KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 18 — Transparency International Malaysia (TI-M) has appointed officials to cut corruption in the management of the world’s oldest rainforests in Sarawak and Sabah that are rapidly disappearing due to logging.
Datuk Akhbar Satar, president of the local chapter of the international corruption watchdog, announced that Krystle Amanda Rabai Nasip and Marathamuthu Suppanainar were appointed as its representatives in Sarawak and Sabah respectively under its Forest Governance and Integrity (FGI) programme, on November 1.
“The objective of TI-M’s FGI programme is to increase awareness and knowledge of the systemic structure of forest sector corruption and its challenges, strengthen cooperation amongst stakeholders, and development and application of forest monitoring tools,” Akhbar said in a statement today.
“TI-M strongly urges the state government to step up its surveillance of the state’s natural resources – its huge acreage of rainforests thousands of years old – which are fast depleting due to irresponsible logging companies,” he added.
Malaysia’s rate of rainforest loss is reportedly the highest in the world as almost 15 per cent have been cut down in just three years up to 2012, according to environmentalist website mongabay.com.
The website also claimed that the size of denuded rainforest cover is bigger than the size of Denmark at a whopping 47,278 sq km, while oil palm estates expanded 17,000 sq km, or 50 per cent, in the last three years.
In 2011, mongabay.com reported Swiss environmental group Bruno Manser Fund as saying that satellite imagery shows that less than 10 per cent, possibly even less than 5 per cent, of Sarawak’s forests are still intact.
Akhbar said today that the suspension order issued by the Sarawak state government to a logging company in the country’s largest state is a warning to those who flout the Forest Department’s guidelines and logging procedures.
“The state government should, in fact, not only stop the operations of the culprit, (but) take appropriate legal actions,” said Akhbar.
“The said logging company is also engaged in some disputes with native customary rights (NCR) land owners. It is the duty of the state government to protect the NCR of the natives from being exploited,” he added.
According to TI-M’s statement, its Sarawak representative, Krystle, has a Master’s Degree in Science from Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) with a major in agrotechnology, while its Sabah representative, Marathamuthu, has been an active member of the Sabah Environmental Protection Association (SEPA) since 1989.
