plans, while fisherfolk keep protesting about pollution of rivers.

The complaints of environmental degradation brought about by the timber industry are not new, and are bound to exist whichever the government in charge. Chopping our forests is still about depleting our natural resources, no matter what the monetary outcome may be.