Sarawak’s rampant clearing of forest habitats for conversion to oil palm should be of grave concern for the people of Sarawak and Malaysia.

Most of the land being cleared for oil palm is peatland. The peatland has to be drained, cut or burned, and doing so releases huge quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere.

Sarawak had 750,000 ha under oil palm in 2009. About 400,000 ha of this was peatland. The plan is to ramp up oil palm acreage to one million hectares in the immediate future, and much more after that.

Quite quickly, Sarawak will convert more than one million hectares of peatland to oil palm if Malaysians do nothing. Clearing a million ha of peatland will release a staggering 6.7 billion tonnes of CO2 over a period of time. This is more than forty times all of Malaysia’s energy related emissions in 2007!

Peatlands provide us vital ecosystem services such as carbon storage, safe haven for bio-diversity (including the orangutan), flood control and improved water quality.

When challenged about its devastating role in climate change, habitat loss, and species extinction, Malaysia’s oil palm industry will deny it, while claiming that oil palm is necessary to reduce rural poverty. The claim does not bear up to scrutiny.

For one, oil palm workers are very poorly paid, and two, there is an acute shortage of labour in the industry. For Malaysia as a whole, the oil palm sector hires about 577,900 workers of which less than 40 % (227,900) are Malaysians and 350,000 are foreigners.

On the one hand, the oil palm industry actively destroys valuable habitats and ecosystems, and contributes greatly to climate change, while on the other hand, it creates a relatively small number of lowly paid jobs. Roughly, for every twenty hectares of natural habitat that is cleared for oil palm, only one job is created for a Malaysian.

If a forested area the size of Selangor was cleared for oil palm, it would only create about 40,000 rural jobs for Malaysians. And these are not the type of jobs a rapidly developing country would want for its citizens.

Typically, the Sarawak government gives away by ruse the communal lands of the indigenous people, for which they have native customary rights, to the oil palm companies. The land is first logged, then cleared. When native communities protest such actions, Malaysian police arrive at the scene to break up the protests.

The people are then forced to abandon their reasonably self-sufficient traditional way of life to become ill-paid labourers in oil palm plantations on what was their own verdant ancestral land.

At great cost to our indigenous people and Mother Nature, powerful families and well-connected oil palm companies make large fortunes.

Malaysians must object to the corruption, injustice and deforestation for the sake of a beautiful Malaysia.