With Sarawak being the most likely Malaysian state to lose its rainforests to timber and palm oil concessions, the European Union should designate it as high-risk under its incoming anti-deforestation regulations, according to human rights advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
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Made public on Tuesday, a year-long assessment found that Sarawak is a high risk area for deforestation and the violation of Indigenous rights. Human Rights Watch published the report as part of a coalition of local and international civil society groups, which include Malaysian environmental watchdog Rimbawatch, Sarawak-based groups Save Rivers and Keruan, Swiss forest protection organisation Bruno Manser-Fonds and The Borneo Project.
“Sarawak’s current land code imposes insurmountable obstacles for Indigenous communities to gain and maintain title to their ancestral lands, while effectively allowing companies to ravage the rainforest,” said Luciana Téllez Chávez, senior environment and human rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The EU anti-deforestation law should factor in Sarawak’s dismal track record in its benchmarking process.”
The EU’s Deforestation Free Products Regulation (EUDR) classifies countries into high, standard, and low-risk depending on their likelihood of deforestation. Once enforcement of the regulation begins in January 2025, products derived from land deforested after 2020 cannot be sold on the EU market. Imports from high-risk countries will be subjected to additional scrutiny and these countries will be required to work with the European Commission to reduce the risks of forest loss and forest degradation.
The EU is the third largest market for Malaysian palm oil exports after India and China, according to official data, with Sarawak contributing 22.7 per cent of total volume produced in 2023. Malaysian palm oil producers have argued that the country should be categorised as low risk, as the mandatory Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil (MSPO) certification does not allow for crops to be grown on land deforested after 2019.
Human Rights Watch said that it is unclear how the government manages plantations which do not comply with this rule. “Further, while the federal government has set a limit of 6.5 million hectares for oil palm plantations across the country, it remains unclear how it will enforce this goal since states, not the federal government, have jurisdiction over land and forest administration,” it said.
Eco-Business has reached out to Johari Abdul Ghani, Malaysia’s Minister for Plantations and Commodities, as well as Stephen Rundi Utom, Sarawak’s Minister of Food Industry, Commodity and Regional development, for comments. At the time of writing, neither has replied.
Human Rights Watch met with representatives from Malaysia’s Ministry of Plantations and Commodities as well as the Malaysian Sustainable Palm Oil certification body in November last year to discuss its concerns. The civil society coalition subsequently wrote to Johari in May this year to share their findings and make recommendations, which include the establishment of penalties for non-compliance with MSPO and the Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme, used to regulate the timber industry. As of 22 September, the coalition said that the ministry has not yet replied to their letter.
“The EUDR is an opportunity for the Malaysian government to improve its sustainability standards, fix flaws in the auditing system, and create effective oversight mechanisms,” said Annina Aeberli of the Bruno Manser Fund.
Indigenous voices suppressed
Sarawak’s forests are especially threatened by the state government’s planned one million hectares of industrial forest by 2025, added the rights group. “To achieve this goal, over 400,000 hectares of naturally regenerating forest would need to be converted between 2022 and 2025,” said Human Rights Watch. Rimbawatch analysis also found that Sarawak accounts for two-thirds of Malaysia’s planned deforestation, and recently decried the state’s coal mining plans in a peat swamp forest.
“Considering this, it made sense to us to prioritise an analysis of Sarawak,” Téllez Chávez told Eco-Business, especially as deforestation is the primary criteria for which the European Commission will determine a country’s risk level under the EUDR.
She explained, however, that the coalition had approached the federal government as they have been interacting directly with the EU on the EUDR. “Additionally, it is the federal government that is supposed to be enforcing the national limit for oil palm plantations and overseeing the application of the certification programs,” Téllez Chávez said.
Human Rights Watch also expressed concern that Sarawak state laws do not uphold its Indigenous peoples’ rights to own, use and control their ancestral territories. Besides having the ability to revoke Indigenous land titles without consent or compensation, the state government grants companies special leases to operate in areas which it has not surveyed, said the rights group.
Since the state land code does not impose any penalties for companies that encroach on Indigenous land, “companies can illegally disregard Indigenous peoples’ land rights claims without consequences,” said Human Rights Watch.
Indigenous peoples from Malaysia and Indonesia have struggled to have their voices heard on the subject of EUDR. At a key EUDR meeting between EU, Malaysian and Indonesian officials in Brussels earlier this month, representatives from Malaysia and Indonesia were denied entry by government officials.
This was despite the representatives having flown to Belgium from their respective countries, after EU officials agreed they could attend. Indigenous Sarawakians Celine Lim, managing director of Save Rivers, and Dayang Ukau of Keruan were asked to sit in a different room and join the session virtually.
“We found ourselves not only denied a place at the table but banned from the room where key negotiations on ending deforestation in Malaysia were happening,” said Lim, who has expressed confusion about why she was excluded. At the same time, logging companies are bulldozing Indigenous peoples’ forests in Sarawak without consultation or consent from communities, she said.
The civil society representatives had intended to raise awareness of this land encroachment at the meeting, as well as to denounce the Malaysian government’s forest data as unreliable.
It also sought to highlight glaring issues with existing certification programmes in Malaysia, such as the Malaysian Timber Certification Scheme. Earlier this month, the civil society coalition called on Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to overhaul the scheme with policy recommendations to improve practices in the country’s timber industry.
“For the EU deforestation law to work, the EU’s task force needs to hear from the frontline communities most directly affected by deforestation,” said Myrto Tilianaki, senior advocate for environment and human rights at Human Rights Watch, who travelled with the civil society representatives to Brussels for the meeting.
