When Taib became the chief minister, he invited ITTO in 1989 to study Sarawak’s sustainable forest management. Some of ITTO recommendations were adopted to strengthen the state’s legal and institutional instruments while bio-diversity conservation included the establishment of Lanjak Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary and Pulong Tau National Park.
Awang Tengah said Sarawak was confident of having one million hectares (ha) of Totally Projected Areas (TPAs) by 2020, with the possibility of raising it to 1.5 million ha.
To reduce dependence on natural forest, the state aimed to have one million ha of tree plantations, while a wildlife master plan had been drawn up for systematic and proper management of the flora and fauna.
The state had also presented a report on ITTO activities in Sarawak and signed MoUs with a consortium of Japanese universities to undertake research in the TPAs at the 48th session of the International Tropical Timber Convention (ITTC) in Yokohama in 2012.
He commended the state for actively engaging the stakeholders in various sustainable forest management and conservation projects in collaboration with ITTO.
Currently CM Adenan is engaged in a propaganda exercise pretending to protect the State’s forests. As he is in the best position to know, 90% of that forest has been cut down to the personal profit of his predecessor as CM Taib and cronies. One cannot “protect” something that no longer exists.
Supporting this “initiative” by Adenan is that curious creature the ITTO (International Tropical Timber Organisation). This body, originally set up by the UN to help conserve tropical forests, has long since been taken over by an international consortium of tropical timber merchants whose sole interest lies in extracting the maximum possible profit from the little tropical timber forest still standing; not just in Sarawak but all over the tropical world.
Recently the organisation held a conference to promote its alleged objective. Anxious to maintain this fiction it screened the list of those wishing to attend and excluded the Bruno Manser Foundation, a Sarawak NGO, which recently circulated a book exposing an ITTO member’s ill doing in Sarawak.
If ITTO genuinely wanted to preserve tropical timber assets it would welcome this book and its sponsor as contributors to saving tropical forests from greedy exploitation.