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ENVIRONMENTALISTS this week attacked the findings of an international
study into the logging of rainforests in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.
When it was first announced last summer, the study, conducted by the British
biologist Lord Cranbrook for the International Tropical Timber Organisation,
was heralded by rainforest campaigners as an important development in persuading
the tropical timber industry to put its house in order.

Sarawak makes up the northwest of the island of Borneo, home of one
of the world’s oldest rainforests. The state is currently by far the largest
source of tropical hardwood logs on the international market, with the bulk
of its supplies going to Japan.

Cranbrook’s study concludes that the state’s virgin rainforest will,
at current rates of destruction, be ‘logged out’ within 11 years. Yet it
recommends a reduction in the rate of logging of only 30 per cent.

‘On the basis of the mission’s own figures, a 60 per cent reduction
seems to be what the mission should have called for,’ says Christopher Elliott,
tropical forest conservation officer for the World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF), previously a strong supporter of the ITTO’s activities.

Cranbrook’s recommendation is based on optimistic assumptions about
the potential benefits to the forest from proposed improvements in the technical
efficiency of forestry operations in Sarawak. He recommends international
support from aid agencies to bolster the activities of the state forestry
department to police the logging companies. But the WWF claims that the
required improvements ‘could take up to half a century to take effect –
far too late to save the state’s forest’.

Cranbrook’s mission comprised foresters and ecologists from nine nations.
It reported its findings to a meeting of the ITTO in Bali, Indonesia, last
week. The study comes at a time of growing international concern about the
role of forestry in the destruction of tropical rainforests, especially
those of Southeast Asia.

The disappointment felt by environmentalists at the mission’s recommendations
is likely to fuel calls for organisations such as WWF and Friends of the
Earth to withdraw their support for the ITTO. The organisation is a ‘club’
of governments from nations that both supply and consume tropical timbers.
It includes among its main aims the promotion of ‘sustainable’ management
of the world’s forests. An early withdrawal of environmentalists would precipitate
a crisis at the timber organisation.

Meanwhile, a fundamental review is taking place into the conservation
failings of the Tropical Forestry Action Programme, a second major international
initiative aimed at stemming the loss of rainforests.

In the past three years, the state has seen hundreds of arrests of forest
dwellers, notably from the Penan tribe, who have repeatedly erected barriers
across roads leading into areas where intense logging is taking place (‘Hit
and run in Sarawak’, New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, 12 May). The forest people complained
that their land rights and livelihoods were being bulldozed along with the
trees.

The arrests turned Sarawak into a focus of international concern for
the rainforests second only to the Brazilian Amazon. Despite promises to
organisations such as Survival International that it would consider the
problems of the inhabitants of the forests, the Cranbrook mission concludes
that land rights are a matter for the Malaysian courts alone. Its recommendations
about local anger at forest destruction appear under the heading of ‘public
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Cranbrook’s study argues that the state forestry department should be
‘comprehensively strengthened’ to reduce the gap between theory and practice,
and also to develop a long-term plan for sustainable forestry.

The mission did not investigate the impact of forestry on the harvesting
of non-timber products of the rainforest, such as oils, rattan, fruits and
meat. Most rural people in Sarawak depend on these for food, building materials
and medicines. The WWF calls this omission ‘incredible’.