A better quality of life should be the business sector’s concern, too. Credit: S Li.

By Diana G Mendoza
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 29 2015 (IPS)

When his father drove back to pay the 47 Malaysian cents they owed to the food stall they had just left, then nine-year-old Anis Yusal Yusoff, today president and chief executive officer of the Malaysian Institute of Integrity, learned the meaning of standing firm by one’s values.

“To me, that was having integrity, having values,” Yusoff recalled while speaking at the ASEAN Responsible Business Forum held here this week in the Malaysian capital. “We had to drive back so we can pay the stall owner what we owed him, even if it was only 47 sen (less than one US dollar) he said.

It may sound cliché, he continued, but integrity should be taught early in life so that it is carried to adulthood, and especially when a person joins the corporate world.

He asked parents and schools to teach children to be “God-fearing and law-abiding,” so that they have firm ethical foundations in life. A walk in a public park, for instance, can teach a child not to throw trash or vandalise flowers because the park belongs to everyone and should be cared for by all who use it.

Simple things like these may be far removed from what business people usually discuss in boardrooms or pay attention to in the world of negotiations, dividends and profit margins. But Yusoff said that business integrity is seen in how people work, in corporations and organisations big and small.

Doing good and practising integrity when doing business resonated through the three-day forum, which was organised by the Singapore-based ASEAN CSR Network. The conference aims to have the public sector, private sector and civil society advance responsible business practices and partnerships as deeper economic integration takes root in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in December 2015.

Attended by some 250 participants from governments, civil society groups, trade unions, academe and business, the forum discussed issues that businesses in the region have identified as important to their brand of “corporate social responsibility”: responsible business practice in agriculture, respect for human rights, assurance of a decent workplace and a path toward a corruption-free ASEAN business community.

“Businesses are widely recognised as the engine for economic growth and poverty eradication,” said Yanti Triwadiantini, chair of the ASEAN CSR Network. “The forum can provide answers by helping transform companies from merely profit-driven entities into agents of change for responsible and sustainable development.”

As agents of change that have a stake in the betterment of the societies they do business in, businesses take an active role in ensuring equitable, inclusive and sustainable development, speakers at the forum explained.

A business can be good if it has good people running it, stressed Lim Wee Chai, founder and chairman of Top Glove Corp, which produces rubber gloves. “We create awareness in the workforce on how to be good in the conduct of business – from picking up rubbish daily to wearing an anti-corruption badge,” he said.

“We encourage our people to do good. We educate them,” he told the forum. But in the wider world of ASEAN and its partner governments and organisations – as ASEAN companies get more opportunities to go across national borders – “being good alone is not good enough; make sure your neighbouring countries are also doing good,” he pointed out.

Yanti stressed that the need for the private sector to be involved in defining responsible business practices and adhering to these values, against the backdrop of the momentum of economic integration at the launch of the ASEAN Community this year.

The ASEAN Community will officially be launched by ASEAN leaders at their 27th Summit in November in this city. It marks the progression of the Southeast Asia’s main regional grouping into a community of more than 600 million people in economic, socio-cultural and political terms. If it were one single economy, ASEAN would be the seventh largest economy in the world with a combined GDP or 2.4 trillion dollars in 2013. “2015 is a milestone year for ASEAN,” said Yanti.

At the same time, Yanti asked participants to be mindful of the need to narrow the development gap among the richer and poorer ASEAN countries, and the gap within these countries, by ensuring protection for the most vulnerable groups such as children, women and migrant workers.

“Many of the problems we face today are also caused by irresponsible companies who take advantage of the prevailing conditions to earn maximum profits at the expense of people and the environment,” she said. “The current haze (is) as prime example of such a phenomenon,” she added, referring to how the drive for profits has pushed plantation owners and companies with concessions in Indonesia to use burning practices that annually pollute the air across several countries in Southeast Asia and cause regional tensions. This year’s haze episode has been the worst since 1997.

Corruption, the concern of many ASEAN citizens and a touchy topic among governments, also drew lively discussion.

“More often, corruption occurs when the government transacts business with the private sector,” said Francesco Checchi, regional anti-corruption adviser of the Southeast Asia and the Pacific office of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime. International mechanisms such as the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) could be a guide to not just eliminate but to prevent corruption in business, he added.

The forum’s guest of honor, Sen. Paul Low Seng Kuan, minister for governance and integrity of the prime minister’s department of Malaysia, pointed that there are “businesses that partner with corrupt political institutions.”

“Corruption has eroded the integrity of almost all institutions,” explained Jose Cortez, executive director of Integrity Initiative Inc in the Philippines. In his country, he said, a trust-building movement has been mounted where institutions are trying to win the public’s confidence by signing “integrity initiative pledges” that commit to transparency and honesty in doing business.

“If transparency is prevalent in a company’s culture, then it is easier to detect corrupt practices,” he said.

From a larger perspective, the quest for “human dignity” is still any businessperson’s aspiration, added Thomas Thomas, chief executive officer of the ASEAN CSR Network. “I’ve heard the quest to doing good many times in this forum, and the difficulty of being good, but it is attainable,” he pointed out.

This feature is part of the ‘Reporting ASEAN: 2015 and Beyond’ series of IPS Asia-Pacific and Probe Media Foundation Inc.

Volunteers taking on fires at Garung village in Pulang Pisau district, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia. Credit: Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Indonesia

By Kanis Dursin
JAKARTA, Oct 10 2015 (IPS)

A regional agreement on managing transboundary haze caused by fires raging in Indonesia’s forests and peatlands appears all but buried in the embers of frustration of its neighbouring countries.

Nearby Singapore and Malaysia, apart from eastern Indonesia, have been hardest hit by the haze, which has been sending air pollution indices soaring to unhealthy levels for more than a month now. In recent days, the winds have blown the haze to southern Thailand as well.

In parts of Southeast Asia, a pall of grey hangs over the skies from morning until dusk, and scenes of residents walking around with masks have become common.

Over the past month or so, schools have been closed at some point, flights delayed or outdoor activities cancelled or limited, with warnings about the risks to children and the elderly, as countries asked Indonesia, with whom they are members in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), to address the burning of forests and land in eastern Indonesia.

After months of digging in its heels and saying it can manage on its own, the Indonesian government was quoted as saying this week it believes foreign help would be needed to put out the fires.

“This has proven quite a challenge for us, so we see it as a necessity to work together with countries that have the available resources to extinguish the fires,” foreign ministry spokesman Arrmanatha Nasir said on Oct. 8. He said Indonesia’s foreign minister, Retno LP Marsud, had talked to Singapore, Malaysia, Russia, China and Australia “to discuss cooperation initiatives to overcome fire hotspots.”

But in these discussions about the fires there has hardly been any mention of the 1997 ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution, a legally binding agreement among the 10 member countries of the organisation. These are Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

In truth, activists say, they did not have much hope in the ASEAN haze agreement and ASEAN’s ability – or will – to hold its members to its own commitments.

“The agreement is said to be legally binding, but ASEAN has no court to try offenders,” said Nur Hidayati, head of the advocacy department of the Indonesian Forum for Environment, known by its Indonesian acronym WALHI. She added that the haze accord would likely meet the same fate as the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights, which activists see as weak.

Yet this year would have been an opportunity to show the teeth of the haze agreement, which ASEAN has long held up as an example of successful regional cooperation. The haze agreement was the world’s first regional arrangement that binds a group of states to tackle transboundary pollution from land and forest fires.

After years of resistance, Indonesia – whose inability to control the fires for nearly two decades has been an irritant in its ties with its neighbours – finally ratified the haze agreement in September 2014 and became legally bound by it. That is 12 years after Indonesia signed it with other ASEAN countries in 2002, a fact that has raised doubts about ASEAN’s ability to enforce its own decisions.

ASEAN countries are also moving toward deeper economic integration and launching the ASEAN Community in December 2015, but addressing transboundary tensions continue to challenge the 48-year-old organisation.

“If the most powerful three members of ASEAN (Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia) are not able to address a recurring and predictable problem (haze), what hope does the region have for economic integration with the ASEAN Economic Community that is going to be finalized end of this year?” asked a September commentary in the Jakarta Post newspaper by Joseph Cherian of the Centre for Asset Management Research and Investments, Jack Loo of Think Business and Ang Swee Hoon of the National University of Singapore Business School.

Singapore and Malaysia have repeatedly offered assistance to put out the raging fires, but Indonesia’s officials until recently said they could manage on their own.

“For the time being, we are only thinking of exhausting all of our internal resources before seeking external assistance,” J S George Lantu, director of ASEAN functional cooperation of the Indonesian foreign ministry said in an interview earlier in October. “We really appreciate their offers of help, but as a sovereign state we don’t want to seek to external help without trying hard enough to put out the fires. We can handle the fires ourselves,” the diplomat said.

But Indonesia is showing “complete disregard for our people, and their own,” Singapore Foreign Minister K Shanmugan told the British Broadcasting Corporation earlier in October.

The head of the environment division of the Jakarta-based ASEAN secretariat, which oversees the implementation of the ASEAN haze agreement, said Indonesia’s responses to the fires were in line with the accord. “Obviously, Indonesia can deal with the fires with its own resources,” division head Ampai Harakunarak said. “All member states are standing by, ready to receive requests from Indonesia.”

The accord aims to “prevent and monitor transboundary haze pollution as a result of land and/or forest fires which should be mitigated, through concerted national efforts and intensified regional and international cooperation.” It requires parties to “cooperate in developing and implementing measures to prevent and monitor transboundary haze pollutions as a result of land and/or forest fires” and “to control sources of fires.”

In truth, “Indonesia ratified the agreement under strong protest from Singapore and Malaysia over haze pollution. It (the ratification) was more as a political gesture than a statement of intent,” said WALHI’s Hidayati.

Significantly, Article 12.2 of the agreement says that external assistance “can only be employed at the request of and with the consent of the requesting party, or when offered by another party or parties, with the consent of the receiving party.”

President Joko Widodo had instructed government agencies to handle the fires in peatlands and forest being cleared by plantations for products like palm oil or paper. Foreign companies run many of them, prompting Singapore’s National Environmental Agency to name five companies with Indonesian concessions suspected to be contributing to the haze.

The Singapore Environment Council and Consumers Association of Singapore have urged consumers to use only products of companies that do not use burning practices in Indonesia.

Satellite images show that 70 per cent of hotspots in Sumatera and Borneo islands in Indonesia are in local plantations. Some 1.7 million hectares of land, more than a third of which are on peatland in Sumatra and Kalimantan, have been burned, Widodo said.

Clearly, Indonesia has a lot of cleaning up to do of the concessions it gives to plantation companies and enforcing of local laws, critics say.

Land and/or forest fires have plagued Indonesia annually over the past 18 years due to unprecedented expansion of pulp and paper companies and oil palm plantations and their conversion into easy-to-burn peatlands, according to WALHI.

“By nature, tropical rain forests are impossible to burn due to high humidity. However, when trees are felled and a monoculture system is introduced in oil palm and rubber plantations or forest estates, their humidity disappears and they become vulnerable to fires,” Hidayati said.

Government officials say they have frozen some oil palm and forest concessions, adding that they have fined some companies and that others are awaiting trial. “Previously, we only charged individuals or corporates violating the 2009 environmental law in criminal and civil courts. Since January 2015, however, we also impose administrative sanctions on them by either freezing or revoking their concessions,” said Muhammad Yunus, director of the criminal law enforcement division of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry.

But the government must review all forest and plantation concessions to determine whether companies can handle fires, Hidayati said. “A fire that breaks out in a plantation or forest estate should been seen as a concession holder’s inability to manage the land and thus serve as a ground to revoke the concession, regardless who sets it or whether or not it’s deliberate.”

Untung Suprapto, head of the land and forest fire control sub-directorate of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, said his office is drafting a regulation that would require plantation and forest concession holders to have own firefighter teams, trucks and equipment.
(End)

Excerpt:

This photo, taken in 2012, shows desperate Rohingya refugees from Myanmar attempting to get past border patrol guards in Bangladesh. Now, in 2015, a fresh exodus of mainly Rohingya migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh has the international community on edge. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, May 16 2015 (IPS)

On Thursday, May 14, a group of journalists rented a boat from Ko Lipe, a small island in Thailand’s southwest Satun Province, and headed out into the Andaman Sea – a water body in the northeastern Indian Ocean bounded by Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Strait of Malacca.

Ten miles into the journey, they came upon a sight not often spied in these waters: a three-storey, rickety wooden vessel, filled with ragged men, women and children who, upon seeing the boatload of journalists, began crying out for help.

“We don’t have a flotilla to go out and help them, but there are plenty of countries in the region that do, and plenty of reasons for them to do it – if they don’t, they’ll be dealing with a floating graveyard soon, rather than a flotilla of ships." -- Leonard Doyle, director of media and communications for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)
This ship and its desperate human cargo – hundreds of migrants from the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar and Bangladesh – now symbolizes the plight of a persecuted people, and the harsh migration policies of a handful of Southeast Asian countries that have resulted in a game of ‘maritime Ping-Pong’ played out with human lives.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), smugglers abandoned the ship and its passengers after failing to dock in Thailand as a result of that country’s harsh crackdown on what it calls “illegal” maritime arrivals, but what rights activists say are beleaguered citizens fleeing ethnic persecution and economic hardship in their native lands.

Earlier, the boat made a failed attempt to land in Malaysia, and on Friday Thai authorities moved the vessel further out to sea, claiming that its passengers wanted to carry on with their journey – an unlikely scenario given that the emaciated group of refugees have been out at sea for three months, and have little to no food or water left onboard.

A regional crisis

And they are not the only ones – the IOM estimates that some 6,000 people out of roughly 8,000 who have been out at sea since early March remain marooned off the coasts of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

These countries, all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have taken an uneven approach to the refugee crisis: the IOM says some 1,500 people have managed to disembark in Malaysia and Indonesia, while thousands of others have been turned away, with the navies of each respective country going so far as to tow some of the boats further out to see.

A statement issued through the spokesperson of the United Nations Secretary-General Thursday called on governments in the region to respond to the crisis by upholding international obligations, including the prohibition on ‘refoulement’ – the forcible return of persecuted individuals to their country of origin.

The U.N. chief also asked governments to “facilitate timely disembarkation and keep their borders and ports open in order to help the vulnerable people who are in need.”

However, these requests have so far gone unheeded.

Alarmed by the plight of those stranded out at sea, the IOM on Friday released one million dollars from its Migration Emergency Funding Mechanism, with the aim of expanding relief to refugees on shore and assisting those still on the water.

While the fund will provide potentially life-saving emergency aid to hundreds of people, “it’s really up to countries nearby to respond,” IOM Director of Media and Communications Leonard Doyle told IPS.

He said the emergency funds will be used to provide desperate migrants with whatever they might need, but they have to be brought ashore first.

“We don’t have a flotilla to go out and help them, but there are plenty of countries in the region that do, and plenty of reasons for them to do it – if they don’t, they’ll be dealing with a floating graveyard soon, rather than a flotilla of ships,” he stressed.

At the very least, he said, powerful emerging countries within range of the crisis should use their naval capacity to bring those needing medical attention ashore – it is believed that pregnant women are among the migrants still drifting well within reach of land – but no government has so far demonstrated a willingness to do so.

Risking death to flee their homes

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) believes that about 25,000 people “departed irregularly by sea” from the Bay of Bengal in the first quarter of 2015 – double the departure rate for the two preceding years.

The U.N. agency also says an estimated 300 people have died out at sea since October 2014, from starvation, dehydration or after being beaten severely by boat crews.

Hailing largely from Bangladesh and Myanmar, passengers pay between 90 and 370 dollars to board these ships, in addition to the thousands of dollars they might pay moneylenders in interest rates, or to immigration officials for their freedom once they land on safer shores.

The sudden spike in departures could be driven by a number of factors, not least of which the harsh conditions in IDP camps in Myanmar where over 140,000 refugees, the majority of whom identify as Rohingya Muslims, have been interned since inter-communal violence in the country’s western Rakhine State displaced them from their homes nearly three years ago.

Other reasons for the exodus include economic hardships, or ethnic persecution, the U.N. says.

That so many are willing to risk death by drowning for a mere chance of a better life speaks volumes of their plight in their home countries.

An IOM statement released Friday explained, “In the past three years, an estimated 160,000 migrants from the coasts of Myanmar and Bangladesh were smuggled by boat to Thailand before being brought overland to Malaysia.”

But the discovery in early May of mass graves in smuggling camps drove a major crackdown on migrants in both countries, resulting in the current regional stalemate.

These and other issues are expected to be the focus of a regional summit scheduled to take place later this month, which U.N. Chief Ban Ki-moon called an opportunity “for all leaders of Southeast Asia to intensify individual and collective efforts to address this worrying situation and tackle the root causes, of which the push factors are often human rights violations.”

Others believe that such a settlement, if it comes at all, will come too late.

“These people are not going to last that long,” IOM’s Doyle told IPS. “They need to be rescued now and that’s what we’ve been calling for. As you can imagine, one day out on a boat is enough, but these people have been out there for [months]… This is shocking, really shocking treatment of human beings.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A scene from ‘The Incredible Adventures of Border Crossers’ by Singaporean artist Ong Keng Sen at the ‘Singapour en France - le festival’ arts fest, which aims to highlight the power of culture and its “ability to bring people together and to cross boundaries”. Credit A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Mar 29 2015 (IPS)

As Singapore mourns the passing of Lee Kuan Yew, the late former prime minister’s vision of a dynamic and vibrant state is being reflected in a major arts festival in France.

‘Singapour en France – le festival’ was launched Mar. 26 in Paris, against the backdrop of a massive out-pouring of grief in Lee’s homeland, following his death three days earlier.

“As Singaporeans grieve and reflect on our loss, we continue to honour Mr. Lee’s vision of establishing Singapore on the international stage,” said Rosa Daniel, deputy secretary of the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth, who delivered a speech on behalf of her chief Lawrence Wong at the opening of the festival.“We used to be derided as just clean, green, safe and orderly, but dull and antiseptic. Now we have a lively city with the arts, culture, museums, art galleries, the Esplanade Theatre by the Bay, a Western orchestra, a Chinese orchestra ... And we have resident writers and artists” – Lee Kuan Yew, late former Prime Minister of Singapore

The event, which will run until Jun. 30, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Asian city state’s independence, as well as 50 years of diplomatic ties between Singapore and France. It aims to showcase the art, culture and heritage of Singapore through more than 70 activities in cities throughout France.

“We’re a young nation … but we’re bold, modern and willing to experiment,” said Daniel, adding that the festival would also highlight the power of culture and its “ability to bring people together and to cross boundaries.”

Lee himself recognised that Singapore had made its “share of mistakes” in the cultural heritage area by destroying buildings in its rush to modernise, but in his later political years he emphasised the importance of safeguarding this heritage and of having a “top-class” arts and entertainment sector.

“We used to be derided as just clean, green, safe and orderly, but dull and antiseptic,” he said in 2010. “Now we have a lively city with the arts, culture, museums, art galleries, the Esplanade Theatre by the Bay, a Western orchestra, a Chinese orchestra … And we have resident writers and artists.”

Some of those artists travelled to France for the opening of the festival and gave a view of the changing art scene in Singapore, pushing the boundaries in a region noted for traditional values and not particularly famous for freedom of expression.

In ‘Secret Archipelago’ at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo modern art museum, visitors can view a range of experimental and contemporary work, created by Singaporeans and artists from other Southeast Asian nations such as Malaysia, Vietnam and Myanmar.

“Their works represent a bridging of the gap between past and future and the creative tension between memory and tradition on the one hand and contemporary Western influences on the other, while bringing their own particular languages to modern art,” say the curators.

“I don’t consider myself a strong person, but art gives me a way to express myself” – AnGie seah, one of the Singaporean artists exhibiting at the ‘Singapour en France – le festival’ arts fest in Paris, March 2015. Credit A.D. McKenzie/IPS

AnGie seah, an artist who includes performance in her work, embodies these concerns – literally – in her presentation titled ‘Howl of the Hallows’ in the Palais de Tokyo’s huge basement gallery.

Here visitors can listen to the screams of various people through a headphone while watching seah (who prefers her name to be lower-cased) perform the screams on video.

“I think the human voice is powerful and I like to use it in my art,” said the artist, who has travelled around France asking people to scream for her, and taping the results.

Her installation included “mini shrines” with pottery or terra cotta representations of body parts such as a hand, with the middle finger sticking up. The shrines give the installation a traditional yet avant-garde feel, inviting visitors to question the symbolism.

“I don’t consider myself a strong person, but art gives me a way to express myself,” seah told IPS.

Not far from her exposition, Vietnamese artists and twin brothers Le Ngoc Thanh and Le Duc Hai, who go by the name of Le Brothers, showed a long rectangle of video screens with military-clad characters in a variety of activities. They told IPS that their work is a call for peace through the depiction of war and soldiers in their self-performed films.

Describing their art further, Singaporean curator Khairuddin Hori said it dissects and questions post-war consciousness of North and South Vietnam, as the brothers “exploit their twin identity as mirror and metaphor.”

Other artists incorporated everyday items such as plates and household figurines to question identity while also re-affirming their history and culture. An artist from Malaysia said he had listened to senior citizens and used their stories to create his installation, which covered a large part of one wall.

Alongside the ‘Secret Archipelago’ exhibition, the opening of the festival included a five hour-long multi-media performance titled ‘The Incredible Adventures of Border Crossers’, with sound, dance, film, fashion and photography.

Specially commissioned for the festival, this ultra-modern work by Singaporean artist Ong Keng Sen features huge video screens, music technicians and live performances in a kind of visual and acoustic cacophony that still transmits harmony.

“Real-life border crossers who have never acted before are invited to be performers in this piece,” said the creator. “Sharing their everyday stories as incredible adventures, they inhabit the installation as singing, dancing and re-performing pioneer travellers.”

The “show” is described as an artwork that “envisions communications in a not-so-distant future megapolis.”

The visitor cannot help thinking that it captures something essential about Singapore, with its multi-ethnic population, its vibrant history as a trading post and its sometimes controversial efforts to build a cohesive, economically strong nation. The show also seems to evoke the late Lee’s vision of his homeland.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Maridiana Deren, an environmental activist based in Kalimantan, Indonesia, says that palm oil companies are destroying indigenous peoples’ ancient way of life. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
BALI, Indonesia, Mar 16 2015 (IPS)

Over the past three decades, 50 percent of the 544,150 square kilometres that comprise Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, has been taken over by the palm oil industry.

“It will expand until it pushes us all into the ocean,” prophesies Mina Setra, deputy secretary-general of the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), who has fought for years to preserve an ancient way of life from being bulldozed to make way for mono-crop plantations.

“The people who have lived off the land for generations become criminals because they want to preserve their way of life." -- Mina Setra, deputy secretary-general of the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN)
For her, the business of producing the oil, a favourite of consumers around the world, needs to fall in line with the principles of sustainability. On its current growth spurt, the industry threatens to undermine local economies, indigenous communities and Indonesia’s delicate network of biodiversity.

Consumption of palm oil has risen steadily at seven percent per annum over the last 20 years, according to new data from a report published by the Dublin-based consultancy Research and Markets.

Globally, more people consume palm oil than soybean oil, and Indonesia is the largest producer of the stuff, churning out 31 million tonnes of palm oil in 2014. Malaysia and Indonesia together account for 85 percent of palm oil produced globally each year.

While output is predicted to be lower in 2015, the industry continues to expand rapidly, swallowing up millions of hectares of forestland to make space for palm plantations.

Indonesian government officials and industrialists insist that the sector boosts employment, and benefits local communities, but people like Setra disagree, arguing instead that the highly unsustainable business model is wreaking havoc on the environment and indigenous people, who number between 50 and 70 million in a country with a population of 249 million.

Busting the myth of equality and employment

A recent study by the Washington-based Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) found that the main benefactors of the palm oil industry are the big investors and companies that control 80 percent of the global palm oil trade.

The report found, “[The] palm oil sector has added little real value to the Indonesian economy. The average contribution of estate crops, including oil palm and rubber, to GDP [gross domestic product] was only 2.2 percent per year […].”

On the other hand, “food production is the main source of rural employment and income, engaging two-thirds of the rural workforce, or some 61 million people. Oil palm production only occupies the eighth rank in rural employment, engaging some 1.4 million people.”

About half of those engaged in palm oil production are smallholders, earning higher wages than their counterparts employed by palm oil companies (about 75 dollars a month compared to 57 dollars a month).

According to the World Wildlife Fund in the last three-and-a-half decades Indonesia and Malaysia lost a combination of 3.5 million hectares of forest to palm oil plantations. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The industry witnessed a 15-percent drop in profits last year, but this year profits are expected to rise, with prices settling between 500 and 600 dollars per tonne. Still, many producers in Indonesia and Malaysia openly advocate lower wages to keep profit levels high.

Experts also believe the sector does a poor job of redirecting profits into the communities because of a model that relies on eating up land and falling back on a system of patronage.

“This patronage system serves as the basic structure for the production, marketing, and distribution of palm oil. It connects significant actors in order to facilitate their businesses through legitimate mechanisms such as palm oil consortia, which usually consist of local strongmen, senior bureaucrats, and influential businessmen with close links to top national leaders,” the RRI report concluded.

Grassroots activists like Setra say that industrialists are also skilled at manipulating legal loopholes to continue expanding their plantations.

For instance, the Indonesian government has imposed a moratorium on land clearing for new plantations, a bid to appease scientists, Western nations and citizens concerned about the gobbling up of rainforests for monocultures.

However, the ban only applies to new licenses, not existing ones, allowing companies with longstanding licenses to violate the law without question.

Even when the central government cracks down, activists say, companies use local connections with powerful politicians to undercut regulations.

“It is a vicious system that feeds on itself,” the indigenous activist tells IPS.

Unjust, unsustainable

According to Bryson Ogden, RRI’s private sector analyst, “The structure of the industry is such that it leaves out local communities.”

“The biggest losers in this process were locals who lost their lands and livelihoods but have not been incorporated in the new economy on advantageous terms,” the RRI report said. “Indigenous peoples, subsistence farmers, and women were the most vulnerable groups, as well as smallholders owning and managing their own oil palm plots.”

But when locals try to take a stand for their rights, such campaigns result in the alienation of whole communities or, worse, the criminalisation of their activities.

In July 2014, a protestor was shot dead by police in south Kalimantan while taking part in a protest against palm oil expansion. Another such killing was reported on Feb. 28 in Jambi, located on the east coast of the island of Sumatra.

“The people who have lived off the land for generations become criminals because they want to preserve their way of life,” Setra laments.

She believes that as long as there is global demand for the oil without an accompanying international campaign to highlight the product’s impact on local people, companies are unlikely to change their mode of operation.

Others say the problem is a lack of data. Scott Poynton, founder of The Forest Trust (TFT), an international environmental NGO, tells IPS that there is inadequate information on the socio-economic impacts of oil operations.

He says the focus on deforestation – in Indonesia and elsewhere – is a result of the tireless work of NGOs dedicated to the issue, combined with “easy-to-use tools like the World Resource Institute’s Global Forest Watch”, a mapping system that allow people to quickly and cheaply identify deforestation.

He says similar resources must be made available to those like Setra – grassroots leaders on the ground, who are able to monitor and report on social degradation caused by the palm oil sector.

As the United Nations and its member states move closer to finalising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the international community’s blueprint for development and poverty-reduction in the coming decades – Indonesia and the palm oil sector will be forced to reckon with the unsustainable nature of the mono-crop corporate model, and move towards a practice of inclusivity.

One of the primary topics informing the knowledge platform on the SDGs is the promise of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP), defined as “the use of services and related products, which respond to basic needs and bring a better quality of life while minimizing the use of natural resources […] so as not to jeopardize the needs of further generations.”

According to the World Wildlife Fund in the last three-and-a-half decades Indonesia and Malaysia lost a combination of 3.5 million hectares of forest to palm oil plantations.

Statistics like these suggest that nothing short of sweeping changes will be required to put indigenous people like Setra at the centre of the debate, and build a sustainable future for palm oil production.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Roseate spoonbills (Platalea ajaja), coastal birds in Sonora, Mexico. Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Zakri Abdul Hamid
KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 22 2014 (IPS)

To mainstream biodiversity concerns into development planning, we must offer a compelling rationale and demonstrate biodiversity’s relevance to wealth generation, job creation and general human wellbeing. Only a persuasive “why” resonating throughout society will successfully get us to urgently needed negotiations of who, what, where, when and how to halt disastrous biodiversity loss.

Experts in a broad span of disciplines — taxonomists, agronomists, social scientists, climate scientists, economists and others — are working together to arm the public and their policymakers with relevant evidence on which to base decisions.A need quickly became apparent for a sustained, ongoing mechanism to bridge the gap between policymaking and the scientific world’s ever-accumulating insights.

Scientists have authoritatively established links between biodiversity and climate change, food security, water security, energy security and human security.

In 2005, with input from more than 1,000 experts worldwide, we published the landmark Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, elevating the issues to policymakers and decision-makers as never before. It was hailed for its success as a platform to deliver clear, valuable, policy-relevant consensus on the state, trends and outlooks of biodiversity.

A need quickly became apparent for a sustained, ongoing mechanism to bridge the gap between policymaking and the scientific world’s ever-accumulating insights. In response, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) was established in 2012.

IPBES’ initial deliverables included a policy-support tool based on the economic values of biodiversity, a fast-track assessment on pollination services and food production, insights into the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity, and a global assessment of the overall state of biodiversity and ecosystem services. IPBES also aims to integrate indigenous and local knowledge systems in its work.

The dollar values of biodiversity and ecosystem services are difficult but not impossible to quantify. In 1997, experts estimated the global value of ecosystem services at an average of 33 trillion dollars per year. An update this year of that study nearly quadrupled the estimated annual value of those services to 125 trillion dollars.

Within that number, for example, is the 2010 estimate by economists that the planet’s 63 million hectares of wetlands provide some 3.4 billion dollars in storm protection, food and other services to humans each year. And, a large portion of the 640-billion-dollar pharmaceutical market relies on genetic resources found in nature, with anti-cancer agents from marine organisms alone valued at up to one billion dollars annually.

The loss of biodiversity through deforestation, meanwhile, is estimated to cost the global economy up to 4.5 trillion dollars every year.

The fast-track assessment on pollination services will address profoundly worrisome changes in the health of bees and other pollinator populations, the services of which underpin extremely valuable — some might say invaluable — food production.

The assessment of the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity will address the ecological, economic, social and cultural importance of mainly harvested and traded biodiversity-related products and wild species.

The IPBES global assessment of biodiversity and its many benefits will build on Global Biodiversity Outlook reports, the latest of which this month urged the world to step up efforts to meet agreed-upon biodiversity targets for 2020.

We have generated much knowledge and continue to add to it. Achieving our sustainable development goals, however, depends on the successful application and sharing of that knowledge.

A workshop last November concluded most nations, unanimously committed to protecting biodiversity, nevertheless lack capacity to measure and assess their genetic and biological resources, or to value key ecosystem services. Helping remedy that capacity shortfall is a core function of IPBES.

Communicating our findings will also be critical in mainstreaming this agenda, using both conventional and new social media platforms, framing the issue as one of development rather than of strictly conservation.

All stakeholders — the business community, in particular — must be engaged, and we must incorporate biodiversity studies at every educational level.

Speaking of his admiration of Malaysia’s towering Cengal tree, his nation’s equivalent to the magnificent California Redwood, Prime Minister Najib Razak recently noted: “Such giants may take centuries to reach their awe-inspiring height and girth, but can be felled in less than a few hours by an unscrupulous timber contractor with a chainsaw.”

Such outstanding monuments of nature are, indeed, so much more valuable than their wood fibre — they engender a sense of pride in our natural heritage.

This appreciation will, I believe and hope, ultimately draw the interest of our most brilliant minds and drive the innovative, nature-based solutions to global challenges on which future generations will depend.

The promising U.N. discussions of post-2015 global development goals should help put biodiversity where it belongs at the heart of the agenda — recognised as a prerequisite for poverty alleviation, good health, food and water security, and more. As we design an age of sustainable development, let us recognise that maintaining a biodiverse world is not a hindrance to development, it is fundamental to development.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement covers 12 Pacific Rim countries that collectively account for about 40 percent of the world economy. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Richard Heydarian
MANILA, Jun 14 2014 (IPS)

Amid simmering territorial conflicts across the Western Pacific, specifically between China and its neighbours in the South and East China Seas, coupled with China rising to the rank of top trading partner with Japan, South Korea, Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Obama administration has been hard-pressed to re-assert its strategic footprint in the region.

Since 2009, Obama has turned Washington’s strategic focus towards the Asia-Pacific region, which has gradually emerged as the global center of gravity in both economic and geopolitical terms.

The “Pivot to Asia” (P2A) policy, formally announced in late-2011, represents Washington’s renewed attempt to tap into booming markets of Asia and check China’s rising territorial assertiveness in the East and South China Seas.

The P2A policy contained both trade as well as security pillars, designed to maintain the U.S.’ strategic primacy in Asia and aid its post-recession economic recovery. The cornerstone of the Obama administration’s economic policy in Asia is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, which excludes China and covers 12 Pacific Rim countries that collectively account for about 40 percent of the world economy.

In security terms, the Obama administration has sought to deepen the U.S. military footprint across Asia by exploring new basing agreements and gradually redeploying 20 percent of its naval assets from the Atlantic to the Pacific theatre.

Obama’s latest trip to Asia, however, underlined the inability of Washington to balance its economic and geopolitical initiatives in the region. While Obama managed to strike new strategic agreements with leading Southeast Asian countries, namely Malaysia and the Philippines, and strengthen bilateral military alliances with Japan and South Korea, there was, in turn, no concrete development vis-à-vis the ongoing TPP negotiations.

“I’ve been very clear and honest that American manufacturers and farmers need to have meaningful access to markets that are included under TPP, including here in Japan,” said Obama during his trip to Tokyo, hoping to encourage Japan to make necessary concessions in the TPP negotiations.

“That’s what will make it a good deal for America — for our workers and our consumers, and our families. That’s my bottom line, and I can’t accept anything less.”

As the world’s third largest economy, with a GDP of six trillion dollars, Japan is central to the conclusion of the TPP negotiations, which missed its late-2013 deadline and has struggled to gain momentum in recent negotiation rounds. But Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe only promised to “energetically and earnestly continue the talks.”

The disagreements were initially over Japan’s trade barriers on agricultural imports; but the U.S. has increasingly focused on Japanese restrictions on the imports of beef and pork and the opening of Japanese automobile market to American manufacturers.

Amid rising territorial tensions in Asia, Obama went the extra mile to reassure Japan of Washington’s full military commitment if a war were to erupt between Tokyo and Beijing over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea.

In Malaysia, Obama oversaw the formalisation of a bilateral “comprehensive partnership” agreement, which marked the end of decades of frosty relations. Above all, Obama’s visit to the Philippines coincided with the signing of a new security pact, the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which grants the U.S. military 10 years of access to the Philippines’ top five military bases, namely the three former U.S. bases of Clark airfield, Subic bay, and Poro Point as well as Camp Aguinaldo and Fort Magsaysay in Metro Manila.

On the TPP front, however, Obama faces tremendous opposition at home and across Asia. Long shrouded in secrecy, a growing number of businesses, concerned citizens, and civil society organisations have come to oppose what they see as a lopsided free trading agreement (FTA), which grants multinational companies (MNCs) extensive control over public services such as healthcare and internet.

Among developing countries in East Asia, particularly Malaysia and Vietnam, there is a growing fear over the potential impact of the TPP on the production and importation of cheap, generic drugs, with global pharmaceuticals poised to more vigorously protect their Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), which have contributed to the exorbitant costs of conventional drugs across the wold.

In the industrialised world, especially the U.S., many labour unions and big businesses are worried over the proposed reduction of strategic protectionist barriers, especially in the automobile manufacturing sectors, allowing export-driven countries such as Japan to displace domestic manufacturers.

Japan, for instance, has insisted on retaining high tariff barriers on its agricultural sector, while Vietnam has resisted the proposed privatisation of state-owned textile companies.

The late-2013 revelation of the draconian IPR provisions of the TPP by the anti-secrecy group Wikileaks dealt a huge blow to the ongoing negotiations, further strengthening opposition to the proposed trading regime.

Among the most worrying provisions are proposals that allow MNCs to sue sovereign governments in international courts and override domestic laws on both trade and non-trade matters; relaxation of environmental regulations; greater policing and monitoring of internet; and restrictions on access to public services due to more strict investment rules in utilities and strategic sectors of the economy.

Fearful of domestic backlash, Asian countries such as Japan and Malaysia have hardened their negotiating positions, more explicitly demanding trade concessions from the U.S. In fact, leaked documents reflect the growing isolation of the U.S. within the ongoing negotiations, with Obama struggling to gain enough support within his own party over the proposed Fast-Track Trade bill to expedite the trade negotiations with limited legislative scrutiny.

“Japan’s aim is geopolitical in the first instance, i.e., contain China. I doubt if the leadership has really thought [the TPP] through economically,” Walden Bello, a leading expert on trade issues and co-founder of the organisation Focus on the Global South, told IPS, underscoring how the TPP lacks any compelling economic rationale and is “doomed to fail.”

“Once [Japanese] corporations encounter the same old hard-nosed demands of the U.S. for structural reform…the Japanese government will hem and haw, as it did with the APEC free trade area in the 1990’s.”

Meanwhile, an economically-ascendant Beijing has managed to progressively eclipse Washington in trade and investment terms, with China pushing for an alternative Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), which is increasingly seen as a more viable and inclusive alternative to the TPP.

“China does not even have to initiate a counter-bloc. It just needs to sit quietly and see the TPP fall apart,” said Walden Bello, dismissing the TPP as an ineffectual attempt to counter growing Chinese economic influence in Asia “The benefits of trade accruing to corporations…with what will soon become the world’s biggest economy [China] will undermine the US’s geo-economic objective.”

Aside from being the top trading partner of almost all countries in East Asia, China has emerged as a major source of development aid and soft loans in recent years, contributing as much as 671.1 billion dollars in the 2001-2011 period.

Given China’s continued economic expansion, the country is expected to accelerate its development assistance to neighbouring countries. China is already establishing a 50-billion-dollar Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which is poised to directly compete with the Japan-dominated Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Overall, the poor prospects of the TPP underline the U.S.’ weakening economic influence in Asia, with the Obama administration primarily occupied with strengthening Washington’s military footprint in the Pacific waters to hedge against a rising China.

(END)

Tamils protest Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jun 12 2014 (IPS)

The recent arrest and deportation from Malaysia of three Sri Lankan Tamils on U.N. refugee status, under suspicion of trying to revive the disbanded Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has raised questions about regional security and minority politics.

For many, disputes over the South China Sea and the proliferation of Islamic terror networks are the defining peace and security issues in South and Southeast Asia. As a result, the arrests of the three men last month went largely unreported, with the exception of local Malaysian and Sri Lankan media.

But with a large and restive Tamil minority in South India, huge Tamil diasporas in Malaysia, Singapore and Mauritius, as well as unhealed wounds from the recently concluded civil war in Sri Lanka that decimated the separatist LTTE, experts say that Tamil nationalist aspirations could end up shaping regional politics.

“About 90 percent of Malaysian Tamils are ardent supporters of the Tamil freedom movement in Sri Lanka. Is the [police inspector-general] going to arrest more than two million of us just because we support their struggle?” -- P. Ramasamy, deputy chief minister of Penang state
Created in 1976 with the aim of carving out an independent state for Tamil people in the north and east of Sri Lanka, the group quickly went on to become synonymous with suicide bombers and child soldiers, earning it the title of one of the most deadly terrorist organisations in the world.

Considered defunct since 2009, when the Sri Lankan army stormed the remaining rebel-held territory and eradicated its top leadership in the final phase of the country’s 30-year-long civil war, the LTTE still holds a powerful place in the collective imaginary of the region.

Referring to the May 15 arrest of the three Tamil men by Malaysian police under a Red Notice issued by Interpol, a regional terrorism expert speaking to IPS on the condition of anonymity said this was a significant development in thwarting attempts to revive the LTTE in Malaysia under the cover of U.N. refugee status.

The arrests followed hard on the heels of another deportation from Malaysia, in March this year, of the deputy leader of the LTTE’s international network, Nanthagopan, who was arrested in Iran on a tip-off from Sri Lanka and sent back to Malaysia before being subsequently deported to Colombo.

In announcing the arrests, Malaysian Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar charged that the suspected persons had “used Malaysia as a base to collect funds, spread their propaganda, and were attempting to revive the defunct terrorist group at the international level.”

Police also seized propaganda material promoting the LTTE and a large amount of cash in over 24 different currencies.

The alleged offenders, registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), had been living in the country without visas since 2004.

“We will not allow the country to be used as a place for them to hide or conduct any terror activities in the country or on foreign soil,” the inspector-general stressed, adding that the UNHCR office in Malaysia should undertake a thorough review of its procedures to ensure that terrorist suspects don’t abuse its offices for activities that threaten regional stability.

He also pledged to screen the roughly 4,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Malaysia in efforts to “flush out” suspected terrorists.

A spokesperson for UNHCR in Malaysia, Yante Ismail, told IPS that while the High Commissioner’s office cannot comment on individual cases, they did urge the Malaysian government not to deport the three suspects until investigations could be completed.

“UNHCR regrets that despite our representations to the Malaysian Government, this group has been deported to a place where they may be at serious risk of harm,” she said.

UNHCR is not alone in its concern – since 1983 thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils have sought refugee status in other countries on the grounds that their rights have been trampled upon by the majority-Sinhalese state.

Unresolved charges that the Sri Lankan army committed war crimes against the minority population during the last days of the conflict, coupled with reports that Tamils have experienced systematic detention in the years following the war, add to the fear that some Tamils are not safe in Sri Lanka.

But since Malaysia is not a State Party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the government is not bound by UNHCR guidelines.

Others believe the issue runs deeper than just regional security.

P. Ramasamy, deputy chief minister of Malaysia’s northwestern Penang state, who acted as a legal advisor to the LTTE during peace negotiations a decade ago, has accused the Malaysian police of falling into the trap set by the Sri Lankan government to frustrate international efforts to conduct a full investigation into possible rights violations in the country.

“About 90 percent of Malaysian Tamils are ardent supporters of the Tamil freedom movement in Sri Lanka. Is Khalid [Abu Bakar] going to arrest more than two million of us just because we support their struggle?” he remarked in an interview with The Edge.

Roughly eight percent of Malaysia’s population of some 29 million people is Tamil, mainly descendants of indentured labourers brought by the British to work in the rubber plantations in the 19^th century.

At the height of the HINDRAF rebellion in December 2007, the then Malaysian police chief Mussa Hassan accused the group of “actively canvassing for support and assistance from terrorist groups”, including the LTTE.

HINDRAF’s leaders were subsequently arrested and jailed under the Internal Security Act and the movement officially banned in October 2008. However, in January 2013 the ban was lifted and in April HINDRAF signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the governing Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition to work towards uplifting the Tamil community.

According to Ramanathan Sankaran, a scholar on the Indian diaspora in Malaysia, many Malaysian Tamils are sympathetic to the cause of Sri Lanka’s minority and have thus supported the LTTE. HINDRAF once represented these sympathies but since joining the ruling government has been much more cautious in its message.

“My support for HINDRAF has declined because they did not make any comments on the arrest and deportations,” Sankaran told IPS, adding, “Their failure to act on this matter is a disgrace.”

Some say the Malaysian government’s biggest fear is the reawakening of the sentiment once expressed by HINDRAF, and the radicalisation of Malaysian Tamils.

The government has been particularly concerned about the recent creation of a group calling itself the Tamilar Progressive Team, which is modeled on a similar group in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu that one of the arrestees – 38-year-old Selvathurai Kirubananthan, also known as Anbarasan – is alleged to have been involved with.

Other experts, like leading Malaysian rights activist Chandra Muzafar, say these fears are unfounded.

“Tamil support for the ruling coalition has been increasing since the last General Election in May 2013,” he told IPS. The more likely scenario, he says, is that the Malaysian government is legitimately apprehensive about Sri Lankan Tamils “using Malaysia as a base to revive the LTTE.”

(END)

President Barack Obama watches archers on horseback demonstrate their skills at the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, Japan, Apr. 24, 2014. Caroline Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, and her husband Dr. Edwin Schlossberg watch at right. Credit: Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

By John Feffer
WASHINGTON, Apr 29 2014 (IPS)

President Barack Obama’s recent tour of Asia was an opportunity to reenergise his foreign policy after a series of setbacks in the global arena.

The four countries on the week-long tour — Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines – have all been eager to upgrade their relationships with the United States in light of their concerns over Chinese maritime ambitions and an uncertain global economy.Ever since the Obama administration announced its “strategic rebalance” of U.S. foreign policy several years ago, the effort has encountered both domestic and foreign challenges.

But if the president thought that his short pass through Pacific would provide a lift to the much-vaunted U.S. “pivot” to Asia, he soon discovered that the world is not cooperating with his best-laid plans.

Ever since the Obama administration announced its “strategic rebalance” of U.S. foreign policy several years ago, the effort has encountered both domestic and foreign challenges.

At home, budget constraints have prevented the release of sufficient resources to finance a significant Pacific reorientation. Indeed, the threat of a government shutdown over the federal budget forced the president to postpone an earlier version of his Asia trip last October.

At the geopolitical level, meanwhile, the pivot was intended to reduce the liabilities of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. But that region has refused to allow the Pentagon and State Department to shift their attention.

The war in Syria, the collapse of negotiations between Israel and Palestine, the reversal of political fortunes in Egypt, and the ongoing talks with Iran have all continued to demand considerable U.S. focus.

An even greater distraction for the president at the moment is the crisis in Ukraine. Russia has already annexed one part of the country, the peninsula of Crimea. International sanctions have so far failed to discourage Moscow from fanning the flames of conflict in eastern Ukraine.

As Obama prepared to head toward Asia, Polish Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak urged the United States to “re-pivot to Europe” in order to bolster its NATO alliances.

Reassuring concerned allies over the potential military actions of a great power was also the expressed purpose of Obama’s trip to Asia. The president provided a good deal of rhetorical and symbolic assurances during his Pacific tour. But the pull of other pressing concerns has turned the “strategic rebalance” into a half-pivot at best.

Last week, Obama did reiterate that Washington would support Tokyo in any conflict over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. But he was also careful not to endorse Japanese sovereignty over the islands that China also claims.

Moreover, the Obama administration has quietly expressed dismay at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s more provocative actions, such as his visit to Yasukuni shrine and his controversial interpretations of World War II history, which have outraged neighbouring countries.

Obama’s greater emphasis on Asia has failed to repair the relationship between the principle U.S. allies in the region, Japan and South Korea.

Despite some progress in the negotiations, the president was also unable to persuade the Japanese to remove trade barriers necessary for the completion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed trade pact involving 12 countries.

To a certain degree the discussions in Japan were moot, since the president lacks the votes in Congress to achieve “trade promotion authority,” the fast-track authorisation that nearly every trade pact has required for passage.

In South Korea, Obama’s visit was overshadowed by the ferry disaster that has so far left more than 200 dead. North Korea, meanwhile, tried to capitalise on Obama’s trip by ramping up its preparations for a fourth nuclear test.

Both Washington and Seoul have threatened repercussions should the North conduct a test, which would likely demonstrate the viability of its uranium enrichment programme.

But North Korea already endures some of the toughest sanctions in the world. Its decision to flout these warnings is yet more evidence that the Obama administration’s policy of “strategic patience” has failed to address either North Korea’s nuclear programme or any of the country’s underlying security concerns.

The trip to Malaysia reinforced the perception that the Obama administration has not put democracy and human rights front and centre of its foreign policy. In the first trip of a U.S. president to Malaysia in nearly 50 years, Obama did mention democracy in his official speech.

But Malaysia’s potential participation in the TPP and its role in pushing back against the expansion of China’s maritime influence all make the country critical to U.S. role in the Pacific. Obama needs Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak’s support, not his irritation, so it was left to National Security Advisor Susan Rice to meet with leading oppositionist Anwar Ibrahim.

The one success the administration is touting from this swing through Asia is a new basing agreement with the Philippines, which gives the U.S. military greater flexibility in its access to the country. The Philippine government asked the United States to withdraw from its military bases in 1992.

But the new agreement does not add substantially to the previous two agreements signed by the two countries, the Mutual Defence Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement. Even this modest bump-up in cooperation, however, generated sizable demonstrations in Manila over the rotation of U.S. troops in and out of the country.

The enormous panda in the room, of course, is China. Obama and his entourage took pains to emphasise that all of these negotiations and treaties and military upgrades are for the general stability of the region and are not targeted at any particular country.

The Chinese, however, view the Pacific pivot as a form of containment. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the Pentagon was drafting a set of contingency plans to deal with any possible military moves by China.

“As outlined by Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping last June, the Pacific Ocean is large enough for the development of the two countries, and each side should respect the core interests of the other,” China’s Xinhua news agency observed before issuing a not-so-veiled warning.

“Meanwhile, it’s advisable for the United States not to underestimate China’s determination to defend its territories.”

Obama’s four-country trip did the minimum required to maintain the narrative of a reorientation of U.S. foreign policy to Asia. But distracted by other foreign policy challenges and soon heading into the mid-term election cycle, the president may not be able to return his attentions to the Far East any time soon.

President Barack Obama talks with Vice President Joe Biden before boarding Air Force One at Pittsburgh International Airport for a domestic trip, April 16, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 22 2014 (IPS)

As he embarks Tuesday on a major trip through East Asia, U.S. President Barack Obama will be focused on reassuring anxious – albeit sometimes annoying – allies that Washington remains determined to deepen its commitment to the region.

Just how annoying some allies can be was underlined on the eve of his departure as Japan’s premier, Shinzo Abe, provoked renewed protests from both China and South Korea over his sending a ceremonial offering to the Yasukuni Shrine, the temple which honours Tokyo’s war dead, including senior officers responsible for atrocities committed by Japan in both countries during World War II.There is little question that security concerns, particularly those aroused by China’s recent assertiveness, will loom large.

As for anxiety, Asian commentators have made little secret of their concern that Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continuing tensions with Ukraine could set a precedent for a resurgent China, whose increasingly assertive behaviour in pressing its territorial claims in the East and South China seas has provoked a number of its neighbours to upgrade military ties to the U.S., as well as increase their own military spending.

Moreover, Obama, whose extrication from the deep hole his predecessor dug for him in the Greater Middle East has gone more slowly than had been hoped, has necessarily been distracted by the ongoing Ukraine crisis which, in turn, has prompted the U.S.’s NATO allies – especially the alliance’s newest member along Russia’s western periphery – to seek reassurances of their own.

“Can Mr. Obama afford to invest more time in Asia when he is bogged down with crises in Ukraine and Syria?” asked the New York Times’ “editorial observer”, Carol Giacomo, Monday.

Obama was originally scheduled to make this trip last fall, but he opted instead to stay home to deal with the Republican shutdown of the government – the latest example of the kind of partisan-driven action that has also sown doubts among Asian allies, as well as others, about the ability of Washington to follow through on its foreign commitments.

This week’s tour will begin with a state visit to Japan, during which he will meet with the troublesome Abe, whose personal visit last year to the Yasukeni Shrine drew a harsh public rebuke from Washington.

The main substantive agenda item on that leg of the trip, according to administration officials, will be to try to narrow differences on agricultural and automobile provisions in the pending 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, the main pillar of the administration’s non-military “pivot” or “rebalancing” toward the Asia/Pacific launched in 2010.

From Tokyo, Obama will fly to Seoul where he will take up both trade and security issues, including a visit to the Combined Forces Command to address U.S. troops charged with helping defend South Korea against the nuclear-armed North.

Obama will then become the first U.S. president to visit Malaysia since Lyndon Johnson nearly 50 years ago, in part to launch a “Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative” and meet with Malaysia civil society activists.

His last stop will be the Philippines where, among other events, he will attend a state dinner hosted by President Benigno Aquino III and meet U.S. and Filipino soldiers and veterans to underline Washington’s longstanding military relationship.

While Obama and his entourage will emphasise the growing economic links that tie the U.S. to the region – if, for no other reason than to counter the widespread impression that Washington’s “pivot” is primarily aimed at increasing its military presence to “contain” China – there is little question that security concerns, particularly those aroused by China’s recent assertiveness, will loom large.

Indeed, China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea conflict with those of both Malaysia and the Philippines with which the U.S. has a 63-year-old mutual defence treaty and which has not been shy about contesting Beijing claims – both through Law of the Sea Convention and most recently by successfully resupplying a long-stranded Filipino naval vessel blockaded by Chinese naval forces.

Nor has Aquino been shy about tightening military links with Washington, inviting it to enhance its military presence in the archipelago and negotiating an “access agreement” that could eventually return U.S. forces to Subic Bay naval base from which they were essentially evicted in 1991 at the end of the Cold War.

Security concerns are likely to play at least as strong a role in the early part of Obama’s tour.

While North Korea’s nuclear arms programme and missile launches remain a major preoccupation for both South Korea and Japan, China’s claims in the East China Sea – and most recently its declaration last fall of an Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) – increased tensions with both countries, especially Japan which has scrambled warplanes in response to Chinese aircraft that entered the zone near the disputed Senkaku Islands, which China claims as the Diaoyu Islands.

Although Washington responded to Beijing’s declaration with its show of force – an overflight by B-52 bombers – it disappointed Tokyo, with which it signed a mutual-security treaty in 1952, by instructing U.S. commercial airliners to comply with China’s identification requirements.

Some Japanese officials and analysts have publicly criticised what they regard as an insufficiently assertive U.S. response to Russia’s absorption of Crimea despite a 1994 agreement between Washington, Kiev, London, and Moscow guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

They worry that Beijing may now be tempted to make a similar move on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, just as some in Southeast Asia have expressed similar concerns about China’s intentions in the South China Sea.

But most U.S. analysts, including the administration, reject the analogy.

“We have longstanding alliances in Asia with most of the countries where the maritime territorial disputes with China are most severe, and we have stated time and again that we will meet our alliance commitments,” said Kenneth Lieberthal, a Brookings Institution expert who served as President Bill Clinton’s senior Asia adviser, last week.

“We don’t have any such commitments to Ukraine. We don’t have an alliance. We have never assured Ukraine’s territorial integrity by threatening the use of force…It’s a different situation, and I think the Chinese are very clear about those differences.”

Alan Romberg, a former top State Department expert who now directs the East Asia programme at the Stimson Centre here, agreed. “It’s a totally different situation,” he told IPS.

Besides the lack of any defence agreement, “if you look at the overall importance of East Asia to the U.S. and global peace and security,” he added, “there’s also no comparison.”

Obama, who will travel to China in the fall, has made clear that he nonetheless wants to avoid unnecessarily antagonising Beijing and has tried to tamp down tensions between it and Tokyo, in part by trying to dissuade leaders in both countries from stoking growing nationalist sentiments among their citizens.

Washington has also tried hard in recent months to reconcile Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-Hye – to the extent of personally convening a summit with the two nationalist leaders on the sidelines of a nuclear security conference at The Hague last month.

But Abe’s latest bequest to the notorious shrine, particularly coming on the eve of Obama’s trip, is unlikely to help matters.

“The U.S. can be a leader, a catalyst, and a stabiliser in the region, but it can’t do it all by itself,” noted Romberg. “It’s important that other countries, particularly allies, coordinate and cooperate, and not spend their time nattering at each other all the time.”

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

The multinational food giant Mars, Inc. unveiled Monday a new set of guidelines aimed at ensuring that its palm oil supply lines are completely traceable and sustainable by next year.

Global demand for palm oil has increased substantially in recent years, for use in both foods and household goods. Yet the industry, overwhelmingly centred in Malaysia and Indonesia, has been rife with environmental and labour problems."This isn’t an activist-led commitment. They’re doing it because they want to do it." -- Bastien Sachet

Recent months, however, have seen a cascade of major reform commitments from both palm oil suppliers and well-known consumer brands such as Mars.

“Rapid expansion of palm oil plantations continues to threaten environmentally sensitive areas of tropical rainforest and carbon-rich peatlands, as well as the rights of communities that depend on them for their livelihoods,” Barry Parkin, chief sustainability officer at Mars, best known as the maker of M&Ms and other candies, said Monday.

“We believe that these additional measures will not only help build a genuinely sustainable pipeline for Mars, but will also help accelerate change across the industry by encouraging our suppliers to only source from companies whose plantations and farms are responsibly run.”

Under the new guidelines, Mars will require that all of its suppliers have in place sourcing plans that are both fully sustainable and fully traceable by the end of this year, to be implemented by the end of 2015. The company, headquartered just outside of Washington, is also instituting a “no deforestation” pledge for its palm oil supply as well as its sourcing of paper pulp, soy and beef.

“Four years ago, Nestle decided to go for full traceability and no deforestation, but at the time that decision was seen as very niche because it was being pushed by environmental activists,” Bastien Sachet, director of the Forest Trust, a global watchdog group that focuses on responsible products and whose newest member is Mars, told IPS.

“The great thing about Mars, particularly in their push against deforestation across commodities, is that this isn’t an activist-led commitment. They’re doing it because they want to do it, which means that they see what’s happening.”

Workers on Bugala Island work to clear the rainforest to make way for an expanding palm tree plantation. Palm oil production is one of Uganda’s rising industries. Credit: Will Boase/IPS

In this, Sachet refers to a growing trend from both palm oil supply companies and major consumer brands to recognise that previous industry certification efforts to clean up palm oil supply lines have been relatively ineffective. Ensuring the traceability of palm oil, on the other hand, turns this certification model upside-down.

“Over the last four years, the general public, industry and the brands have struggled to make progress on sustainability with the tool of certification. Meanwhile, we saw forests being trashed in Malaysia and Indonesia, a process that’s also beginning in Africa,” Sachet says.

“But now they’re realising that certification is not the only way to go. Instead, we can get traceability first, figure out where it’s coming from and then figure out what’s happening around its production. Eventually we can incentivise those guys who are doing well with more market share – and penalise those that aren’t.”

While much of the industry is currently based in Southeast Asia, many observers point to looming problems in Africa, where land is starting to be snapped up by speculators. Yet Sachet says the new policies being put in place by the global food industry could be laying the grounds for finding a balance between development and conservation throughout the palm oil industry.

Half the supply

A voluntary certification process for responsible palm oil production, known as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), has been in effect for a decade, and most of the major users of palm products do abide by its guidelines. Yet it’s become increasingly clear that RSPO certification has been unable to halt the industry’s mass deforestation and destruction of endangered habitat.

Mars’s Parkin notes that his company “recognised that even though we have already implemented a 100% certified supply of palm oil, this is not enough.”

Other major brands have made similar realisations in recent months, including Unilever, Hershey, Kellogg and L’Oreal. Perhaps more critically, this trend has now included some of the largest global palm oil suppliers, including Wilmar (in December) and Golden Agri Resources (GAR, just last week).

Wilmar alone accounts for more than 40 percent of the global palm oil supply. Altogether, companies controlling a bit more than half of that supply have now committed to having their products be deforestation free by 2015.

As recently as the middle of last year, that figure was zero.

“There has been progress and I definitely think we’re on the right track, though there’s still a long way to go,” Calen May-Tobin, lead analyst for the TropicalForest and Climate Initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC), a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“It’s also important to remember that these are still just public commitments. The action happens when these commitments get turned into policies and are actually implemented.

Last week, UCS released a scorecard that rated palm oil-related sustainability progress by the packaged food, fast food and personal care industries. May-Tobin, who was a co-author on the new report, notes that much of the new public pressure has been aimed at the packaged-food companies.

“On the one hand, it’s clear that when consumers speak up, these companies listen. On the other hand, I think the report’s major finding was how poorly the fast-food sector did,” May-Tobin says.

“Further, there are still a number of other large traders that now need to follow Wilmar and GAR’s example. We think the consumer companies are equally key in helping drive the traders, as the average consumer doesn’t necessarily know who Bungee or Cargill is, but they know Hershey and Mars.”

Advocacy groups are using the recent momentum to urge holdout companies to unveil their own commitments. Greenpeace, the group widely credited with pushing Nestle to make its landmark pledges in 2010, is currently focusing on the U.S. consumer-goods giant Procter & Gamble (P&G).

“Mars joins a growing list of companies … that are finally promising forest-friendly products to their consumers. It shows that global public pressure is working, and is leaving P&G, which refuses to clean up their supply chains, increasingly isolated,” Areeba Hamid, forest campaigner at Greenpeace International, said Monday.

“P&G is relying on a certification scheme that has failed to prevent rainforest destruction in the habitat of endangered orangutans, or help reduce man-made fires like the ones that covered Singapore in smog last summer. It’s time P&G finally becomes proud sponsors of rainforests and commits to No Deforestation.”

Border guards in Bangladesh refuse entry to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in November 2012. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS.

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Feb 20 2014 (IPS)

Two Myanmar Buddhist politicians who were visiting Malaysia narrowly escaped a late night assassination attempt outside a leading shopping mall in Kuala Lumpur this month. The incident has raised fears of an overseas spillover of the religious violence that has engulfed their state of Rakhine in recent years.

Aye Maung and Aye Thar Aung are leaders of the Arakan National Party (ANP), representing the mostly Buddhist Rakhines, the largest ethnic group in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, which was known as Arakan during British colonial times. Gunmen riding a motorcycle fired a number of shots at a car carrying them and their companions in a busy shopping area of the Malaysian capital, but no one was injured, according to eyewitness reports.“We have set up a committee of inquiry with Buddhists, Muslims and persons of no religious affiliation to look at the issue and determine what is really happening and provide some solutions." -- Dr Chandra Muzaffar

The Buddhist leaders returned to Myanmar a day after the incident. Aye Maung told a news conference that it was a well-planned terrorist attack. “I strongly believe the attack was a planned assassination attempt on our lives,” he claimed. “Our internal disturbances have now reached overseas, and we can now firmly conclude from this incident that the terrorists are now well established in foreign countries, especially in Malaysia.”

Some Muslim groups in Malaysia, however, claim that the ANP has staged the drama in order to gain the sympathy of Buddhists in Myanmar ahead of the general election there in 2015.

Rakhine state has witnessed several episodes of violence since 2012 between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, leaving scores dead and displaced. Many of the victims were from the Rohingya Muslim minority, considered by most Myanmar Buddhists as illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

Thousands of Rohingyas have fled to Muslim-majority Malaysia, where about 250,000 Myanmar nationals – both Buddhists and Muslims – are believed to reside, with many employed in low-paying jobs at restaurants and construction sites.

The Malaysian police have been quick to blame Myanmar migrants for the shooting incident.

But Malaysian political analyst Dr Chandra Muzaffar, head of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), said a lot of Muslims in the region have been unhappy with the way Rohingyas are being treated inside Myanmar.

“Certain groups must be reacting because of certain perceptions of these politicians,” he told IPS from Kuala Lumpur. “Police need to investigate thoroughly to find out who was behind this.”

Kuala Lumpur’s acting investigations chief Khairi Ahrasa said in a media statement that a special squad, headed by him, has been set up to investigate the case “which has elements of political involvement.”

He also said they are investigating whether the killing of a Myanmar national, Ko Aung Gyi, in the city a day later has any connection with the shooting incident.

Ko Aung Gyi, a member of the 88 Generation Students group who hailed from Rakhine, was killed soon after his meeting with the Rakhine delegation. The former student leader turned political activist from Rakhine had been living in Malaysia with his family for several years. According to his wife, Ma Su Su Myint, he was killed after being called to discuss a business matter.

There have been a number of killings within the Myanmar migrant community in Malaysia in the past year. In late May 2013, violence in the community in Kuala Lumpur left at least two people dead, and was widely linked to the Rakhine state’s troubles. Earlier that month, Indonesian police arrested four men who were later found guilty of attempting to bomb the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta. The bomb plot’s mastermind said the conspirators were trying to avenge the killings of their Muslim brethren in Myanmar.

JUST has been concerned about the escalating tension between Muslims and Buddhists in the region and in November organised an inter-faith dialogue in Kuala Lumpur attended by Buddhists from across Asia and Muslims from Malaysia and Indonesia.

“We have set up a committee of inquiry with Buddhists, Muslims and persons of no religious affiliation to look at the issue and determine what is really happening and provide some solutions,” Muzaffar told IPS.

The six-member delegation of ANP leaders that was visiting Malaysia when the attack took place was basically the core political leadership of Buddhists in the Rakhine state. They were in Malaysia to meet exiled Myanmar Buddhists, collect donations and drum up support for their campaigns.

They were also believed to have held a town hall-style public talk and discussion titled “Reform in Burma and Arakan Politics” in Kuala Lumpur, according to a blog by Myanmar exile Hla Oo, who says Aye Maung is “bitterly hated” by Rohingya Muslims.

Aye Maung’s Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP) and the Arakan League for Democracy (ALD) – originally two rival groups – formally agreed to merge and form ANP (Arakan National Party) in October 2013, thus making it a formidable force in the state ahead of the 2015 general elections.

RNDP’s former stronghold was northern Rakhine while ALD’s bases were in southern Rakhine. ALD won 11 out of 26 seats in Rakhine in the 1990 general elections. ALD didn’t participate in the 2010 elections but RNDP participated and won 16 seats in Rakhine.

The ANP leadership applied for official registration to Myanmar’s Union Election Commission on Oct. 15 last year, but their application was only granted on Jan. 13 this year.

Muzaffar believes that the Myanmar government is not doing enough to stop the violence in the state and the military may be trying to use Buddhist nationalism to perpetuate military rule beyond the 2015 elections.

Referring to the Association of South East Asian Nations grouping of which Myanmar is a member, he said, “Other ASEAN governments can’t do anything to stop this, but they can get a dialogue going under the ASEAN charter of 2007.

“The international community could also help…but the problem is all are hoping to get a big slice of the Myanmar pie and western governments don’t want to antagonise the Myanmar government.”

By Lusha Chen
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 14 2013 (IPS)

In June, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia were enveloped in haze as hundreds of forest fires burned across the island of Sumatra, in the worst pollution crisis to hit Southeast Asia in more than a decade.

Dr. Nigel Sizer, Courtesy of the World Resources Institute

An analysis by the U.S.-based World Resources Institute (WRI) determined that 150,000 square kilometres burned – more than twice the size of Singapore. Worse, nearly three-quarters of the fires in the study area burned on peatland (a soil layer composed of partly decomposed organic material,  often several metres deep), which acts as a sink to absorb planet-heating carbon dioxide.

Dr. Nigel Sizer, the director of WRI’s Global Forest Initiative, spoke with IPS correspondent Lusha Chen about the obstacles they confronted in investigating the fires, and what countries in the regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) can do to prevent this recurring environmental catastrophe.

Q: Regarding the most recent fires across Sumatra, what efforts are being undertaken and what efforts should be taken to investigate the cause of the fire and potential culprits?

A: Achieving full accountability for the fires in Sumatra is important, but it will not be easy. Officials in Indonesia, Singapore, and elsewhere are currently investigating who started the fires and who is legally responsible. Several companies that operate palm oil and pulpwood concessions, as well as a few individuals, have already been implicated.

Still, it remains to be seen exactly who will be officially prosecuted and what the penalty will be. Knowing who is legally responsible can be determined only after careful collection of evidence and proper due process.

A major hurdle is that land ownership information in Indonesia is complex, difficult to obtain and opaque. Analysis from the World Resources Institute found that determining who is legally responsible managing the land where fires occurred is a huge challenge.

For example, although many fires were concentrated in company concession lands set aside for palm oil or pulpwood development, simply identifying which companies manage the land proves very difficult. The company concession data are inconsistent between the Ministry of Forestry, the provincial and district governments, and even more so with the self-reported data from the companies.

Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia should work together to try and unravel the complex ownership structures of the companies, and their subsidiaries, to understand who manages the land where fires may have occurred.

Q: In the report, you called on ASEAN leaders to act together to stop the pollution. Did this happen at the recent meeting in Brunei?

A: In October the heads of state from the ASEAN countries took some positive steps towards combatting the illegal and harmful fires that cause the haze. Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Thailand agreed to adopt a joint “haze monitoring system” and share digital land-use and concession maps on a government-to-government basis. These are good steps towards transparency and accountability.

But much more progress needs to be made. The governments stopped short of making concession and land use data entirely public, which would allow for independent monitoring of fire-prone areas by civil society. The ASEAN governments can also do more to ensure that companies operating in multiple countries in the region are held to responsible for their operations in Sumatra.

Ultimately, enforcement on the ground in Indonesia remains the most important thing. The risk of further fires will remain high unless the no-burn policies as strictly enforced at a local level. This will require support from national and local governments, as well as corporate buyers and consumers who purchase commodities produced in the area.

Q: How seriously are the fires contributing to Indonesia’s GHG emissions, and what are the long-term consequences if the problem is not addressed?

A: The fires are an enormous contributor to Indonesia’s Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions, and will have profound impacts on the country’s climate strategies.

Calculating the emissions from the fires is be extremely difficult, due to uncertainly in the depth and quantity peat, a soil layer of partly-decomposed organic material that can emit large amounts of gas when burned. According to estimates from Indonesia’s national office on climate change*, changes in land use (including fires) and the effects on peatland account for 79 percent of Indonesia’s total emissions. This is globally significant, as Indonesia is, by some accounts, the third largest emitter in the world.

The Indonesian government has pledged to cut emissions 26 percent (or 41 percent with international assistance) by 2020 compared to business-as-usual. It will be very difficult for them to meet this ambitious goal without addressing the issue of fires on forest and peatland.

Q: Slash-and-burn is a very traditional way to clear the land for planting. What efforts should be taken at the grassroots level?

A: We need greater awareness and political will from the leaders on the ground. Elected officials, local governments, and local communities need to take strong action to ensure that illegal burning is controlled. Local farmers should be given alternatives to burning, such as access to mechanised equipment that can make clearing and planting easier.

It is also vital that major plantation companies prohibit their local company operators and suppliers from burning land. Similarly, corporate buyers of commodities like palm oil and pulp and paper should ensure that their supply chains are not linked to companies suspected of burning.

Getting the markets to send the right message will help ensure that local farmers and company operators understand the damage that the fires cause.

Change on the ground cannot happen without them.

(*Citation: DNPI (2010) Indonesia’s Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve. Dewan Nasional Perubahan Iklim, Jakarta, Indonesia.)

Excerpt:

In the Philippines, under regulated advertising for tobacco products, cigarette brands have developed more creative products like packets of 10 sticks instead of the standard 20 to make them cheaper for consumers. Credit: Kara Santos/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Sep 7 2013 (IPS)

Between concluding rounds of negotiations towards the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a major U.S.-proposed free trade agreement, a divisive fight has heated up over the extent to which countries should be allowed to regulate the sale of foreign – potentially far cheaper – tobacco products.

In duelling proposals offered during the latest round of negotiations, in Brunei late last month, the United States and Malaysia put forward starkly different approaches. While Washington is urging that tobacco products be given no special consideration, the Malaysian government has countered that these items should receive a special “carve-out”, exempting them from a broader lifting of trade restrictions.“When you lower tariffs on cigarettes, prices become cheaper, greater numbers of kids and poor people become addicted, and overall health gets worse.” -- Ellen R. Shaffer of the Centre for Policy Analysis

Now, critics of the U.S. proposal are hoping to emphasise the health implications of these proposals ahead of the next 12-country TPP talks, slated to take place here in Washington starting Sep. 18. The administration of President Barack Obama had initially hoped to have a final agreement text by October, but that now looks extremely unlikely.

“Under other trade agreements, tobacco companies are currently using their investment provisions to attack public health regulations,” Arthur Stamoulis, director of the Citizens Trade Campaign at Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer watchdog, told IPS.

“For this reason, many feel there needs to be a broad carve-out in this agreement for tobacco, if public health is going to be protected. Fortunately, as negotiations get further along and the negotiators get into thornier issues, there’s a lot more people paying attention to these talks.”

New York Mayer Michael Bloomberg, a long-time proponent of greater tobacco control, recently suggested that the U.S. proposal could directly contribute to “tens of millions” of deaths globally.

The potential results of the U.S. proposal are fairly clear, with repeated evidence going back to at least the 1980s. For instance, according to findings by the Government Accountability Office, the U.S. Congress’s main watchdog, after international tobacco companies moved into South Korea in 1989, teenage smoking increased fourfold within the first year.

“There’s no question about it,” Ellen R. Shaffer, co-director of the Centre for Policy Analysis, a group focused on trade and health issues, told IPS. “When you lower tariffs on cigarettes, prices become cheaper, greater numbers of kids and poor people become addicted, and overall health gets worse.”

Chilling effect

Advocates of tougher restrictions are warning that the U.S. scheme would be particularly dangerous to developing countries. Not only could the proposal open these economies to potentially cheap cigarettes coming from other countries, but it would also make them vulnerable to expensive litigation from powerful tobacco interests if these countries try to impose trade restrictions.

Smoking rates in the United States and many other developed countries have come down dramatically in recent years, in part on the back of a unique wave of international agreement about tobacco’s deleterious health effects. Indeed, the world’s only international health accord, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which entered into effect in 2005, has been ratified by 176 countries – including each of the dozen in the TPP negotiations, except for the United States.

Yet smoking rates are rising in many developing countries. With tobacco use having led to roughly 100 million deaths during the last century, experts now estimate that it could cause upwards of a billion deaths this century – more than 80 percent of which will likely be in developing and middle-income countries, according to the World Health Organisation.

In the TPP negotiations, the new U.S. position rescinds an earlier draft proposal that included an exemption for tobacco-control measures. Instead, the new proposal simply recognises that countries are allowed to put in place health regulations, similar to other treaties.

It also offers a compromise of sorts. If any tobacco-related trade dispute were to arise due to the imposition of health-related regulations, health officials would be encouraged to engage in consultations before any settlement process goes forward.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has signed off on the new proposal, with the agency’s deputy secretary, Bill Corr, stating that the “proposed language … will make a difference for tobacco control and public-health efforts”.

Yet such provisions still constitute a “retreat … and fail to prevent tobacco control measures from being challenged as violations of trade agreements,” according to Susan M. Liss, executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a U.S. advocacy group, reflecting similar sentiments recently expressed by several U.S. health associations.

On the other hand, Liss said in a statement, the Malaysia proposal “is appropriate and necessary to stop the tobacco industry from continuing to challenge tobacco control measures as trade violations, a tactic the industry increasingly has used around the world to fight efforts to reduce tobacco use.”

Indeed, not only are countries such as the United States and Australia currently fighting lawsuits brought by tobacco companies against various tobacco-control laws, but such suits are increasingly being aimed at developing countries. Uruguay, for instance, is currently battling former tobacco giant Phillip Morris over a law that requires particular packaging for cigarettes.

“Developing countries are particularly at risk from these trade rules and challenges simply because they do not have the financial and legal wherewithal to defend against trade suits brought against governments,” the Center for Policy Analysis’s Shaffer says.

“The international tobacco industry has changed dramatically in recent years, and this constitutes a two-pronged strategy: first, to shoot down existing tobacco-control regulations and, second, to have a chilling effect on countries that may be thinking about instituting regulations.”

Shaffer, too, lauds the Malaysian government’s proposal, which she says has reportedly met with “some favourable reception, including reportedly from Japan, which would be encouraging given that country’s economic strength.”

Slippery slope?

Although tobacco no longer makes up a large percentage of the U.S. economy, pressure on the Obama administration surrounding the TPP negotiations has come from business interests worried about a “slippery slope” effect – that an exemption for cigarettes would eventually lead to additional exemptions for a range of other products.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby group, has been increasingly vocal in recent days on the TPP tobacco proposals.

“[We risk] opening Pandora’s box by setting a precedent that others will try to follow for additional ‘unique’ products in ways that could be very damaging to American workers, farmers, and companies,” John Murphy, the Chamber’s vice president for international affairs, wrote last week.

“Following this example, other governments may seek similar treatment for alcoholic beverages, snack foods, genetically-modified organisms (GMOs), or a range of other products – the export of which supports many American jobs.”

Chinese greed for ivory is taking its toll on the African elephant. Credit: Richard Ruggiero/USFWS/CC By 2.0

By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR , Aug 12 2013 (IPS)

A distance of nearly 9,000 kilometres separates Malaysia from Africa, but that hasn’t stopped the Southeast Asian nation from becoming a key staging post in the illegal trade of ivory from Africa to China.

“Between June 2011 and March this year, we managed to seize over 10 cases of smuggled ivory,” Khazali Ahmad, director-general of the Malaysian customs department, told IPS.

Close to 50 tonnes of elephant tusk, for which 1,500 elephants would have been killed in Africa, have been recovered in the country since June 2011.

The biggest such haul took place in September of that year, when 695 elephant tusks weighing close to two tonnes were seized in Port Kelang, one of Malaysia’s busiest container ports, 38 km southwest of the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

Two other seizures in January this year from the ports in the northern state of Penang and the southern state of Johore yielded 1.4 tonnes and 492 kg of ivory respectively.

The tusks come hidden under a variety of shipments, be it crates of salted fish, sawn timber or even peanuts. Marked as ‘Export to Malaysia’, local agents, knowingly or unknowingly, declare that the cargo is bound onward to China, making it difficult for the authorities to trace the eventual recipient there. The caches are also accompanied by multiple documents, obfuscating the trail even further.

“All the ivory comes from Africa and is headed towards China,” said Ahmad.

Traditionally, ivory is used to make intricate, expensive collectibles like chopsticks, bookmarks, Chinese cultural figurines as well as ornaments. These find enormous favour with the neo-rich in China as well as among the significant minorities of wealthy people of Chinese descent in outlying countries like Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines. They are willing to pay a considerable price for the objects of their desire.

Consequently, ivory sells at more than 10,000 dollars per tonne in some markets. The humongous profits from the trade go towards sustaining several wars waged by military or rebel groups in central Africa like the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which are compounded by freelance poachers, smugglers and organised crime syndicates across the continent.

“It’s very disheartening,” WWF-Malaysia executive director Dr Dionysius S.K. Sharma told IPS. “The price of ivory is making the situation insane.”

The greed for ivory is taking its toll on the African elephant, whose numbers are declining steadily, so much so that scientists fear the species is becoming close to endangered.

Concern over Malaysia’s role as a transhipment hub for illegal ivory was highlighted for the first time at a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in July. Ivory trade is banned under CITES.
The country, a party to the convention since 1975, was asked to report on what action it has taken to address the issue.

Within Malaysia, there is a growing realisation that the recorded seizures could just be the tip of the iceberg. “How much more African ivory is slipping through our ports?” said Kulasegaran Murugesan, a Malaysian lawmaker and a vocal campaigner for wildlife protection.

The question is, he told IPS, “Do we let this happen and blame others for the illegal trade or do we act proactively and decisively to arrest the ivory trade?”

Murugesan is determined to raise the subject in Parliament, and also intends to apply pressure on port operators, customs and wildlife officials to deny international traffickers the use of Malaysian ports.

The officials say there is little they can do, besides tough action at ports and airports, including the use of scanners. Malaysia’s porous borders allow people and goods to come and go as they please, making the country a preferred outpost for traffickers.

Commending the customs department on its vigilance, William Schaedla, the Southeast Asian director of wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC, said they hoped “to see it pursue all leads towards finding the criminals that are using Malaysia as a transit point for ivory.”

“We also urge authorities to ensure proper systems are in place to catalogue and stockpile the seized ivory,” Schaedla told IPS.

Seized ivory must be destroyed publicly, but activists say this has not been done yet. It could well have found its way back into the market.

“We are in the midst of doing an inventory of the ivory seized,” said Malaysian environment minister Palanivel Govindasamy. He added, however, that it was a new thing for them. “We have to develop internationally accepted protocols,” he told IPS. “It will take some time, but we are working on it.”

Malaysia had not had a single ivory seizure in nearly a decade till the middle of 2011. This did not mean there was no ivory passing through its ports and airports, but it did not have the demand that it does today.

There is no demand for ivory in Malaysia itself. “Our people are not willing to pay so much for ivory and the country is absolutely against the illegal trade,” said Ahmad.

So, while Malaysia too has elephants in its jungles and its zoos, there is no trade in elephant tusk. If elephant numbers are dwindling here, it is because of loss of habitat to oil palm, deforestation and the growing hunger for land to cultivate food crops.

Ahmad called for an international initiative, led perhaps by regional trade block ASEAN, to combat ivory trafficking. “We need the best efforts of other countries as well.”

Thai laws ban transgender women from changing their names and gender on their identity cards. Credit: Sutthida Malikaew/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
BANGKOK, Jul 24 2013 (IPS)

A draft law being readied for parliament that seeks to offer lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) couples the same legal rights as heterosexual couples could make Thailand the first country in Southeast Asia to legalise gay marriage.

Last year, Nathee Theeraronjanapong (55) and his partner Atthapon Janthawee (38) decided to make their 20-year relationship legal.

Citing section 1448 of Thailand’s Civil and Commercial Code, which deems same-sex marriage unlawful, the head of registrations in Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai handed the couple a letter of denial.

“The LGBTIQ community really struggles with the issue of acceptance from our parents. There is a lot of pressure to conform to traditional beliefs of what a family unit is comprised of." -- Anjana Suvarnananda, co-founder of Anjaree Group.
In response, the couple filed a complaint with the Parliamentary Human Rights Commission, the Administrative Court and the National Human Rights Commission insisting that Thailand’s constitution guarantees them equal protection under the law.

The political storm following that incident, which generated considerable media buzz, prompted a member of parliament to gather a committee of parliamentarians, 15 scholars and LGBTIQ activists to draft the country’s first civil union bill, to legalise same-sex marriage.

Presenting the draft law on same-sex unions to Thailand’s parliament is Wiratana Kalayasiri, Democrat parliamentarian from the southern Thai city of Songkhla, who is also the chairman of the Legal Justice Human Rights committee.

He says most legislators in Thailand are over 47, which partially explains the staunch opposition to the law in its early stages.

“At first, there was a negative impression and people were wondering why I was doing this but as this process went on people started to understand that this is a human right of the Thai people, guaranteed under the constitution. Since then minds have changed,” Kalayasiri told IPS.

“We have held five hearings on the bill at several universities throughout Thailand and in parliament as well. A survey of 200-300 people showed that 78 percent are in favour of allowing same-sex marriage and 10.3 percent are against it.

“I was particularly surprised when we went to Songkhla [a city of roughly 75,000 people] for a public meeting and 87 percent of Muslims in attendance were in favour [of gay marriage].”

Still, leading activists in Thailand’s LGBTIQ movement like Anjana Suvarnananda, who co-founded Anjaree Group in 1987 – the first organisation to raise the issue of LGBTIQ rights here – believes that the bill could facilitate the process of moving public attitudes from opposition to acceptance.

“The LGBTIQ community really struggles with the issue of acceptance from our parents. There is a lot of pressure to conform to traditional beliefs of what a family unit is comprised of,” she told IPS.

“This is why it is important that the language of the bill transcends defining marriage as being solely between a man and a woman. If we can put forth the idea that the family structure is based on the union of two loving and consenting individuals then…society and our parents would be more willing to accept our way of life.”

Under the current Civil and Commercial Code, same-sex families are not afforded the same legal protections as heterosexual couples such as medical coverage or recognition as being the sole caretaker of their spouse.

Suvarnananda believes the law will be particularly useful during times of emergency. “If there is a severe accident or health issue, like if my partner becomes ill, then in the eyes of the law I am no one other than just a friend. This forces us [the LGBTIQ community] to struggle by ourselves…We want more security,” she added.

In 1956, provisions making sodomy a punishable offense were repealed and consensual sex between same-sex couples became lawful, making Thailand one of Asia’s most progressive countries regarding gay rights.

Anti-discrimination laws protecting members of the LGBTIQ community are non-existent in the region. Sodomy is criminalised in six member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – namely, Brunei, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore, as well as  Marawi City in the Philippines and the South Sumatra Province of Indonesia.

Thus Danai Linjongrat, executive director of the Rainbow Sky Association, has been urging caution in the drafting of the civil union bill, so that it will not inadvertently fan the flames of intolerance and heighten regional stigmatisation of the LGBTIQ community.

“We are looking for a bill that equalises all relationships,” he told IPS. “For example, the current marriage law grants heterosexual couples the right to marry once they reach the legal age of 17, but for LGBTIQ people the legal marriage age would be 20 years old.”

“When we put forth language like this in a bill it merely reinforces discrimination against a certain segment of society when it comes to marriage,” says Linjongrat.

The situation is particularly complicated for transgender individuals, who confront a range of attitudes and biases across the region. Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, for example, all have laws targeting and criminalising transgender women for “cross-dressing”.

Even in Thailand, where gender non-conformity receives a high degree of social acceptance, there has been little progress in formally recognising the rights of transgender people.

Thailand’s first sex change surgery was performed in 1972 and there are an estimated 180,000 Thai people who identify as transgender, including a number of pop singers, television personalities and movie stars.

In addition, a transgender beauty pageant, the Miss Tiffany’s Universe, is televised annually on a national scale from the eastern city of Pattaya.

Yet Thai law does not allow trans-people to change their gender or their names on ID cards, birth certificates or passports, leading to complications in finding employment and harassment at border crossings or immigration checkpoints.

Even with a university degree, transgender people have difficulty finding a decent job. To support themselves, many turn to the entertainment or sex industry.

Experts hope “this civil union bill will slightly reduce heteronormativity in Thai society, which could improve…health issues by reducing the likelihood of unsafe sexual practices [among the LGBTIQ community],” Prempreeda Pramoj Na Ayutthaya, an HIV and AIDS national programme officer for UNESCO in Bangkok, told IPS.

Thailand has the highest adult HIV rate in Southeast Asia, with nearly 520,000 people between the ages of 15 and 49 living with HIV/AIDS; a 2010 survey in Bangkok found that 31 percent of gay men and transgendered people are HIV-positive.

“In order for the transgender community to fully support this bill, it must ensure that we are granted the right to legally change our name titles,” Na Ayutthaya stressed.

Recently deforested peat land intended for oil palm plantations in Borneo, Indonesia. Credit: glennhurowitz/CC-BY-2.0

By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 22 2013 (IPS)

With a propensity to devour everything in their path and spiral quickly out of control, leaving behind swathes of scorched earth, forest fires are considered a hazard in most parts of the world. In Indonesia, however, fires are the preferred method for clearing large areas of land for massive plantations of commercial crops.

In the first half of 2013, research studies have already recorded 8,343 forest fires, a higher number than has been recorded in preceding years.

While some blazes occurred naturally, igniting in the country’s vast rainforests that are transformed in the dry summer months into an expanse of kindling, experts say that many fires were created by plantation companies and, to a lesser extent, by local communities, to clear millions of hectares of jungle land needed for oil palm plantations.

According to the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), oil palm plantations “covered 7.8 million hectares in Indonesia” in 2011, and produced roughly 23.5 million tonnes of crude palm oil that year.

The cheapest and easiest way to clear enough land to yield these huge quantities of oil is to set fire to acre upon acre of rainforest and let the wind and the flames do the work, including reducing the acidity of peat soil.

This soggy, organic matter is anathema to palm trees, which explains why about two-thirds of forest fires in Indonesia occur on peat lands.

Unfortunately, peat soil becomes extremely toxic at high temperatures, emitting greenhouse gases and creating haze and smog. Peat fires can burn on for weeks, even months, endangering wildlife and human communities far from the site of the actual fire.

For years, palm oil-producing companies in Indonesia and Malaysia, which together account for 85 percent of the world’s palm oil production every year, have come under fire from activists and scientists who say the ‘forest fire method’ poses serious environmental and health risks for the entire region.

While most of these fires originate in Sumatra, changes in wind direction mean that smoke travels to nearby countries.

Last month, for instance, the international community pilloried Indonesia for fires that choked parts of neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia.

The haze that enveloped the latter was so bad that the government in Kuala Lumpur declared a state of emergency in parts of the country where air pollution index readings reached a critical 750 on Jun. 23, well above the “hazardous” level of 300.

Malaysian citizens were advised to stay indoors, while Singaporean authorities cancelled outdoor summer activities as panicked residents emptied stores of their supply of protective masks.

The average air pollution index rating in both Malaysia and Singapore now hovers at over 100, a dramatic increase from the preceding decade, which “could contribute to climate change and is seriously detrimental to the health of people in the region,” Gurmit Singh, a renowned Malaysian environmentalist, told IPS.

Blame has been bandied about, with governments, corporations and even local communities named as culprits, but public censure has failed to prompt concrete action.

Environment ministers representing five members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) flew to Malaysia’s capital last week in search of a lasting solution to what has become a predictable, annual crisis, but the talks concluded on Jul. 17 with no firm agreement on the table.

All that officials from Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand approved was a plan for Indonesia to refer ASEAN’s 2002 Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution to its parliament by 2014 – hardly a promising solution, since the accord appeared before Indonesia’s legislature in 2009 but was not mentioned once during the entire session.

The outcome of the high-level meeting comes as no surprise to T. Jayabalan, a public health consultant and adviser to Friends of the Earth-Malaysia.

“For almost 20 years these governments have adopted a lackadaisical attitude towards resolving the problem (of forest fires),” he told IPS.

“No concrete measures have been taken because any measure imposed will impact the profits of palm oil companies,” he added.

A quick look at the stakes involved in palm oil production support Jayabalan’s claim: according to CIFOR, crude palm oil brought in 12.4 billion dollars in foreign exchange in 2008, while the government bagged another billion dollars in export taxes alone that same year.

The sector employs some 3.2 million people every year – no mean feat in a country where 30 million people live below the poverty line.

Earlier this year, the Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association unveiled an ambitious plan to grow the sector by 5.4 percent by the year 2020, adding another four million hectares to existing plantations around the country.

With such zealous plans in the pipeline, a solution is urgently needed, “rather than more talk and postponement of key decisions,” Jayabalan stressed.

He and other experts believe the first step must entail recognising the role palm oil companies play in creating fires.

Data published last month by the Washington-based World Research Institute (WRI) shows that the number of fires per hectare is “three to four times higher within…oil palm concession boundaries than outside of them.”

The research also suggests that there are significant discrepancies between maps issued by the ministry of forestry and those being used by oil palm companies.

According to WRI, “Company ‘Business Land Use Rights’ licence boundaries (in Indonesian, Hak Guna Usaha or HGU)…are generally nested within, and are smaller than, the concession boundaries the government is using. This is creating confusion about responsibility for fires found on land thought to be within concessions but outside areas the companies fully control and are directly developing.”

With more fires expected in the months between August and October, environmentalists are urging governments to “come to terms with the haze and its root causes because people in the region suffer from the pollutants,” Singh said. Various studies have shown that haze pollution leads to an increase in the number of people suffering from upper respiratory tract infections, asthma and rhinitis.

Countries in the region are also being called upon to cooperate in the development and implementation of prevention mechanisms, monitoring and early warning systems, information-sharing networks and other channels for providing mutual assistance.

But these steps have currently been stalled by Indonesia’s refusal to ratify the ASEAN Haze Pollution Agreement.

A Wyoming Air National Guard C-130 Hercules equipped with a Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System drops a water and fire retardant slurry on a fire on the Indonesian island of Sumatra on Nov. 17, 1997. Credit: U.S. Air Force

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 10 2013 (IPS)

Indonesia’s forest fires, a predictable annual ritual, will continue to have serious implications for health and the environment in Southeast Asia unless the government strengthens forest protection, warn environmental groups.

The government claims it is doing its best, including implementation of existing protection measures against recurring forest fires. But environmental groups say Indonesia’s best is not good enough."There is need for a more active exchange of experiences, good practices and knowledge between the different regions of Kalimantan and Sumatra ." -- FAO's Pieter van Lierop

Last month’s forest fires in Indonesia, which literally choked parts of Singapore and Malaysia, have revived a longstanding debate on one of the key environmental issues troubling Southeast Asia.

The Malaysian government declared a state of emergency in areas where the haze triggered “one of the country’s worst pollution levels”, even as Singapore urged people to stay indoors.

Conscious of the ecological implications, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono formally apologised to Singapore and Malaysia for the widespread pollution caused by the forest fires in his country.

“For what is happening, as the president, I apologise to our brothers in Singapore and Malaysia,” Yudhoyono said.

Indonesia has been working hard to fight the fires, which are mostly set by farmers to clear fields.

Ironically, the Indonesian president is one of three world leaders – along with Britain’s David Cameron and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – chairing a high-level panel on the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda, which places high priority on the environment, and specifically on a set of future sustainable development goals.

As a result, says one Asian diplomat, neither the United Nations nor Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are likely to take a critical stand on Indonesia’s continuing forest fires.

“It’s a politically sensitive issue,” he told IPS, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Asked for a response, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters Tuesday: “Well, as I understand it, the countries in the region are closely coordinating and cooperating on this particular matter. And I think I would leave it at that.

“Should I have further information, particularly from my colleagues from the Economic and Social Commission for Asia Pacific (ESCAP), then I’d let you know,” he added.

But at this point, “I think it is being handled between those countries in the region.”

Asked about the implications of the recurring forest fires, Yuyun Indradi, forests campaigner at Greenpeace Southeast Asia, told IPS, “Basically this demonstrates that the government of Indonesia is less serious in dealing and improving forest governance, despite their previous commitments to do so.”

Their commitment to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions up to 41 percent will be a mission impossible (most of the carbon emission is contribution of deforestation and land use change in the forestry sector which contributes up to 80 percent of Indonesia’s emission), he said.

“Forest governance, which includes law enforcement, is very weak. Even Indonesia has adopted zero burning policy (under the Forestry Act, Plantation Act and Environmental Protection and Management Act) but it is clearly still occurring on a widespread scale,” he added.

He also said investment in forest protection itself is also very low in terms of human resources – forest firefighters, forest fire investigators, equipment, early warning system – and it means that this environmental crime is allowed to occur.

Corruption also part of the problem in the land-based extractives industry, such as plantations, forestry and mining, he added.

Pieter van Lierop, Forestry Officer (fire management) at the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), told IPS it is important to recognise that fire is used as a land management tool.

However, fires that get out of control on drained peatlands frequently cause significant damage to human health, human assets and biodiversity and create large amounts of greenhouse gasses contributing to climate change.

The risk of such fires and their emissions are very high as dried peat becomes extremely inflammable and fires can remain underground in the peat for some time and then rise to the surface at a considerable distance from the original outbreak, he said.

Nazir Foead, conservation director at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia, told IPS the implications for Indonesia would be on several fronts. Public health is certainly one of them, mostly for those living in provinces heavily affected by haze, he said.

Foead said the state may have to bear some of the costs to improve public health.

As the fires burnt either crop or timber plantations, companies and farmers will endure economic losses.

“We hope the [Indonesian] government would seriously enforce the zero burning laws on companies, and provide assistance to farmers who would eventually use fires to clear land every year,” he said.

If farmers are not provided with technical and financial assistance, they will start the fires again next year, he warned.

FAO’s Van Lierop told IPS that commercial enterprises involved in oil palm and other plantations should avoid the use of fire in the establishment and maintenance of plantations. At the same time, he said, small farmers should receive more support to use fires in a controllable and efficient manner and, where possible, to apply alternatives to the use of fire as an agricultural tool.

“There is need for a more active exchange of experiences, good practices and knowledge between the different regions of Kalimantan and Sumatra (where forest fires occur),” he said.

Governments at all levels should play an important role in this. International research projects could also contribute more to the exchange of good practices and the results of research, he added.

FAO has been providing support to countries to develop an integrated approach to fire management, from prevention and preparedness to suppression and restoration for many years, he said.

Greenpeace’s Indradi told IPS the forest fire problem is part of the wider problem Indonesia has with managing its natural resources, “especially when we continue to put political and financial interests first rather than the environment”.

Youth are protesting high costs of living, unaffordable fuel prices and the continuing reign of the Barisan Nasional party in Malaysia. Credit: Udey Ismail/CC-BY-2.0

By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

They had voted for “ubah” or change. What the youth of Malaysia got instead seems to be more of the same.

“I am deeply disappointed,” said Alex Lee, a 24-year-old student at the Kuala Lumpur campus of Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), a private institution run by the Malaysian Chinese Association, one of the main parties in the current ruling coalition.

“All my friends, relatives and everyone I know said we could vote and change the government - but even though all of us voted for Pakatan Rakyat, we could not." -- Samantha Yow
“We thought people’s power would bring about change. Instead we see the same old government taking office and the same old policies are in place,” Lee told IPS during his shift at a warong (eatery) in the upscale Bangsar suburb of Kuala Lumpur, where he works part time.

Lee is giving voice to the widespread resentment among Malaysia’s urban youth, who, comprising 60 percent of the country’s 13.5 million voters, had thought their numbers would be large enough to bring about the change they so desperately sought at the recent elections.

They had pinned their hopes on the Pakatan Rakyat, a coalition of three disparate parties, as the vehicle of that change. As it happened, though, Barisan Nasional (BN), a coalition of 13 parties that has held the reins for 56 long years, returned to power yet again.

BN went on to form the government on the basis of securing 133 seats in the 222-seat parliament, its poorest showing to date. Despite bagging 52 percent of the larger national vote, PR had no choice but to occupy the opposition benches, given the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

In the May 5 election Barisan Nasional won 133 rural seats but lost the popular vote.

Alleging a “theft” of this election, PR leader Anwar Ibrahim has been staging rallies across the country, which dejected youth are attending in droves, numbering well over 50,000 at any given time.

“I had rushed to register as a first-time voter along with my friends in college, and we all supported the Pakatan,” said Lee, who just last week was in the nearby town of Petaling Jaya to attend one such rally that drew an estimated 70,000 people, most them of youth.

“We thought we would have a new beginning. But it’s the same old problems again: high university fees, high cost of living.”

While Malaysia enjoys full employment and provides employment to many foreign workers, opportunities consist mostly of low-paid factory jobs.

Transport, rent and other living expenses account for most of the average monthly salary of roughly 970 dollars. Young people have little to look forward to after they leave school besides working hard just to make ends meet.

Thus, Pakatan Rakyat’s campaign of free education, improved public transport, reduced fuel prices and cheaper cars struck a chord among urban youth.

“This country is for a few rich people,” Margaret Lam, who works with Lee at the warong, told IPS, referring to corrupt practices like granting government cronies Approved Permits to import luxury cars at reduced tax rates, while placing heavy duties on imported vehicles under the guise of “protecting” the local car manufacturer, Proton: the first indigenous-owned and operated automobile enterprise in the country that has long enjoyed government support.

In fact, the Pakatan Rakyat had announced plans to revamp the National Automotive Policy (NAP) if it came to power, by slashing duties on what many people here see as cheaper, better quality cars from abroad. The reforms would have forced Proton to get competitive, rather than rely on the government’s protectionist policies that have buoyed it up for three decades at a huge cost to ordinary people, experts say.

This promise by PR was yet another reason for youth to throw their lot in with the opposition, since many young people were already fed up with the government’s preferential treatment of natives (called bumiputras, or ‘sons of the soil’).

Alan Rajasooriya, who spoke with IPS at a recent rally in Seremban, a city about 60 km south of the capital, said he wants more than anything to see an end to policies that discriminate against descendants of Indians and Chinese.

“There should not be any preferential treatment to natives over non-natives,” he said, lashing out at policies that favour bumiputras by giving them priority in major business deals and government contracts.

According to him, this view finds echo among thousands of other youths who have been taking to the streets. They are also demanding an end to corruption and cronyism.

Rajasooriya and scores of others like him also firmly believe Ibrahim’s accusation that the country’s election commission allowed Bangladeshis, who come to the country as guest workers, to vote, in order to beef up the government’s numbers.

This is something that the election commission denies. However, as a gesture of reconciliation, the new government, under the prime ministership of Najib Razak, has offered to place the body under a parliamentary select committee.

Neither Ibrahim nor the youth are appeased. “All my friends, relatives and everyone I know said we can vote and change the government,” Samantha Yow, another youth protester, told IPS. “But even though all of us voted for Pakatan Rakyat, we could not.”

Now she feels she has no choice but to attend rallies, where she and other frustrated youth “share their aspirations and let off steam.”

The wave of popular discontent has also highlighted the rural-urban divide, with protesters articulating the desires of primarily urban youth.

Ibrahim Suffian, director of programmes at the Selangor-based Merdeka Centre for Opinion Research, attributes this partly to the level of government-controlled media in the Malaysian countryside, where about 30 percent of the population resides and where most people rely on national newspapers and television stations for their information.

Internet penetration of the country is just over 60 percent, and most rural youths have been left out of the digital revolution, unlike in urban areas where social media is a mainstay both for information and entertainment.

While rural voters, mostly farm labourers, along with small rubber and oil palm holders, remained staunchly loyal to Barisan Nasional, young urbanites were forming their own opinions about politics and governance and questioning their own role in the country’s future.

Sadly, this change did not happen fast enough for the PR, as the urban vote bank failed to match the landslide of ballots cast in the rural hinterland.

Experts say youth will most likely play a big part in the major opposition rally planned for June 15 in the capital, but whether or not their protests will amount to change remains to be seen.

At the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, advocates shared strategies for breaking religious taboos on reproductive rights. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
KUALA LUMPUR, May 31 2013 (IPS)

Liberian journalist Mae Azango says she spent a year living “like a bat, going from tree to tree” with her daughter in order to escape religious fanatics who were threatening to kill her for exposing the practice of female genital mutilation in her home country last year.

A senior reporter at the local FrontPage Africa publication, Azango told IPS that although the Liberian government signed a treaty in 2012 promising its citizens the right to information, it continues to hold back data on sexual and reproductive health and rights from journalists.

“With every story that I write, I take a great risk,” she says, adding that she is entirely dependent on “secret sources” within the government to gather information, since very little is shared in the public domain.

Her woes found echo among hundreds of women and health experts gathered in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur for the third annual Women Deliver global forum that ended Thursday.

Hailing from different corners of the globe, participants at the conference had no trouble identifying common goals: breaking taboos surrounding sex education and creating a safe climate for advocates, health professionals and educators to spread awareness on safe sex and family planning.

In Morocco, a country of 32 million people, schools are banned from offering sex education to young people because parliamentarians believe it to be an “evil concept, designed to promote promiscuity,” sexual and reproductive advocate Amina Lemrini told IPS.

She says progress on improving sexual health services in her country has been particularly slow due to taboos introduced by religious leaders.

With a government unwilling to challenge clerics, the job of providing crucial health services falls entirely on the shoulders of civil society, who are then threatened for their efforts.

Lemrini says she does not know a single reproductive rights activist who has not been threatened, yet the government offers them no protection.

Their distress has been recognised by leading experts in the field, including the executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), Babatunde Osotimehin, who told IPS that religious fundamentalism is a “indeed a worry” when it comes to progress on sexual health.

Still, he urged activists to continue their work, adding, “Fundamentalism exists in all societies and all religions – what matters is how we communicate our message.”

He believes that if more people are made aware of their rights and choices, they will not hesitate to defy archaic laws and so-called “cultural taboos.”

“The average person on the street does not want a situation where death comes calling every day for reasons that can be prevented,” he stressed.

Indeed, even a cursory glance at global statistics is enough to make a strong case for the need for better communication: according to the UNFPA, nearly 800 women die every single day as a result of pregnancy-related complications; in a year, that number is closer to 350,000 deaths, of which 99 percent occur in developing countries.

Sex-selective abortions and neglect of newborn baby girls have resulted in an estimated 134 million “missing” women worldwide.

Doing a wide sweep of global data, the UNFPA estimates that “millions of girls” practice unsafe sex and lack information on contraceptives. Osotimehin recently wrote that an “unmet need for family planning exists among 33 percent of girls between 15 and 19 years old…in Ethiopia, 38 percent in Bolivia, 42 percent in Nepal, 52 percent in Haiti and 62 percent in Ghana.”

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, head of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), told IPS that giving up on communication about sexual and reproductive health and rights was not an option.

“We need an operative environment for those who are discussing this issue,” she said. “We need to protect the media — this isn’t a choice. Governments must scale up the level of cooperation with the media and provide supportive legal backup where it is not yet available.”

Gumbonzvanda thinks that citizen journalism could be an effective way to mitigate the risk posed by fundamentalists, not only by amplifying the voices of those who often go unheard, but also by empowering common citizens to take action.

Nowhere was the power of citizen journalism more evident than during the revolution in Egypt in 2011, where blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts replaced TV channels, newspapers and radio stations in reaching millions of people.

Today, as Egyptians struggle against the conservative policies of the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, that network of citizen journalists has turned its attention to reproductive health and safe sex, topics that are frowned upon by Islamists.

Ahmed Awadalla, sexual and gender-based violence officer for Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA), told IPS that anyone discussing the issue risks detention, arrest, harassment and imprisonment.

As a result, the number of bloggers increases every day, as citizens and advocates flee to cyberspace in search of safe forums to share information and ideas.

“When I blog about the sexual rights of women I break two rules,” Awadalla said. “First, by speaking about a forbidden issue and secondly by speaking as a man, who is not supposed to take the side of women.” Though he faces harsh repercussions, nothing will persuade him to give up his advocacy.

But even while citizens innovate new ideas to get around the deadly threats of engaging in sex education, experts say governments must not be let off the hook for failing to provide these basic services.

Governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America must be held accountable by foreign funders, says Agnes Callamard, executive director of the London-based ‘Article 19’, an organisation dedicated to freedom of expression.

“Every government has committed to spending a certain amount of the funding they receive (on sexual health),” she said, so tracking aid flows could pressure governments to improve their track records on information sharing.

In fact, when the Mexico-based Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida (GIRE) started to track aid supposed to be allocated to providing information on sexual and reproductive health in 2011, “we found that nearly a million dollars were missing,” said GIRE Information Rights Advocate Alma Luz Beltrán y Puga. “We sued the government over that.  If the same tracking is done the world over, it can lead to greater accountability.”

According to a study done by the World Health Organisation (WHO), developed countries donated nearly 6.4 billion dollars to help provide access and information on reproductive health in developing countries. It is now up to civil society to ensure that money is responsibly allocated.

With little sign of a meaningful diplomatic breakthrough on the South China Sea horizons, coupled with a dangerous escalation between Vietnam and China in the disputed waters, the Philippines has faced an added crisis over the Malaysian state of Sabah.

The crisis was prompted when (Feb. 14) between 80-100 armed supporters of the descendants of the Sultanate of Sulu, led by Sultan Jamalul Kiram III, launched a ragtag occupation of a remote area of the Malaysian state, precipitating a muscular response from the Malaysian security forces.

Despite incessant efforts by the Philippine government to prevent a violent confrontation, notably dispatching a humanitarian fleet to fetch children and women among the armed men, Malaysia and Kiram’s so-called Royal Security Forces (RSF) ended up fighting a protracted and bloody guerilla war, re-igniting a centuries-old tug-of-war between the Philippines and Malaysia over oil-rich Sabah.

Meanwhile, the conflict led to the potential displacement of up to 800,000 Filipinos residing in Sabah, with dozens of Filipinos accusing Malaysian authorities of committing human rights violations amid large-scale mopping-up operations against Kiram’s suspected followers.

As the crisis intensified, more supporters – straddling porous maritime borders and infiltrating the naval blockade by Filipino-Malaysian forces – of Sulu Sultanate entered the theatre of war.  Within two months, confrontations led to the death of at least 68 members of the RSF and the arrest of 126 others, while up to 6,000 Filipinos residing in Sabah were reportedly displaced by the crisis.

In many ways, some analysts and commentators have characterised the whole fiasco as a classic case of intelligence failure, with both Manila and Kuala Lumpur failing to anticipate a bilateral crisis resulting from unilateral actions by a number of non-state actors. It was also, they claim, an example of crisis-management disaster, with both governments failing to effectively prevent an armed confrontation in absence of a close bilateral security-intelligence coordination and effective deployment of peaceful, diplomatic means.

All the while, the Philippines has been facing a dangerous escalation in the South China Sea in recent months, with Beijing (a) rejecting Manila’s call for an international arbitration of maritime disputes and (b) taking an unprecedented decision to deploy three “surveillance ships” and a naval helicopter to consolidate its claims over disputed features.

With a cloud of mystery shrouding the exact circumstances leading to the crisis, people have resorted to a range of conspiracy theories amid sensitive elections in Philippines, where the Aquino administration is facing a de facto referendum in a by-elections, and Malaysia, where the ruling coalition is facing a historical parliamentary battle against an emboldened opposition. Some are accusing the Aquino administration of orchestrating the Sabah crisis to score domestic political points, while others have pointed their finger at the Malaysian opposition led by Anwar Ibrahim.

The Malaysian government, meanwhile, has engaged in an effective public relations campaign, rousing nationalist sentiments and public sympathy for the government under Prime Minister Najib Razak, while an increasing number of Filipinos have renewed their calls for a more assertive stance by the Aquino administration on the Sabah issue, with some citizens petitioning the Supreme Court to instruct the executive to bring Philippines’ claims to international courts.

Responding to the popular pulse, the Aquino administration has promised to convene a panel of experts and government officials to review the possibility of subjecting the Sabah claim to international arbitration.

Prior to the independence of Malaysia and the Philippines, the Sultanate of Sulu laid claim to North Borneo, a gift from the Bruneian royalty, which it leased to the British North Borneo Company in 1878 in exchange for an annual payment of 5,000 Malayan dollars then, which was increased by another 300 Malayan dollars 1903 onwards.

At the onset of the emergence of the Malaysian Federation, after the withdrawal of British forces, the Sulu Sultanate ceded its North Borneo claim to the Philippine government in 1962. The following year, however, Sabah was incorporated into the Malaysian federation, provoking a diplomatic crisis between Manila and its new Southeast Asian neighbour.

The Marcos regime in the Philippines pushed the envelope by increasingly agitating against the newly formed Malaysian state, threatening to take back Sabah by force, which, in turn, prompted Kuala Lumpur to seek U.S. assistance to dissuade Manila against any armed action, according to newly-released diplomatic cables.

Initially, Marcos solicited the support of Filipino Muslims, the so-called ‘Moros’, to reclaim Sabah. But a series of events, notably the Jabbidah Massacre, escalated into an internal war between the Philippine government and an all-out insurgency in the South, led by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) under charismatic academic-turned-warrior Nur Misuari.

Reportedly, what ensued was a proxy war, whereby the Malaysian government supported the insurgency to distract the Philippine government, which eventually decided to prioritise its strategic ties with its western neighbour and drop the pursuit of Sabah in order to focus on the domestic crisis.

No wonder, many have accused the Aquino administration of allegedly sidelining the country’s claim to Sabah in order to facilitate the Malaysian-brokered framework peace agreement with the country’s main insurgency group and MNLF-offshoot, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), in 2012.

For some, Kiram’s actions were a desperate attempt to highlight an otherwise forgotten territorial dispute, since the Sulu Sultan, prior to the crisis, is said to have repeatedly sought Manila’s assurances on upholding the Sabah claim in principle and practice. Meanwhile, the MNLF, with Misuari supporting Kiram’s stance on Sabah, has accused the Philippine government of striking new deals with the MILF, without fully honouring its earlier agreements with the group.

Against such a stormy backdrop, Malaysia imposed restrictions on barter deals with Filipino traders, while Manila and the MILF failed to reach a deal on key aspects of the framework agreement in the latest series of negotiations, underscoring the depth and range of challenges faced by the Aquino administration.

In effect, Manila has been placed in a precarious strategic position, whereby it is simultaneously facing two diplomatic crises to its west (Malaysia) and north (China), while desperately seeking to rein in domestic insurgency, especially in the southern island of Mindanao.

Politicians are becoming media savvy in Malaysia, using Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to appeal to netizens. Credit: West McGowan/CC-BY-2.0

By Kalinga Seneviratne
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 11 2012 (IPS)

Malaysia is gearing up for a general election in six months and as the campaigns enter the crucial voter-courting phase many observers are wondering if the political ‘tsunami’, which severely weakened the ruling National Front coalition (BN) at the 2008 polls, might be repeated.

That political tidal wave – which stripped the BN of its two-thirds majority in parliament for the first time since independence and handed five state governments over to the opposition – was precipitated by the spread of Internet-based social media as a campaigning tool, harnessed primarily by the opposition.

“In 2008 neither the government nor opposition expected the result they got,” Ramanathan Sankaran, author of ‘Media, Democracy and Civil Society’, told IPS.

The proliferation of independent websites and blogs such as Malaysia Today and Malaysiakini rendered the ruling coalition’s propaganda machinery less effective during the electoral race, as formidable opponents appeared in the crucial arena of cyberspace.

“Six or seven bloggers, who had been unknown (to most of the ruling coalition) got into parliament. It shocked the BN,” Sankaran added.

Three of these bloggers have now become well-known opposition figures in Malaysia. Former human rights activist and environmental campaigner Elizabeth Wong is now the minister for Tourism, Consumer Affairs and the Environment in the opposition-ruled Selangor state government that covers the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Tony Pua, who defeated a BN parliamentary secretary candidate to win the Petaling Jaya federal constituency, is now the “shadow minister” for Higher Education in the federal parliament.

Meanwhile Jeff Ooi, who won a state assembly seat in Penang, clinching another crucial win for the opposition in 2008, has taken the reigns as senior aide to the Chief Minister.

“One of the first things (then Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad) Badawi said when the results came out was ‘we lost the Internet war. We didn’t realise that was important. We relied too much on mainstream media’,” recalled Steven Gan, editor of the leading alternative news website Malaysiakini.

“When (current Prime Minister) Najib Tun Razak came to power in 2009 there was substantial focus on the Internet. He set up his own Facebook (account), along with other politicians, and he is tweeting as well.”

The Prime Minister also has a website called ‘1 Malaysia’ which is updated daily. According to Sankaran, Razak has instructed other ministers and senior government officials to make good use of the Internet and respond to emails within 48 hours.

Even the former Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has set up his own blog, ‘Blogging to Unblock’, whose comments are regularly picked up by the mainstream and alternative media.

And long-term opposition member in federal parliament, Lim Kit Siang, who first entered parliament in 1969 and is currently the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party’s parliamentary leader, has his own blog through which he has been relentlessly attacking the government on corruption issues for several months.

Nudged by the outcome of the 2008 election, “BN made a concerted move to (mobilise) its own cyber-troopers,” Gan told IPS.

According to Sankaran, BN’s determination to learn from past mistakes is reflected in their decision to field Kamalananthan Panchanathen, a young Internet-savvy candidate, for the seat of Hulu Selangor, an electorate with a large Indian population.

The 40-year-old blogger won back the seat in the by-election of 2010 “partly because of his appeal to young (netizens), and he now has his own website,” Sankaran added.

“The government has opened up the Internet (to encourage better governance),” he added.

Prominent Malaysian political commentator Chandra Muzzafar, a former political ally of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, agrees that the Internet will play an important role in coming elections. “It will be a major actor in some constituencies and controlling it is difficult,” he told IPS.

Censorship rears its head

But along with the government’s attempt to become more media savvy ahead of the elections has come a desire to curtail the freedoms allowed to other social media practitioners and rights groups who utilise these channels to spread their message to civil society.

On Sep. 13, the independent Star newspaper reported that the prominent human rights group SUARAM was being investigated by the Home Ministry and five government agencies, including the Registrar of Societies, on allegations that they received funds from the Open Society Foundation (OSF), whose chairman is international financial speculator George Soros.

SUARAM’s membership includes a number of opposition MPs linked to Anwar Ibrahim’s People’s Justice Party (PKR). The rights group has waged a long anti-corruption crusade against the government.

Government-controlled media reported that investigations by the Domestic Trade, Cooperatives and Consumerism Ministry found three letters addressed to SUARAM dated 2007, 2008 and 2010, detailing grants amounting to nearly 189,000 dollars from the OSF.

“Civil society is now continuously portrayed in the media as the enemy who is seeking to overthrow the government at the behest of foreign powers. These accusations have also been hurled at BERSIH (the Coalition for Free and Fair Elections), more so since July last year when we had a successful rally of more than 50,000 people on the streets of Kuala Lumpur, clamouring for clean and fair elections,” Ambiga Sreenevasan, co-chair of BERSIH, said in a commentary published by ‘Malaysian Insider’ last week.

Another alternative media outfit that has been consistently accused of receiving funds from Soros is Malaysiakini.

“While we are non-partisan that doesn’t mean we are apolitical. We are very political. We cover issues we feel strongly about such as corruption, press freedom and human rights,” Gan said in an interview with IPS.

“We will speak for people who do not have access to mainstream media. We speak for the voiceless, those who suffer human rights abuses that are not covered properly by mainstream media. That has always been our position. People see us as pro-opposition because we cover those issues,” he added.

Internet – or economy?

But though active netizens are breaking the government’s “monopoly on truth”, and the powerful Reformasi movement – comprised of a Malay core and based on exposing corruption and abuse of power within the government – is on the rise, experts like Muzzafar believe BN will have an easy victory at the polls.

He believes the economy will be the key factor in determining the outcome of the election. The Malaysian economy is currently strong and stable. Unemployment is at a low 2.7 percent as of August 2012, gross domestic product (GDP) growth was 5.6 percent in the second quarter of 2012 and industrial production was up by 4.9 percent in September 2012, according to the Department of Statistics.

Though Malaysia enjoys a strong alternative media network, a vibrant NGO sector and a robust opposition – the three ingredients necessary to topple a ruling government – Gan believes that BN will win on account of their huge state machinery and state funds – the government’s television and radio networks, along with the government-controlled mainstream newspapers, have a huge influence on Malay rural voters who form the backbone of the electorate.

Although the opposition has been targeting young voters, the recent nationwide university elections don’t bode well. According to Star newspaper, Pro-Aspirasi, a group widely perceived as pro-establishment and pro-government, “won big” in elections at eight out of 15 public universities on Sep. 25.

(END)

For half a century cardiovascular disease has been the largest killer in Western countries, but recently it has started to dominate the health statistics in the South as well. In India coronary heart disease is already the biggest killer, and strokes are about to rise to second place. Globally, cardiovascular disease now kills about 17 million people a year, and a growing number of people are having heart attacks or strokes as early as their 40s or 50s.

Risto Isomaki

This global pandemic has a number of complementary causes. People live longer, eat less healthy food, smoke more, and do less manual labour. More and more people are commuting to their jobs by metro, train, bus, or car instead of walking or cycling. The majority of the world’s population is breathing seriously polluted air from which small inhaled particles can move from lungs to other parts of the body, including the walls of our arteries where they become a part of the plaque built by bacteria. Reduced exposure to sunlight could also be a factor, because it reduces the amount of cholesterol that our skin will convert into to vitamin D.

However, the most important single reason for the global cardiovascular epidemic could be the growing use of unhealthy dietary oils and fats. The world currently consumes about 150 million tonnes of edible oils and fats per year. Of this, one-third is produced by a single species: the African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), a prolific source of vegetable oil.

Unfortunately, almost 50 percent of palm oil is palmitic acid, which is one of the unhealthiest fatty acids for the heart and veins. Coconut oil, which provides another five percent of our edible oil, is even less healthy. According to official predictions, world consumption of edible fats and oils will rise to 300 million tons by 2030.

Most of the new demand comes from Asia, where the current per capita consumption of edible oils is only 50 percent of the present average in North America and Europe. At the moment it looks as if the vast majority of this increase will come from palm oil. Huge areas of clear-cut rainforest areas have been converted to oil palm plantations in Malaysia, Indonesia, and a number of other countries. Indonesia already has nine million hectares planted with oil palms, and companies have applied for permission to expand this to 35 million hectares.

Environmentalists have been horrified by these developments. Without the oil palms many of the logged areas could regenerate and grow back into rainforest. More than two million hectares of oil palm plantations have been established on deep peat soils, which causes significant carbon dioxide emissions from the oxidizing peat.

Yet the most significant public health aspect of the situation has received much less attention. If humanity triples or quadruples its consumption of palm oil, our present cardiovascular pandemic will explode. This could overload public healthcare systems and leave them far less time and fewer resources for dealing with poor people’s diseases.

The world needs vast quantities of healthier food oils to prevent what could otherwise become the worst public health disaster in human history. The healthiest food oils contain very little saturated and a high percentage of monounsaturated fatty acids. Polyunsaturated fats are, of course, healthier than saturated fats, but they are less stable than monounsaturated fats.

Many plants produce oil which has a lot of monounsaturated and only a little saturated fat, but two of them are especially important: the olive and the avocado. Up to 80 percent of olive oil consists of monounsaturated fat, which helps to keep the levels of good cholesterol up and the levels of bad cholesterol down.

According to some studies olive oil might even reduce women’s risk of getting breast cancer by 45 percent. Unfortunately, the world currently produces only three million tonnes of olive oil. The average yield is only 200 or 300 kilograms per hectare per year, but this hides huge production differences between countries and even farms.

Olive cultivation requires relatively cold winter temperatures. Because of this, the avocado tree could, or should, become the leading food oil plant in the tropical and subtropical regions. It originally comes from Mexico and the Amazon region, but has a very wide range. For example, in India avocados have been grown successfully both in the north, in the Himalayan foothills, and in the south, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

We already know that avocados grow well in many parts of Africa. According to Chinese agricultural scientists, the tropical and subtropical parts of China and Vietnam also contain tens of millions of hectares of hilly land that would be eminently suitable for avocados. Avocado oil is exceptionally stable and resists high temperatures even better than olive oil. In countries where people often fry food in oil, avocado oil might be the healthiest option. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Risto Isomaki is an environmental activist and awarded Finnish writer whose novels have been translated into several languages.

Malaysian conservationists are urging a ban on the trade of endangered marine turtles’ eggs. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 14 2012 (IPS)

Age-old customs and traditions that allow licenced traders to collect and sell marine turtle eggs to locals and tourists alike are driving the creatures to extinction, Malaysian conservationists charge.

Citing the extinction of the leatherback and Olive Ridley sea turtles, which in the 1960s nested on beaches here by the thousands but today have all but disappeared, environmentalists have now called for a ban on the collection, sale and consumption of turtle eggs.

Others highlighted the precipitous decline in the number of nesting hawksbill turtles, a critically endangered species, and called attention to the disappearance of green sea turtles, in an effort to urge authorities to take strict action.

The authorities, meanwhile, are caught between determined traders and the widespread belief that turtle eggs cure asthma and promote male virility.

In Kuala Terengganu, the east coast capital of Terengganu state, popularly known as the country’s ‘turtle town’, traders are vehemently defending their livelihoods.

“There is a market for (the eggs), so we sell them. It is not illegal either except for leatherback turtle eggs,” said Abang Dok, who pays a mere five-ringgit (1.5-dollar) annual fee to collect and sell turtle eggs.

Traders have been selling turtle eggs for decades and argue that the eggs have not run out.

“As long as we eat only the eggs and not the turtle, the species will continue to come and nest…I see no reason why the turtle will not survive,” said Dok, who earns 25 ringgits (roughly 7.8 dollars) for every 10 turtle eggs sold.

When told that several species have become extinct and no longer nest on the beaches due to human activity, another trader calling himself Ismail Wok said that other species would soon “replace” the disappearing ones.

“It is a big ocean and the turtles come and go as they please…we should not be blamed if they don’t come anymore. Maybe they like other beaches,” he said.

“It is a question of our livelihood…our survival,” he said.

Though conservationists are fighting hard to educate local communities and tourists, the state government allows the practice under the pretext that livelihoods are at stake – but recent studies show otherwise.

A 2010 study of a village in Terengganu, which faces the South China Sea, conducted by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found that only a few villagers actually rely on the trade for their monthly income.

Roughly 200 villagers are licenced to collect eggs but some of these traders are inactive or have sold their licences to others.

“The question of livelihood is irrelevant because turtle eggs are also imported from elsewhere for sale in Terengganu,” Rahayu Zulkifli, head of the WWF’s Terengganu Turtle Conservation Programme, told IPS.

Still, illegal collection and sale of eggs is rampant. Collectors earn up to 200 ringgits a month but traders can earn as much as 2,000 ringgits monthly through sales to tourists.

Turtle conservationists and other concerned members of the public are up against the age-old belief that turtle eggs cure asthma despite the fact that numerous medical experts have refuted the claim.

Numerous people also believe that turtle eggs, if eaten twice daily, enhance male virility.

Zulkifli, who is working round the clock to save turtles from extinction, has urged tourists who visit Terengganu not to buy turtle eggs and respect the ban that locals are pushing for. She believes if there is no market for the eggs, then traders will be forced to stop collecting them.

Terengganu state, which ironically exploits the turtle population to attract international tourism, is also a football-crazy region, where football stars have a huge public impact. The WWF has successfully tapped into their popularity for the conservation effort.

“They (the footballers) are our partners…we have to create greater awareness among villagers, officials, state authorities and tourists,” Zulkifli said at the launch of the first ever World Sea Turtle Day celebration last week.

The campaign theme, ‘Telur penyu, beli jangan, makan pun tidak’ (‘Don’t buy or eat turtle eggs’) was promoted among the 1,000 attendees, who joined together with famous footballers to urge the public to respect and protect the turtle population by leaving the eggs alone.

While the leatherback and Olive Ridley species are nearly extinct, green turtles still nest on a 20-kilometre stretch of beach at Rantau Abang, averaging about 2,000-2,500 nests a year.

Weak legislation

Turtle species are also threatened by the destruction of their feeding and nesting grounds, turtle-snaring fishing gear, pollution and illegal trapping by foreign fishing vessels.

Other hurdles to conservation include inadequate national laws – currently turtle protection falls under the jurisdiction of the country’s 13 individual states, some of which have no laws concerning turtle conservation.

Turtles are excluded from the purview of the recently enhanced Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, while the 1985 Fisheries Act only protects turtles found more than three nautical miles offshore.

WWF Director, Dr. Dionysius Sharma, has been pressing for holistic federal legislation that would streamline all state legislation into one special law for turtle conservation.

“The current laws are not conservation-oriented,” he told IPS. “They don’t ban egg consumption but focus (solely) on licencing egg collection. There is little emphasis on habitat protection and penalties for offences are minimal.”

In most states, the fine for killing a turtle is a paltry 100 ringgits.

Sharma stressed that if turtles are to survive, their nesting habits and offspring must be protected and licenced trade must be banned immediately. The prevailing attitudes of authorities and many local actors have remained unchanged since colonial times – but with an endangered species at stake, they will be forced to seriously rethink their customs.

“As long as we eat the eggs, we’ll create an imbalance and cause the decline of the species. There will be no juveniles to grow into mothers,” Sharma warned.

(END)

Kunasekaran Krishnan (43) is a member of the Socialist Party of Malaysia (PSM) who hopes his newly released CD of 10 “revolutionary songs” will help convince voters to back the Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance) in the general election that is widely expected to be held this year.

“We have always known only one government, the Barisan Nasional (National Front). My CD of songs is an attempt to convince voters to see the Pakatan Rakyat as an alternative…give them a chance to rule,” he said.

“It is also an effective way to break the stranglehold the government has over mainstream media,” he told IPS. “The CD is cheap, enjoyable and an effective form of communication.”

As Malaysia prepares for a fiercely competitive election, the opposition, which is largely barred from mainstream media, is resorting to alternative methods to reach voters, from rallies to social media campaigns to the dissemination of hundreds of thousands of CDs that could influence wide swathes of the urban and rural populations.

Besides music, the CDs also contain rarely heard political speeches by leaders like Anwar Ibrahim, head of the People’s Alliance, who is daily lambasted in the mainstream media. His recent speech, promising free education up to tertiary levels in the event of a Pakatan Rakyat victory at the upcoming polls, was ignored by most major media until a truncated version of it surfaced several weeks later as the subject of government ridicule.

Targeting the youth

Pakatan Rakyat is offering voters the first viable political alternative in over 50 years. Many voters are intrigued by the possibility of a change in government, a dream they had hitherto written off as impossible.

The 2008 general election, in which the People’s Alliance came close to unseating the 13-party National Front, winning five states and denying the ruling coalition a two-thirds majority in parliament, was the best showing by the opposition since independence in 1957.

Five years later, an intense “return match” is on the cards, in the words of Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, that will decide which coalition is left standing.

“It is a life or death struggle for us (the National Front),” he told national television on Monday.

In addition to producing CDs, the Democratic Action Party (DAP), a member of the Pakatan Rakyat, has also posted video clips on YouTube with one overriding message – ‘ubah’, or ‘complete change’, which is the party’s theme song and central message for the general election.

The Malay and Mandarin CDs are targeted at young urban voters who tend to be anti-establishment in their political leanings.

“The songs in the CD bring a message of hope for a better tomorrow under a Pakatan Rakyat government,” DAP socialist youth chief, Anthony Loke, told IPS. “We are projecting a young image for our party to target the young voters.”

Pakatan Rakyat also utilises its own bi-monthly newsletter, ‘Harakah’, to carry it’s message to the younger generation.

Universiti Sains Malaysia academic Sivamurugan Pandian believes that 40 percent of the country’s 12.9 million registered voters are aged between 21 and 39 years.

“All political parties are actively wooing them. They (could) decide the outcome of the general election contest,” he told IPS, adding that the most tech savvy coalition will have an edge.

“They cross over questions of race, religion and ethnicity. They are the true ‘Bangsa Malaysia’ or Malaysians as opposed to native Malays, Chinese or Indians,” he said. “The future is in their hands.”

Both the opposition and the ruling coalition have deployed armies of ‘cyber troops’ against one another to post songs and political messages on YouTube and Facebook, turning the social media landscape into a veritable battleground.

Wooing voters with song

Kunasekaran, the mastermind of the revolutionary music, also said that songs are a powerful way to win the hearts and minds of Tamil working class voters.

Tamils in Malaysia are the descendents of indentured labourers brought by British colonials at the turn of the 19th century to clear jungles and plant and tend to rubber trees. The community now numbers about two million, a population that can make or break either of the political coalitions in about 50 of the 222 parliamentary constituencies in the country.

Both Prime Minister Najib Razak and opposition leader Ibrahim have been assiduously courting the community for months.

“In India songs are used to convince Tamil voters. Here in Malaysia, I try to emulate the Indian politicians,” Kunasekaran said, referring to the late M. G. Ramachandran, chief minister of Tamil Nadu state who made movies and Tamil songs to influence voters.

The government too has entered the battle for hearts and minds, producing its own CDs and hiring young and popular artistes to sing about its theme ‘continuity and progress’.

“Trust the National Front, we have delivered for 50 years,” the government CDs proclaim.

(END)

Despite a wave of reforms washing over the country, the Malaysian government-controlled media remains muzzled, mostly because ruling elites fear a free press will erode their iron grip on society.

All print, electronic and radio media are, in one form or another, controlled by the ruling National Front, which buttresses its hold with a repressive publication law that activists say should be repealed.

Online and social media and blogs, on the other hand, are thriving, as people reject mainstream news sources as biased mouthpieces of the regime.

As a result, the new government proposal to set up a Media Council, designed to monitor online and offline media and its practitioners, has run into stiff opposition.

There is deep suspicion that the proposed Council, over which the Attorney General has held several rounds of discussions with selected editors, would simply add another layer of control in an already heavily regulated industry, where the government is omnipresent and single-handedly directs the national news agenda.

“The proposed Media Council would only curtail media freedom further instead of liberating it,” said Masjaliza Hamzah, executive director of the Centre for Independent Journalism.

“As long as the PPPA (the Printing Presses and Publications Act) is not repealed, journalism here will not be free or independent,” she told a press forum here on Jun. 1

Prime Minister Najib Razak has proposed an amendment to the PPPA that will remove the Home Minister’s absolute authority to grant and withhold printing licenses, but only in return for the formation of the self-regulatory Media Council to oversee the industry.

Editors and leading journalist are wary of any such initiative coming from the government, which, they see as the primary threat to press freedom.

‘Cosmetic changes’

Though real social reforms have recently taken root – like the repeal of laws allowing for detention without trial, the arrest and jailing of political opponents and the banning of public protest – activists say only “cosmetic changes” to media laws have been introduced thus far.

The PPPA, first introduced to counter a communist insurgency, has, for years, required all newspapers and printing presses to obtain an annual publishing licence.

The law was revised in 1971, after the race riots of 1969, to ensure that ‘racial sensitivities’ would not be provoked by inflammatory reporting.

The government was handed sweeping powers to revoke licences of newspapers that were seen to be aggravating national sensitivities or publishing material considered ‘detrimental to national development goals’.

The Act was amended in 1984 to grant more power to the government to seize or revoke printing press or publication licences at will.

In its current form today, the law gives the Home Minister absolute authority to grant and refuse licences. The amended Act not only regulates the press and local publications, but also books, pamphlets and the import of publications from abroad.

The possible reasons for a ban are extensive but vaguely defined, covering any publication going against so-called ‘national interests’.

Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) professor Ahmad Murad Merican said a Media Council to regulate the industry is a good idea, but it should not have been initiated by the government.

“It is best if the idea comes from the press fraternity and not the government,” said Ahmad Murad, a senior lecturer in communications.

It should be established as a statutory body through a Private Members Bill and funded by Parliament; furthermore the PPPA should be repealed, he said.

He added such a council should be led by a retired judge and should consist of eminent members of society who are also independent of the authorities.

The idea for the Media Council was first mooted in the 1970s but had always been rejected by industry players who saw it as a government initiative to further choke press freedom.

Opposition

Malaysiakini, a successful online news website with a large following, has already opened a court case to force the government to issue a publishing licence for a newspaper that it intends to publish.

Members of the political opposition and the election monitoring group Bersih also want equal access to media in the run-up to general elections, that many expect to take place at the end of the year.

In a last desperate attempt to expose the extent of government suppression of the media here, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim pointed out that even the repressive regime in Myanmar allowed democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi equal access to address the country on national television.

“Why not in Malaysia?” he asked. “We less claim we are less repressive but we don’t allow equal access,” he said.

Gobind Rudra, a correspondent with the news website Free Malaysia Today, declared on May 29 that the embryonic idea for the Media Council is actually a government plan to restrict press freedom.

“A new regime of media control is taking shape and journalists are being co-opted into this process by being part of the government’s consultations…on how to control, whom to control, and (whom) to punish,” he said.

(END)

Foreign workers, mostly from Indonesia, now make up just over 10 percent of Malaysia’s workforce of 14 million people, both in the formal and informal sectors, according to the latest government statistics.

A recent series of incidents has highlighted the shocking conditions in which these labourers toil and exposed the lengths to which the Malaysian government will go to keep the press quiet on the plight of immigrants in the country.

Prominent human rights activist and long-time champion of exploited foreign workers, Irene Fernandez, has come under severe attacks from government ministers and employers for an interview she gave a Jakarta newspaper in which she condemned poor governance and alleged that migrant workers felt “unsafe” in Malaysia.

In the Apr. 30 interview Fernandez, president of Tenaganita (Women’s Force) and winner of the Right Livelihood Award in 2005, said that apart from low wages and rampant exploitation, migrant workers were also subjected to unfair labour practices and often stopped and harassed by uniformed personnel, in a country that has no legal framework to protect, regulate or ensure the safety of immigrants.

Immigrants’ housing, wages and welfare were left to market forces, she told the English-language ‘Jakarta Post’, causing a chaotic situation that enabled rampant exploitation of vulnerable workers.

The interview came on the heels of rising anger in Indonesia against the reports of exploitation of its nationals in Malaysia.

The wave of immigration, which began in Malaysia in the 1990s, coincided with a construction and commodities boom that saw vast swathes of the jungle-cloaked country transformed into oil palm plantations.

As countless skyscrapers popped up and rapid urbanisation made the construction sector hungry for cheap labour, Indonesians were lured into the country en masse, quickly growing to be the biggest group of foreign workers, numbering nearly two million last year.

Others – Indians, Bangladeshis, Nepalese, Vietnamese and Africans – followed to work on plantations and in the construction, manufacturing and service sectors whose rapid expansion left the top 10 percent of Malaysia’s 28 million people, along with foreign investors, extremely wealthy.

The middle class also expanded but the bottom 60 percent of the country suffered, competing ferociously for the manufacturing sector’s four million jobs.

According to the Malaysian Investment and Development Authority (MIDA), a government agency, from 2011 the government expanded foreign employment to include 11 sub-sectors such as restaurant jobs, cleaning services, cargo handling, launderette services, golf club caddies, barbers and so forth.

As high demand pushed wages down, the ‘3-D’ jobs – dirty, dangerous and demeaning employment that most Malaysians no longer want to do – became almost exclusively associated with Indonesian immigrants.

‘Sedition’

To counter Fernandez’s allegations now circling around Jakarta, the mainstream media here is running daily stories of happily employed Indonesian workers with no complaints about the system.

The interview is seen as a “betrayal of Malaysia” by Fernandez and has sparked vociferous calls for action against her.

She has been accused of everything from unpatriotic behaviour to being a traitor and has been held responsible for spoiling an otherwise “excellent” relationship between the two countries.

Under pressure from the government, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission and the police announced this week that Fernandez is being investigated for ‘sedition’, a catch-all law that many civil rights activists have described as “archaic” and used against human rights defenders.

Fernandez, who for the last two decades has been virtually the lone voice in the country decrying the plight of foreign workers, said she is unfazed by the attacks.

“I will not be cowed. I will continue to speak up for voiceless migrants and the oppressed poor people of Malaysia,” she told IPS.

“I have no regrets. I want to highlight the sorry plight of thousands of migrant workers,” she said, adding that she stands by everything she said in the ‘Jakarta Post’ interview.

This is Fernandez’s second run-in with the law.

Back in 1996 she was charged with publishing false news to all the foreign missions in the capital about the deplorable living and working conditions of immigrants in detention centres.

After a marathon trial that lasted 13 years the court acquitted her.

She was given the Right Livelihood Award for her “outstanding and courageous work to stop violence against women and abuses of migrant and poor workers.”

Fernandez has a long history of activism – she organised the first textile workers union, was instrumental in setting up trade unions in the country’s free trade zones and focused on development of women leaders in the labour movement.

Tenaganita aims to secure the rights of foreign workers who, according to a government census in December 2011, number nearly 3 million, documented and undocumented.

The hysterical reaction against Fernandez for speaking the truth is typical of the government, said Arulchelvam Subramaniam, the secretary-general of the Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM).

“The country has a first world infrastructure and a booming economy but remains immature intellectually,” he explained.

“At a signal, everybody jumped on the bandwagon and lashed out at her (Fernandez) including the mainstream media”, in the process forgetting the real issues involved such as the exploitation of workers, low wages and corruption in the legal system.

According to Subramaniam Sathasivam, the Human Resources minister, all labour laws are equally applicable to locals as well as foreign workers.

“We are fair in that,” he told IPS.

But the laws are weak and easily surmounted by employers, while law enforcement and persecution of offenders is weak and ineffective. Some laws look good on paper but are impractical to implement.

While seeking to deflect criticism on its handling of foreign workers, the government is now toying with a Foreign Workers Act, which will regulate immigrants’ working and living conditions.

(END)

The United States has simultaneously some of the highest quality and most troubled educational systems in the world. The dichotomy is inspiring countries like Malaysia to learn from examples in the United States in order to help them figure out how to turn the worst into the best.

Although half a world away, Malaysia’s education system faces many of the same challenges as the system in the United States does, such as extremely high student drop-out rates, especially among students from poor families, says Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY).

“We know that graduates have double the incomes, have healthier children, and are better citizens than drop-outs,” says Zimpher, who pioneered the “cradle to career” approach of the Strive public-private collaborative in Cincinnati, Ohio, which boosted public school test scores and college enrolment by more than 10 percent.

The Strive Partnership brings leaders from across different sectors to help ensure that children are successful in school, enroll in and graduate from some form of postsecondary education, and enter a career, among other goals, according to the program’s website.

Graduates are the primary drivers of successful economies, Zimpher says.

Since one of Malaysia’s goals is to become a middle-income country by 2020, with a knowledge-based economy, education is a key to achieving this ambitious goal, A. H. Zakri, science advisor to the Malaysian prime minister, tells IPS. “Student drop-out rates are high, especially in poor rural areas,” he adds.

The high school graduation rate in the United States is 18th among the top 24 industrialised nations, and more than one million secondary school students drop out every year. Fixing the long-broken public education system has seemed impossible.

Yet the Strive model has been successful because it gets commitment from important actors in different sectors to work on a common agenda for solving a specific social problem, according to a recent paper in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Malaysia, like the United States, has too many poorly paid, under-qualified teachers and underfunded public schools. Nor is education highly valued in many regions, Zakri says. While Malaysia is prepared to invest heavily in education – university fees are already partially subsidized – it wants everyone to be involved in the process.

What Zakri particularly likes about the the Strive initiative is that it brings together families, community, business, teachers and officials to help children do well in school. “It’s a collective approach to education that makes education everyone’s business.”

Strategic buy-in from hundreds of partners at all levels throughout the community is essential, says Zimpher. A reliable or continuous collaboration between pre-kindergarten, kindergarten to Grade 12, higher education, and the transition into the workforce is also crucial.

“Kids may do well in pre-school, for example, but unless that pre-school is working with the local school district to align expectations, most of them won’t be ready for kindergarten,” she explains.

The lack of collaboration between pre-kindergarten, kindergarten to Grade 12, higher education are the primary causes of “leaks in the education pipeline” – youths leaving the educational system before completion.

The Strive approach is being deployed in 27 states and the District of Columbia in the United States. Malaysia will be the first country to apply it at a national level.

Pilot Strive programs will be set up across Malaysia, aimed at helping the transformation of Malaysia’s economy, with greater human capital in science, technology and innovation, said Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak in a statement.

“This initiative will also address the lack of student interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics due to poor teaching of the subject matter…a lack of priority given to the subjects by schools….and unattractive prospects for science-qualified graduates,” Razak said.

Since Malaysia and New York state face similar problems, they will share experiences through an alliance with the State University of New York and its Cradle to Career program and the New York Academy of Sciences STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Education Initiative.

Zakri acknowledges the U.S. education system is in trouble but adds that it is “trying to get (its) act together”. But as for which systems and programs are most successful, however, for both Malaysia and the United States, only time will tell.

(END)

Malaysians protesting against an Australian-owned rare earth refinery, that will generate radioactive waste,  are determined to agitate until the project is abandoned.

“It is time to shut down the Lynas plant,”  said Wong Tack chairman of the Himpunan Hijau (Green Gathering Malay) or HHC  that is leading a mass movement against the controversial refinery.

On Feb. 26, the HHC organised its biggest ever mass protest in this coastal town, capital of Pahang state, attracting 15,000 ordinary Malaysians as well as  prominent public figures, including Anwar Ibrahim, leader of the opposition Pakatan Rayat coalition.

Wong Tack told IPS that if the government “continues to dither” the HHC would organise an even bigger protest at Gebeng, site of the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP). The HHC proved its strength in October 2011 when it organised a 2,000-strong rally at the Taman Gelora beach.

According to Wong Tack, Malaysia is seeing a “green revolt” as people truly feared that the plant will produce radioactive thorium waste that would seriously harm the environment and endanger people’s health.

Ibrahim told the gathering in Gebeng that his opposition alliance plans to seek an emergency motion in Parliament to urge the cancellation of the  project. “We won’t sacrifice our culture and the safety of the children.”

Rare earth minerals, used in the electronics industry, find their way into anything from laptops and mobile phones to missiles. Their prices shot up after China, the world’s biggest producer, restricted exports last year.

But processing the rare earth ores mined in Australia will result in the concentration of radioactive elements such as thorium and uranium, which if not properly disposed can prove hazardous to environment and health.

Dr Michael Jeyakumar, a legislator belong to Parti Sosialis Malaysia, a small opposition party Malaysia was already suffering from the dangers of indiscriminate dumping of industrial waste as a result of uncontrolled and rampant industrialism.

“The people have given notice they will be not a dumping ground for radioactive waste by this Australian company,” he told IPS.  “This Lynas project is going to lay waste our land and our health and the health of future generations for mere profit,” he said.

“The government has to listen to the protesters…there is no way the government can justify this act of madness,” he said.

The LAMP plant is due for completion in June and start shipping in ore from the Port Weld mine, in Australia. LAMP hopes to break China’s near  monopoly on world’s supply of rare earth metals.

Once production starts LAMP  stands to generate profits in excess of three billion dollars a year because of the demand for rare earth metals. LAMP has already having signed agreements to supply Japanese firms.

Lynas, which is listed in the Australian stock exchange, saw its stock prices tumble when protestors filed for court action in the Kuantan High Court against government for giving LAMP a temporary operating licence.

Prime Minister Najib Razak, reacting to the Gebeng protests, said the LAMP plant is harmless and that the project is subject to review by a government panel.

Razak said the government was looking for an “isolated region” in the country to store the radioactive waste, thereby admitting that there was a problem.

Thorium, which is radioactive, is already being used to power experimental nuclear reactors in India, where it occurs naturally and in abundance.

Friends of The Earth president S. M. Mohamed Idris said Lynas chose Malaysia to site its plant is because of lax radioactive control laws and the distribution of responsibility among four different ministries and an atomic energy regulatory agency.

“Our Atomic Energy Licensing Board (AELB) is in no position to handle the Gebeng plant, its mechanics and the technology involved as also the waste produced,” he told IPS.

In June last year the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) undertook  a safety study of the Gebeng plant and recommended numerous measures for Lynas to take including the submission of plans for a permanent disposal facility for the radioactive waste.

While Lynas is yet to follow several of the IAEA recommendations it has managed to obtain a temporary operating licence from AELB and has been given a generous 18 months from start of operations – expected in  June – to come up with disposal plans.

The current plan is to contain the waste in special drums that are to be placed in trenches, at the Gebeng plant.

For many Malaysians the plan brings back memories of the Japanese  Mitsubishi-owned Asian Rare Earth plant in the 1980s that was closed down following  spirited public protest.

The Mitsubishi rare-earth plant was ordered shut, after an increase in birth-defects and leukaemia cases in children of former workers. The radioactive waste, contained in drums had to be dug up and interred in a hilltop site.

Member of parliament for Kuantan, Fuziah Salleh, told IPS that the public is strongly opposed to the LAMP plant out of fear of radioactive poisoning.

“After the Fukushima disaster, last year, they fear damage to their health from radioactive waste,” she said. “Even if the radioactive waste is shifted to a remote, unpopulated site it will remain dangerous for many years. Why bring it here in the first place?”

(END/IPS/AP/IP/IF/EN/HE/CS/CU/NU/AW/CR/HD/BK/RDR/12)

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 26 (IPS) – A plan by the Malaysian government to privatise its public healthcare system and get consumers to pay for it through salary cuts is rapidly turning into a major election issue.

Whistleblower doctors let the cat out of the bag this month by sharing details of ‘Icare’ that the government had shared with doctors and select stakeholders.

Currently, the government pays Malaysian ringitt 34 billion (11.2 billion dollars) annually for a healthcare scheme that it wants to pass on to consumers under ‘Health Care Financing’ that the public and conscientious doctors are opposing.

These doctors are fundamentally opposed to any scheme that requires citizens to pay a part of their earnings – in this case 10 percent of net monthly wages – if the cost of health financing is passed on to consumers.

The existing system, which consists of a network of government hospitals and clinics and caregivers throughout the country, provides cheap, affordable and effective healthcare.

“Why fix something that is working reasonably well,” said Dr. Ng Swee Choon, deputy president of the Private Medical Practitioners Association, a group of doctors opposed to Icare.

“Malaysia has excellent healthcare coverage as nearly 90 percent of the people stay within a five km distance from a government-run clinic or hospital,” he said.

Ng told a Feb. 18 forum that the World Health Organisation (WHO) had acknowledged in its annual report of 2007 that Malaysia had an effective and efficient healthcare system and had rated the service “excellent”.

Currently, 4.7 percent of the GDP is set aside for healthcare, way below the WHO recommendation of eight or nine percent.

“It’s more important to increase the bill of healthcare as a percentage of GDP than to go and change the system,” said another activist doctor T. Jayabalan.

The government is moving away from providing nearly free healthcare to a financing scheme that will be paid for by all citizens, he said.

 The government, however, says healthcare is getting more expensive by the day and believes that a better option is one that is financed by citizens.

“Everybody is entitled to equal healthcare…there won’t be a private or government distinction,” said health minister Liow Tiong Lai of a scheme in which people contribute monthly in return for getting best medical care available.

Currently, those who can afford it patronise the expensive, well-equipped private hospitals that have sprung up all over the country while others make do with crowded government hospitals that are under-equipped and under-staffed.

 Icare is expected to pool resources under the National Health Corporation (NHC) that will foot the medical bills, assign the sick to a doctor and regulate treatment according to a fixed schedule.

Many people are not confident about giving a part of their wages to a government-managed NHC and fear it will be mismanaged and overtaken by cronyism and nepotism, like other public sector outfits.

 “We fear pilferage and that other forms of corruption would overtake the scheme,” said Dr. Michael Jeyakumar, a lawmaker from the small Parti Sosialist Malaysia.

“Right now the government is simply telling the people to wait quietly for them to tell what is best for them,” he said. “This type of top-down policy does not work anymore,” he said.

Health minister Liow came forward last week to say the opposition is spreading “false” details to confuse the public about Icare.

He said the assertion that 10 percent of salary would be mandatory to finance Icare is false. “I myself will oppose the scheme if that is the case,” Liow told The Star daily on Feb. 19.

But neither the health ministry nor Prime Minister Najib Razak have accepted a challenge from the opposition to release all the details.

The government has asked Malaysians not to speculate about Icare and reserve judgment for when the system has been given a chance to develop.

The opposition Pakatan Rakyat has urged the people to vote out the ruling Barisan Nasional or National Front. “The Front cannot be trusted with the people’s money,” said Jeyakumar.

The opposition has rejected Icare as exploitative and is using the issue as campaign fodder for elections that are due by April 2013.

A top-down planning system is the hallmark of the National Front which has ruled the country since independence in 1957 and is dominated by the powerful United Malay National Organisation party.

Moves to privatise state-run public healthcare can damage the National Front which has projected itself as the protector of the socio-economic interests of its main constituency, the rural Malays.

Voters rejected the Barisan Nasional’s hold on power in the 2008 general election when nearly 49 percent abandoned the Front in favour of the incipient Pakatan Rakyat opposition coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister in the Front government.

The Pakatan Rakyat and the National Front are nearly equally matched for a return match in their contest for state power in a general election that is widely expected to be called mid-year.

“Many members of the public are unaware of the implications of the scheme,” opposition legislator Charles Santiago told IPS.

“The federal government argues that Icare will make healthcare more affordable and its delivery more efficient to the public,” said Santiago.

“But they are actually privatising our healthcare services through a social health insurance scheme that will only further burden the people, especially the poor,” said Santiago who has started an awareness campaign in his constituency of Klang, 30 km west of the capital.

Credit:Marwaan Macan-Markar/IPS

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Feb 24 2012 (IPS)

Malaysia’s charismatic opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is tapping the spirit of the Arab Spring to end the 55-year unbroken rule of the United Malay National Organsiation (UMNO) and its allies in the Southeast Asian nation.

“Malaysia cannot be isolated from what is happening throughout the world, particularly the Muslim world,” said the 64-year-old head of the Parti Kedilan Rakyat (PKR), or People’s Justice Party. “For us in Malaysia these are very reassuring signs: this trend towards democracy, freedom and more accountability in the Arab world.”

His ongoing campaign for more freedom will be tested in Malaysia’s provincial and national legislatures, where the PKR made history in the 2008 polls, winning five state governments out of 13, and 82 seats out of 222 in the national parliament.

But Anwar admitted during an interview in the Thai capital that he faces a formidable challenge, given how UMNO where he was once a rising star has persecuted him since he was fired as the country’s deputy prime minister in 1998 on charges of corruption and sodomy.

He was freed after six years in jail after a court overturned the charges. But fresh allegations were made in 2008 that he had sodomised a former male aide, another case that was overturned by a court in January this year.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

Q: Has your January court victory boosted your political fortunes?

A: It does not make a difference among my supporters because they know the case was based on trumped up charges. But it does make a difference for those who are non-committal or ruling party supporters. They received a daily barrage of news from the media during the case that Anwar is guilty and the judiciary is independent.

Q: Would you prefer a general election early this year? Or when the current parliament’s term runs out in March 2013?

A: It is very likely the elections will be held this year. The massive campaign now by the government suggests that they may go for an election in late March or any time in June. So, we have to be prepared because elections in Malaysia are a mockery of the democratic system. The media is controlled and the campaign period is only seven to eight days – the shortest in the world.

Q: You have emerged as a symbol of a new Malaysia after decades of corrupt and authoritarian rule by the governing coalition. Do voters have a reason for optimism?

A: Although I am not that young (laughs) …, our policies are clear for Malaysia to mature as a democracy. What the Arab Spring people are talking about and the Occupy Wall Street movement is talking about in terms of justice and being opposed to unbridled capitalism that caters only to the very rich and the very few are what we have been articulating.

Q: Does that mean a break from the state-driven capitalism of UMNO?

A: Our economic agenda seeks to offer an alternative to this policy, which I consider obsolete. It only benefitted the rich families, members of the ruling clique and their cronies through contracts and shares. They became billionaires by using the Malay privileges. And they continue to defend this system tooth and nail because of their personal interest.

Q: UMNO’s other defining feature has been its race-based politics. But you head a coalition drawing on many ethnic groups. Is Malaysia ready for your politics seeking to transcend these deep divisions, particularly the Malay majority?

A: It is challenging. I don’t deny the fact that it will be difficult. I have been accused by the governing party of trying to sell the country to the Chinese, or under us the country will be Christianised, and if I attend Hindu functions it has also become an issue. So, they are using these racist lines to attack me.

To be discriminated because of race is something unthinkable and unacceptable in this day and age. I believe the majority of Malaysians can be convinced to accept this view.

Q: What about sodomy?

A: I have said that the law on sodomy is a crime. That does not mean I am pro-gay marriage. As a Muslim I and even the majority of non-Muslims in Malaysia believe in the sanctity of marriage.

Q: You are not the only opposition figure in Southeast Asia who has been harassed by their respective governments. Burma has Aung San Suu Kyi, Cambodia has Sam Rainsy and Singapore has Chee Soon Juan. Why do they fear a vibrant opposition?

A: We have been late in the process of understanding that our countries must mature as a democracy, to respect democratic institutions, respect the right to dissent and the right to freedom. The Arab Spring has been particularly useful for us in the Muslim world in this regard. It has had an impact about the meaning of democracy.

Q: So is it time to write a requiem for ‘Asian Values,’ which was asserted by strongmen like Singapore’s former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and your former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad to justify authoritarian rule for decades?

A: The notion of ‘Asian Values’ is obsolete. It was never relevant in the first place. It was not even Asian values as we talk about Islamic values. It was a perverted excuse to benefit those in power.

Q: But you were part of the system and benefited from it before you fell out with former premier Mahathir?

A: I cannot absolve myself. But in my speeches I did talk about the condescending view leaders had towards their citizens. Such views have no place in politics today.

(END)

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