Our Rainforest Lose!

Native Customary Rights issue is a sensitive and complicated one. The way by which the State and various arms of the state dealt with the matter does not make it any clearer or more transparent. Sarawakians at least have NCRs, Orang Asal of West Malaysia has no such thing, they are merely squatters on their own home. Your backyard today, maybe a golf course tomorrow. Maybe even a SimeDarby Club House, for which you are not welcomed of course.

Today, I learnt something new. While trying to expose friends, colleagues and immediate community about the struggles of our Indigenous Community, I stumbled upon a CD What RainForest? by Hilary Chiew and Chit Too together with the various other OA articles on sale.

In the CD, an Iban community leader from Batu-Niah-Suai area made something crystal clear for me :

State recognises NCR as land as that land which is cultivated by the indigenous people on a regular and sustained basis.

Natives consider all land worked by their ancestors since time begin as NCR, which included land presently being worked on pemakai menoa, land left fallow, forests within their traditional domain, ancestral hunting ground, places held special as shrines and burial ground. The concept of pemakai menoa goes beyond mere agricultural use and extends to hunting, fishing and living off the produce of the jungle.

State "leases" NCR land (based on their narrow definition) to plantation companies to be developed ie. thru logging concessions, oil palm plantations. Many native communities in Sarawak have been displaced by this self-serving definition. Many a logging concessions and plantations have gone ahead, multi-millions made. Many more are in the pipelines.

Native communities then came back with a strategy to develop all the land that they've defined and recognised as their NCR land into plantations to avoid land grabs by State, agencies and companies given the concession, prompted by the narrow, self-serving NCR definition by the State. Through gotong-royong, communities are felling trees and planting them with oil palm.

Native communities clear lands they traditionally preserve for communal use pulau galau to prevent their land from being appropriated by the State. Only cultivated land is afterall NCR by the State's own definition.

There won't be much rainforest left in the years to come. At the rate both sides are going, "We green the earth with oil palm" may one day sadly be a reality. What rainforest?

Only our rainforests stand to lose, presently Sarawak already has the highest deforestation rate in the world. I've always thought that the dubious "honor" belonged to Kalimantan.