Ben Fogle accused of fronting propaganda ignoring Sarawak ‘environmental destruction and exploitation’
(The Independent) – Fogle told The Independent he has “postponed” the champagne event after being “horrified” by recent revelations, including an undercover investigation by the NGO Global Witness. He said he would not be making any more films for the Sarawak Tourism Board until he received answers to “many questions” that he now had.
The television presenter Ben Fogle has been accused of taking part in an environmental propaganda campaign for a regime with one of the world’s worst records in deforestation. Fogle, known to millions of BBC viewers as a face of travel documentaries, has become the poster boy for tourism to the controversial state of Sarawak in Borneo, where vast amounts of industrial logging have left only five per cent of forests that have not been either logged or converted to palm oil plantations.
The presenter has made a series of films for the Sarawak Tourism Board under the title “Ben Fogle’s Sarawak Adventures” in which he is pictured playing with orang-utans and swimming in waterfalls. Fogle wrote about his trip to Sarawak, which is part of Malaysia, in his “Ben Fogle, The Adventurer” column for the Daily Telegraph and in a large article in Hello!
Fogle’s material has been widely promoted to a network of “mummy bloggers” encouraged to share the films and invited to meet the presenter at a champagne reception this week in London. Some believed they would be offered the chance to join a “Sarawak Blogger Ambassador Club” and go on a trip to Borneo.
Sarawak has the fastest rate of deforestation in Asia and exports more tropical logs than Africa and Latin America combined. It has only 0.5 per cent of the world’s tropical forest but accounted for 25 per cent of tropical log exports in 2010.
Fogle’s involvement in the PR campaign has shocked critics of the Sarawak government and its appalling record on conservation. “It seems Ben Fogle may have been made a pawn,” said Clare Rewcastle, founder of the Sarawak Report blog. “Anyone with the slightest knowledge of environmental matters should know the issues around Malaysian oil palm destruction and the culpability of the Sarawak state government.
“He should not be promoting them for responsible eco-tourism or pretending that they are protecting the jungle habitat of the orang-utan. The only place you can find orang-utan in Sarawak is in caged enclosures or in a few remaining patches of jungle where the state government is at loggerheads with the local tribes because it has issued licences to cut it down.”
