Bruno Manser Fonds Denies Baseless Allegations By Sarawak Minister Over ITTO Project Failure

Government policy change over logging core protection zone is the real reason for the termination of the ITTO-supported Upper Baram Forest Area (UBFA) in Malaysian Borneo

Swiss NGO Bruno Manser Fonds (BMF) today denied allegations made by Sarawak Deputy Minister Len Talif Salleh in the Sarawak State Assembly (DUN) yesterday over the reasons for the termination of a flagship sustainability project

”We are not willing to take the blame for a dodgy policy change by the Sarawak government”, BMF director Lukas Straumann said. ”Len should be honest and acknowledge that Sarawak dropped the late Chief Minister Adenan Satem’s plan of protecting the UBFA’s core zone of 79,000 hectares of primary forest – Sarawak’s last primary forest outside the totally protected areas.”

Celine Lim, Managing Director of Sarawak-based NGO SAVE Rivers said:” We work with non-Penan communities and were part of the UBFA Project Steering Committee (PSC). So, it is not true that the overall communities were not well represented via the NGOs coalition. The response by YB Datuk Haji Len is intentionally divisive and incomplete to villainise the role of the NGOs, when we were only inquiring public information as per our role as rightholders in the PSC.”

In 2020, Malaysia submitted a proposal to the International Tropical Timber Organization for the conservation and sustainable development of a 283,500 hectare area in Sarawak’s Upper Baram region. The proposal was drafted by the renowned late botanist Dr Paul Chai and endorsed by then Forest Director Sapuan Ahmad. A key element of the proposal was the conservation of a 79,000 hectare core zone of primary forest in Upper Baram.

After international funding was secured, the Sarawak authorities unilaterally changed the project design. The 79,000 hectares were no longer to be excised from the logging concessions but became part of a timber licence granted to Borneoland Timber Resources, a company controlled by the politically-linked timber tycoon Hii King Chiong.

Currently, massive logging activities on the western flank of the iconic Gunung Murud Kecil are threatening this habitat of extraordinary biodiversity in the core zone of the former ITTO project.

Neither ITTO nor the Sarawak state government answered NGO letters questioning the reasons for the policy change and highlightling governance failures in the ITTO project. The Swiss City of Basel, the Bruno Manser Fonds and the Japanese government had pledged to support the project with a total amount of USD 556,000.

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