(PROGRESS) Landmark court ruling could help tribes stop deforestation

Landmark court ruling could help tribes stop deforestation
Indigenous Malaysians Empowered to Protect Land

A landmark ruling by the Malaysian courts has granted indigenous tribes land rights that could help them stop deforestation and the expansion of oil palm plantations on their traditional terrains. This 2009 article is circulated by OneWorld, May 13, and is from Survival International, May 8.
by Survival International

A landmark ruling made by the Malaysian courts this week could allow tribes on the island of Borneo to stop logging and oil palm plantations destroying their forests.
The Malaysian Federal Court ruled that indigenous people in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, have rights to land they use for hunting and gathering as well as land they use for growing food.

Previously, the Sarawak government did not recognize tribal peoples' rights over their traditional land unless they could show that they had grown crops there.

The Penan and other tribes in Sarawak are desperately trying to stop logging and oil palm companies razing the forests they rely on for their survival.

The Sarawak government has, until now, required indigenous people to provide evidence that they have cultivated their land for many years before it will recognize their rights. This has made it impossible for the Penan, who are hunter-gatherers and grow very little of their food, to protect their land.

The Sarawak state government has leased the Penan's land out to logging and oil palm companies without consulting the tribe. The destruction of their forests scares away the animals they hunt, pollutes the rivers and kills the fish, so that many Penan have real difficulty finding food.

Tribes in Sarawak have filed around 200 land rights cases, but most are facing long delays in the court system.

OneWorld: According to the Borneo Resources Institute of Malaysia and the World Wildlife Fund in Indonesia, "land disputes [are] emerging as one of the biggest problems associated with palm oil," says the Associated Press (AP).

Reporting on a two-day environmental summit on palm oil, AP notes, "Indonesia and Malaysia, the world's top two palm oil producers, have aggressively pushed to expand plantations amid a rising demand for biofuels, which are considered cleaner burning and cheaper than petrol."

Palm oil is also used as a "vegetable oil" in consumer goods such as frozen fried foods and shampoo.

Corporations have long been razing forests on the Southeast Asian island nations to make way for large plantations of the resource.

"The situation is getting critical at the moment," said Kalyana Bujang, director of the Borneo Resources Institute of Malaysia, referring to the displacement of local communities at the hands of palm oil producers. "The communities are caught unaware. They don't know what to do, or where to go."

Palm oil plantations are increasingly replacing some of the Earth's most biodiverse ecosystems, including rainforests, grasslands, and peat swamps in South America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and Africa.

Clearing these lands releases enormous amounts of greenhouse gases and poses a huge threat to dwindling plant and animal biodiversity. The establishment of palm oil plantations also forces small farmers and indigenous communities off of their traditional land, violating traditional and Indigenous land rights.

The workers employed on palm oil plantations face abuse, harsh working conditions, unfair pay, and exposure to toxic pesticides.

To learn more about the harmful effects of palm oil plantations, visit the Rainforest Action Network's campaign site. click here

JJS: The geoist ethic requires us to share the surplus annual rental value of sites and resources. So, if corporations knew they could no longer hog the lion’s share of palm oil, would they still be so eager to extract it?

The geoist ethic also requires us to use Earth sparingly, and to pay not just land dues but also Ecology Security Deposits and premiums for Restoration Insurance. Having to bear the full costs, again, would corporations be so bent upon extraction?

The geoist ethic, besides expecting us to pay land dues, also grants us Earthlings full title over our labor and capital, meaning we should not have to pay taxes on either. Besides extraction, there are other remunerative uses of forests, such as eco-tourism. If tourists were not taxed at home, they’d have more money to visit the jungles at Borneo.

Finally, if we followed the geoist ethic, and paid our society not for the values we create but for the values we take, and if our society did not subsidize special interests but disbursed rent dividends to us all equitably (a la Alaska’s oil dividend), then the pace of techno-progress would be so fast that pretty quickly we’d come up with an eco-friendly substitute to logging jungles for palm oil.

Because the world was designed to work right for everyone.

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Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.


Also see:
Same old story -- less habitat, more pollution
http://www.progress.org/2008/firefly.htm

It's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it
http://www.progress.org/2008/rubbish.htm

A cost benefit analysis of trees vs logs
http://www.progress.org/2009/reforest.htm