Sarawak must comply with international policies involving sustainable forest management to enable its timber products to penetrate the international market, Chief Minister Abang Johari Openg said.
He said environmental organisations could have a major influence on the purchase of timber products.
“If you don’t comply with international policies, then people would boycott your products and we don’t want our timber industry to suffer the same fate as our palm oil industry,” he said at the Sarawak Timber and Small and Medium Entrepreneurs (SMEs) expo here today.
He said the export of timber and timber products is the fourth largest contributor to the state’s export earnings after liquified natural gas (LNG), petroleum and palm oil.
Pray what “fate” would that be, Chief Minister?
It would appear that Abang Johari allowed himself a telling slilp of the tongue yesterday by publicly acknowledging that Sarawak’s Palm Oil industry has “befallen a fate” that he would not wish on the timber industry as well, as a result of negligent or unsustainable practices.
Indeed. And the admission that Sarawak’s palm oil industry has befallen a fate amply backs up the recent prediction by Malaysia’s finance minister that the state government’s finances are in serious trouble, a projection that Abang Johari has hotly denied.
So, what are the present statistics with regard to Sarawak’s palm oil fate? Sarawak Report reported just earlier this week that a report by a global consultancy on timber and plantations categorised Sarawak’s ill managed palm plantations as being uncompetitive in a tough market with state revenues in “steep decline”.
The people are entitled to know the outcome of the state government’s plantation experiments across millions of hectares of logged out land over the past decades, so it’s time to produce the figures relating this this “fate” instead of denying there is a problem.
As for convincing the world that Sarawak has been applying sustainable timber practices, sadly this ambition is way way too late for the bunch of pluderers in charge of the present state government. Sarawak and its timber companies have the worst record in the world when it comes to greedy, unsustainable, destructive and deeply unethical and corrupt logging, not just in Sarawak but in unfortunate regions across the world.
Anyone who hands them a sustainable forest management badge would end up a laughing stock, like Abang Jo.