Rainforest: Malaysia's is in pretty good heart

This was written for the Times Saturday Magazine in 1995

About a fortnight into nearly a month of poking around Malaysia's rainforest, I found what I was really looking for. We had set off uphill into a large expanse of jungle from Luasong Forestry Research Centre in Sabah - or north Borneo as it was called by the British. The other way, a two hour run on logging roads leads down to the nearest tarmac, which itself winds for a further couple of hours before it reaches even a half-pint town. Richat Patula, a wiry site supervisor employed by the State's Forestry Department, seemed delighted to have the chance to show me the downside of logging in this really big wild country. "There are some things you'll see here which aren't very clever", he said.
We left the jeep and the air-conditioning at the point where logging trucks could go no further, and continued sweatily on foot on tracks made by bulldozers and fat-wheeled tractors. This was where two forestry methods met: on one hillside, the bad end of the everyday; on a neighbouring hillside - heavily-researched - the reformed methods foreigners are helping to fund.

The crudely-harvested woodland fitted some of what I had read. The skid-trails down which logs are towed to "landings" where they are stockpiled had been carelessly "bladed" (that is, bulldozed). They were wide and deeply gouged. My guide took me to a lovely small river. "There will be more silt in it because they put a landing very close, on its banks", he said. He also showed me what to watch out for in the carefully-logged forest nearby: especially, the skinny little skid-trails he had policed a year or so before and which had already become all but invisible under regrowth. And carefully-sited landings.

But it was the sheer number of trees in either of these logged areas which is such a surprise. Dr Manokaran, head of Environmental Sciences at Malaysia's Forestry Research Institute (FRIM) near Kuala Lumpur, had given due warning, though. "I'm involved in international meetings with NGOs [Non Government Organisations] from the West and they have the common misconception that we do clear-felling." This is the technique, normal in the northern hemisphere, of harvesting every stick of a forest. In the tropics, says Dr Manokaran: "We take perhaps seven, eight - or maybe twelve - trees per hectare. The rest of the trees are left. Thirty-odd years later, some of the remaining trees will have grown on to form the next crop".

Indeed, the rules say that a commercial harvest must leave at least 30 really substantial trees in each hectare of a concession. There is even an argument that the number of trees left standing after a logging operation is not the truest guide to whether it has been well done from an ecological point of view. "It's not the intensity of the harvest which matters as much as how it's done", says Andrew Garcia, project manager of Luasong.

The surprises continue to come thick and fast. For instance, even heavily logged rainforest can be very rich in wildlife. Andrew Davis, a Cambridge University scientist working in Sabah, pointed out that secondary forest more fulfills the Western idea of jungle than does primary: it's more tangled - and is rather hotter and drier than mature forest. There are more vines and shrubs (they like the sudden flood of light), and thus more food for browsing and grazing creatures, and hence more food for some bird species. The number of species isn't diminished, though the populations of each species is changed for a while.

Dr Davis is on secondment to the Royal Society as the chief scientist of the Danum Valley Field Centre, one of Asia's most famous forestry research centres. He says, "I think the most important thing to realise is that whatever the problems, the logged forest is still there, as forest. It's there, and we can work with it. The Royal Society's main aim is to see how forest could be logged better, and restored better".

The project is working with a resource much more robust than is usually supposed. As one senior and disinterested scientist commented: "You get closed canopy after 15 years. Around thirty years later you couldn't tell there'd been logging at all unless you were a trained botanist. I'm no friend of the loggers, and I prefer virgin forest - but there you are."

Perhaps the biggest misconception is that we desperately need all the rainforest we can hang on to. This is, frankly, more a matter of taste than science. Research suggests that intelligent planning could organise a system whereby perhaps ten percent of the existing rainforest could be preserved and contain perhaps 80 percent of the forests' current species numbers. There is good evidence that plantations and farms, both candidates for alternative use of forest terrain, can preserve the quality of watersheds very well.

Of course, after it's been logged, the forest is in various degrees damaged - or altered might be a better word. Some of its tallest trees will have been taken out. However, some of the very tallest remain, partly because they will be past their best for timber, and partly because some are required for regeneration as "mother" trees. In principle, any tree under 45cm girth at a man's chest height will be left to mature, ready for the next harvest. The most prized species in Malaysia tend to be of a family called dipterocarp. These are often the tallest as well as the hardest-timbered trees and must be 60cm before they qualify for felling. In the mainland state of Negeri Sembilan, Che Ros, a district forestry officer, insists the rules are taken seriously: "I'm not saying there wasn't illegal logging. But we have tightened up. The loggers are smart and creative. But we are well-informed. We try to be be friendly, but we have the last word".

The national (which is to say, federal) government, and the thirteen States which actually control the forest on the ground, have agreed a considerable raft of measures about how forestry should be done. That's on top of the most basic conservation measure of all: around 2m hectares of Malaysia's primary forest has been declared off-limits to loggers.

Out in the 14 million hectares of Malaysia's 20m hectares of rainforest which is ear-marked for logging the story is, however, very mixed. In a country as noted for its tolerance of mild dissent as it is for its disappoval of loud dissent, the local Worldwide Fund for Nature is the most vociferous voice in the increasingly effective chorus against abuses. Yet Salahudin Yaacob, forest conservation officer for WWF Malaysia, begins with a message uncommon amongst conservationists elsewhere in the world: "We are pretty satisfied with the policies and the guidelines for forestry", he says. He rattles off the same statistics as does the industry or the Government: "The country has 57.5 percent of its surface as natural forest. If you add the palm oil and other estates, the figure of tree cover comes up to nearer 70 percent." Conservationists are not keen on lumping plantations with natural forests: but the fact remains that even plantations fulfill some of the role of the natural stuff. Mr Yaacob goes on: "Forty percent of the land is Permanent Forest Estate, where logging is allowed. But we can live with the arrangements with which it is supposed to be managed: if all the guidelines were implemented we would have good sustainable forestry."

So far as Malaysians - conservationists included - are concerned, forestry can be a sound ecological and economic proposition. As the campaigner says: "The nature of tropical forest is that they grow fast. Within one year of being logged the exposed soil will be covered, and the research which has been conducted on the hydrological cycle shows that soil loss recovers after five years. In areas that are properly logged, we know the forest can recover without any silvicultural

treatment at all. Of course, in forest which is not properly harvested, things can be very, very bad."

Malaysians are fast becoming urban and suburban, and they are showing every sign of becoming conservation-minded too. Nonetheless, historically, they have been too busy and poor to care much about nature. In any case, they may have been pretty comfortable with the realities of forestry partly because most of them hardly ever saw rainforest, whilst for others it is a distant backdrop to their modern farms. More important, Malaysians seem united in the view that economic development is good for nearly everyone, and that logging has been an important source of capital for the country.

To a degree which very few people in the West understand, this is even true for many of the people living in the jungle, most of whom are slash-and-burn farmers, whose numbers are declining mostly because the work is too hard and boring to appeal to anyone educated enough to pursue any of the opportunities an economy growing as fast as this one affords.

The West often hears about native people protesting about new dams and the destruction they bring to rainforest. The latest is the dam proposed at Bakun, in Sarawak. Yet a thoughtful senior policeman in Kuching, himself the son of a poor farming family once affected by a dam, and who knows Bakun well, says that the protest was not even about the amount of compensation promised by the Government. One listened to such a man because, born in a traditional longhouse (a communal bungalow on stilts) he had made the very common transition from a stone-age world to twentieth-century professionalism. "They are worried", he said, "about whether the promises will be honoured. That's what this is about. And they're right to be worried."

Stephan Andel, a experienced ex-patriate tropical forester working with the UN-sponsored International Tropical Timber Organisation on sustainable forestry methods for Malaysia, says: "If you go to longhouse communities, you find all the men of twenty or thirty are working in town or for timber companies for cash. Shifting agriculture is very much disappearing. There may be three million hectares of idle land now. The question is, what sort of forestry do we want to see on it?" Mr Andel favours well-planned plantations of the kind of rather ordinary trees which the modern world hugely demands - for paper especially. He thinks natural or semi-natural rainforest might best be regarded as producing the kind of high quality, slower-growing decorative timber for which people are prepared to pay higher prices.

The Malaysians have promised to maintain the recent steady reduction in the annual coupe (or harvest). Gerald Hiu, Forestry Operations Manager for the Sabah Foundation, emphasises the positive. His foundation is a typically Malaysian hybridised body, half official and half independent. It manages a million hectares of forest whose revenues the foundation uses for the social development of the state. It has in the past been accused of inefficiency and worse, and may not have been overly scrupulous in obeying the logging rules, though it seems to have shaken off that reputation now. In any case, a change of forestry habit seems to appeal to its people, as to many other Malaysians. Mr Hiu says his organisation is a long-term player: "We have been cutting at about the same rate since the 70s, and we reckon we have enough virgin forest left to go to 2016". By that time, there will be substantial tracts which have been able to regrow for fifty years. Long before then, new priorities may require more virgin forest be "locked up" as reserves. Also before then, foresters may have decided that it is high time to log more carefully to ensure a decent crop in 2030 and beyond.

It's defining what responsible policy would be that promotes the debates. At the Danum Valley Field Centre, there are research programmes which look at how Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) might spare many more trees, and how skid trails and roads can be better designed. It's simple stuff: cutting trees so they fall where they do least damage to other trees; roads designed so they don't cause earth slips. There is also work on restoring logged

forest with selective planting - to help regeneration along. Again, it's straightforward, in principle. There's a vast amount of sunshine available in logged rainforest, and desirable seedlings of the right tree species might just as well be planted so as to mop it up. To this end, at Danum they test-plant hundreds of thousands of baby dipterocarps, whilst at Luasong they experiment with rattan - the staple of conservatory furniture in Europe.

The New England Power Company in the US is funding one of the RIL programmes, with US Government encouragement, on the grounds that helping forests recover quickly helps them lock up carbon dioxide emissions from Western power stations. It's a job they do far more quickly than does mature rainforest which has achieved a sort of tick-over state of carbon cycling.

There is broad agreement that this sort of work is valuable, but greater argument about how far it should go. The Malaysians are acutely aware that the timber market is highly competitive: cost alone may keep exotic solutions - for instance, hauling logs out by helicopter - a rarity.

At the Luasong research centre (less well-known than Danum, but somehow more down to earth, too), Andrew Garcia very politely implies that it is important not only to promote the expensive best. He says, "We are working on guidelines which are reasonable and enforceable". He thinks some of the government's rules, and some of the new ideas foreign researchers enjoy exploring, are too idealistic, and may well be counter-productive.

In any case, it's policing which matters almost more than regulations. "When I was a ranger in the 70s, we couldn't enforce the guidelines because we had hardly any men out in the forest. Now we have a man for every couple of tractors", Mr Garcia says.

Whole armies of regulators would be useless if they were stymied by corruption, as it is widely believed they have been in the past. There is widespread acceptance that politicians and businessmen are in each others' pockets in Malaysia: crony-ism is the preferred term for the relationship, and it captures the sense that it is cosy venality which goes on, rather than anything obviously nasty.

The pressures were and are profound. Logging contractors naturally want their quick buck. They have often bought the right to harvest logs from a concessionaire who bought his right to harvest an area from the State government. "The State governments were historically always under pressure - or attracted - to improve their revenue position, and to go beyond the guidelines and quotas," says Wong Kum Choon, the urbane retired civil servant who runs the Malaysian Timber Council - yet another hybrid of state and private interests.

And then the area of forest - primary or secondary - is whittled away illegally as well legally, often for development (which has taken over from the creation of farmland as the modern pressure).

Actually, however, it is very likely that this rough and ready system will be converted into something more Western and more obviously respectable: it has served its purpose for the pioneering days, and now alienates the middle class who increasingly matter. Thus, just as Malaysians have acquired at taste for the naturalness of rainforest, they seem also to have acquired a distate for the informal commercialism which tends most to damage it. "The Prime Minister and the deputy Prime Minister have been very forceful in getting State Chief Ministers to toe the line", says Wong Kum Choon. "The political leadership is very strong on pressing the connection between ecology and economics". It is as powerfully insisting that crony-ism has had its day.

Nowadays, the politicians are themselves closely watched. Salleh Mohamed Nor, the dynamic erstwhile head of FRIM, is president of the Malaysian Nature Society and has become the country's most influential critic of conventional logging. His usefulness to the cause was clear the day he played host to Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the country's prime minister and father-figure, at the launch of "Gift of Trees", a scheme under which Malaysia's citizenry can fund the planting of amenity trees. Dr Mahathir, whose word is close to gospel in the country, was demonstratively warm to Dr Salleh, and made a speech about the greening of the country which would have gratified any Western audience.

"We clearly can't take traditional logging techniques into the remaining upland forests," says Dr Salleh. This is not to say he cannot see how to do sustainable forestry. In particular, he is increasingly bold about the political changes which need to be made: he is just the latest, and by far the most influential, voice calling for the private sector to be given the chance, and the duty, to harvest forests for longterm profit. Dr Salleh is amongst many who stress that this may not lie in timber at all, but in the forest's ability to keep watersheds rich in clear water - a commodity Malaysia sells to Singapore.

He believes that concessions should be very large and very long term, and - perhaps more important - they should be run by firms which have invested in sawmills, pulp mills and furniture-making. This ties in with an emerging view that ensuring large firms are committed to large projects over a long period makes them more likely to be amenable to the rule-makers: their licence to log is important to them.

Whether Malaysia can have - in the trendy term - a licence to sell its timber overseas is another matter. In Germany, greens have succeeded in making it virtually impossible for retailers to sell anything with tropical timber in it. In Britain the issues remains totemic.

The UN, and especially the under-powered ITTO, has been the forum in which producer and consumer nations have discussed a growing but still waffly commitment to sustainable forestry, notionally to be achieved by 2000. Meanwhile, powerful western NGOs, including the WWF, have liaised with commercial interests to produce the Forest Stewardship Council, which is becoming the umbrella under which various certification authorities can begin to label this or that forest as well-enough managed for scrupulous consumers to patronise.

Dr Mahathir and his primary industries minister, a Belfast-educated doctor, Lim Keng Yaik, have been inclined to fulminate against this sort of neo-colonialism. Hardly surprisingly, they resent the implication that they can't be trusted to tell the truth about, or be in charge of, their own resource. However, Malaysia may soon find it wants to change its tune. With a domestic political requirement to improve its logging, the country may make a switch often seen in environmental politics. The virtuous - and therefore expensive - producers quite quickly find they want rigorous regulation applied universally. They welcome the level playing field.

Alan Knight, the go-ahead environment manager for B and Q, the British do-it-yourself and garden centre retailer, worked hard to establish FSC. "We need it for our business," he says. "Five years ago, people like Friends of the Earth were arguing for a boycott of tropical timber. Now they support the idea of certification". Mr Knight believes that countries such as Malaysia should aim to develop their own home-grown certification schemes, which could then work under the FSC umbrella. The UK government has signalled mild sceptisicsm about the FSC approach, fearing that it may be too idealistic to work. What is sure is that it is increasingly easy to define acceptable standards, and some countries are beginning to feel more obliged to introduce them.

The truthfulness of a country's claims to forest virtue, or of campaigners' claims of destruction, will soon be much easier to test. In an office in the headquarters of the Sarawak Forestry Service outside Kuching, German researchers are learning how to read satellite images of forest and forestry. Spy-in-the-sky technology, designed to spot inter-continental ballistic missiles and their carriers, is being redeployed to check that mighty trees are not being hauled out of their proper habitat on timber trucks.

With luck, British consumers will one day be able proudly to boast that their front door is slow-grown dipterocarp from a Bornean mountainside. Even the most purist green may begin to see that a dictum much used about buses and village shops at home just as well applies to rainforest in exotic countries. The message is, "Use It Or Lose It".