The politics of conservation in South East Asia first captured the World’s attention when the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad threatened to boycott the 1992 United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED) in Brazil because of what he saw as "abuse" of Third World Countries from First World environmentalists. This situation was reviewed by William Steiff in the November 1991 issue of ‘Monitor’ with an article entitled Deforesting Malaysia
The original article by Steiff may be viewed from here
This perceived affront seemed to focus on a book published the previous year by Philip Hurst entitled Rainforest Politics: Ecological Destruction in South-East Asia. Hurst presented six case studies of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and Burma. From personal experience of the area he set out the human and economic consequences of forest destruction. His analysis revealed that its causes are rooted in an exploitation of natural resources for western markets going back to colonial days. In addition, a range of other factors play a role including land hunger of small farmers deprived of their traditional farming lands, wrongly conceived development strategies and the pressures of foreign debt. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was received wisdom in the development agencies that the main pressure on tropical forests came from the poor. Many NGOs put a lot of effort into demonstrating the links between deforestation, landlessness and poverty and the processes of land and wealth concentration, which were in turn driven by macro-economic forces and global trade. They called for secure tenure for indigenous peoples and participatory agrarian reforms for peasants to address the linked problems of ecological injustice and deforestation.
Subsequent studies demonstrated that forest loss caused by logging was far more than had previously been thought. NGO case studies showed how the demands of the timber, and later paper and pulp, industries were heavily simplified and degraded both boreal and temperate forests. They also exposed the corruption in the timber industry, explored the political ecology of forest loss and drew attention to the activities of migratory loggers who have been expanding their operations out of South-East Asia and posed an increasingly serious threat to the world’s forests.
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