LAHAD DATU, Malaysia: Twenty-five years ago, Lahad Datu was just
another sleepy port town on the fringe of Malaysian Borneo, frequented
by traders, sea gypsies and the occasional pirate gang.
These days, big money is flowing into banks and construction
projects that have multiplied in the city centre, where a gaudy silver
statue honours the cash crop that put the former backwater on the map:
palm oil.
Long a preferred cooking ingredient in developing countries,
palm oil is now in greater demand in Western markets because of its low
price and long shelf life. Derived from the fruit of oil palm trees, it
can now be found in many of products sold in supermarkets, from cookies
to cosmetics. And its use is increasing as the commercial food industry
phases out trans fats.
A migrant worker sorts clusters of palm fruit at a plantation refinery.
Photo: Photo for The Washington Post by Jason Motlagh
The huge global appetite is yielding billions in revenue for
Indonesia and Malaysia, the world's first- and second-largest producers
of palm oil. But environmental and human rights activists warn that the
boom is doing irreparable damage to rare biodiversity and accelerating
the effects of global warming, with no concern for long-term social
costs.
They add that indigenous people are being pushed off their
ancestral land to make way for plantations staffed by tens of thousands
of migrant workers, who are often denied health care and education
services. Many families that have laboured for decades still do not have
the legal documents that would grant them and their children basic
rights.
The labourers and their children "are invisible; they have no
future. They just work and work and work," said Alison Neri, the
director of a social welfare organisation that assists Indonesian
migrants in eastern Malaysia.
The toll is most acutely felt in Borneo, the Southeast Asian
island shared by the two countries that's home to one of the oldest rain
forests on Earth and humankind's closest relative, the orangutan.
According to a new study, oil palm plantations over the past
two decades have cleared about 16,000 square kilometres of primary and
logged forested lands. Palm oil deforestation and hunting have combined
to cut Bornean orangutan populations down to 54,000, half the total of
the 1980s, according to environmental groups. At this rate, some predict
the iconic animal could be extinct within a matter of years.
Borneo started losing its rain forest cover in the 1960s when
the Malaysian government pushed the expansion of oil palms to
complement rubber tree growth. Migrant workers travelled in droves from
Indonesia and the Philippines to work on the plantations being carved
out of the backcountry.
Palm oil has since evolved into Malaysia's most lucrative
crop. In 2011, the export of palm oil and palm-based products netted
$US27 billion - a five-fold increase over the past decade - thanks to
brisk trade with China, Pakistan, the European Union, India and the
United States, which imported record levels for the year.
The transformation of Lahad Datu is emblematic of the boom
going on in Malaysia's Sabah province, which accounts for about a
quarter of Borneo's land area. The local population has doubled over the
past 15 years. Western fast food chains and other new businesses have
arrived. And real estate prices are soaring in what has been dubbed
"Palm City".
On the southern edge of town, lines of tanker trucks deliver
crude palm oil to a sprawling, state-owned refinery complex where
smokestacks belch into the night. Fresh lots have been set aside for
prospective investors, and officials hope a deep-water port under
construction nearby will position the region to be a top exporter of
biodiesel fuel.
Longtime residents who recall a time when street crime and
power failures were a fact of life boast their children are coming back
to the city to start businesses and profit from the boom. "The quality
of life here has improved tremendously," Tammay Bin Inton, 58, a
community leader, said as he joked with friends at a popular coffee
shop.
Nasrun Datuk Mansur, a state assemblyman and assistant to the
Sabah chief minister, said the industry is "the catalyst for all types
of business activities that are helping Lahad Datu develop very fast,
and I believe it's true for the whole country".
But critics of the palm oil industry counter that the
breakneck expansion of plantations into virgin tracts of Borneo's
countryside is benefiting little more than a handful of major companies,
which gain extra income from timber, at the expense of one of the
world's most biologically diverse areas and the farmworkers who do the
heavy lifting.
A joint study published last month by Stanford and Yale
universities found that land-clearing operations for plantations in
Borneo emitted more than 140 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions
in 2010 alone, equal to annual emissions from about 28 million
vehicles.
"We may see tipping points in forest conversion where
critical biophysical functions are disrupted, leaving the region
increasingly vulnerable to droughts, fires and floods," project leader
Lisa M. Curran, a professor of ecological anthropology at Stanford
University, said in a statement.
Slash-and-burn agriculture accounts for 80 per cent of
Indonesia's carbon dioxide emissions, making it the world's
third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind the United States and
China.
"It's a perfect storm of human rights abuses and social
conflict on the one hand and the destruction of some of the most
biologically diverse forests in the world on the other," said Laurel
Sutherlin, communications director for the Rainforest Action Network, a
San Francisco-based environmental organization. "Extraordinary
ecosystems are becoming dead tree farms."
Indonesian officials have announced plans to convert about 18
million more hectares into palm oil plantations by 2020. Malaysia
wants to double the area under cultivation over the same period to drive
development in its rural eastern provinces, where infrastructure and
living standards lag far behind its wealthier, more industrialised
western peninsula.
Lost in the environmental debate is the plight of thousands
of migrant workers - mostly from Indonesia - who remain the life's blood
of Malaysian palm oil plantations. Some have laboured in the country
for more than 30 years. Yet the government does not provide education or
health-care services to them and the estimated 36,000 children living
on backcountry farms.
Leonary Marcus, 17, came with his parents from Indonesia as a
young boy. He attended a learning centre run by a local nonprofit
organisation, but without legal documents, he was ineligible for
secondary school. For the past five years he has toiled on the
plantations, earning about $US7.50 a day.
"It's a hard life, but what choice do I have?" he said.
Without access to state schools, workers' children are
destined to hard labour in the shadows, said Aegile Fernandez, director
of Tenaganita, an organisation that assists undocumented migrants in the
country. She said it was the "duty of every government to look after
every child on its soil - no questions asked".
The Malaysian government declined to comment on the issue.
In response to mounting pressure, leading palm oil producers
have partnered with advocacy groups to form the Roundtable on
Sustainable Palm Oil, an association based in Zurich that aims to
establish clear social and environmental safeguards for the industry.
Top consumer goods companies, such as Unilever and Nestle,
are members, as well as agribusiness giant Cargill, the largest importer
of palm oil to the United States.
But activists say there has been more talk than serious reform.
On a recent afternoon, Mappi Tabbo and his five children,
ages 5 to 19, loaded a pickup truck with their day's haul of palm nuts.
Ten years after leaving Indonesia for a better-paying job,
the 41-year-old still risks arrest, a penalty that exceeds a year's
wages and possible deportation if caught by police. He avoids town
altogether.
Motlagh reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting.
Source: http://www.smh.com.au
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