Stop using our wood for Olympic stadium, Penans tell Japanese PM

KUCHING: The headman of the Penan community of Long Jaik here has appealed to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to stop Japan’s use of wood from a company that, he says, is destroying their forests and their livelihoods

Matu Tugang sent the appeal on the anniversary of the first Tokyo Olympics, according to a statement from the Bruno Manser Fund.

Japan is using tropical timber from Sarawak to construct its new national stadium for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.

According to the statement Tugang told Abe in the letter that as long as Japan continued to accept this wood, the company would continue “logging our forests and extracting logs daily”.

Tugang said the company had been “logging very aggressively in the area of our village”, and that its tractors, in extracting a log, simply “bulldoze everything around”.

He claimed the company had been “logging our ancestral forests without our permission or consent. They have never asked us for our opinion or needs”.

According to the statement, evidence gathered at the stadium construction site in Japan by NGOs in April 2017 confirmed the use of plywood supplied by the company.

The Penan community at Long Jaik has been fighting with blockades to protect its forests against the company’s logging and conversion of the area to oil palm plantations.

The community, the statement added, had an ongoing lawsuit against the company for violating their customary rights.

The Malaysian Human Rights Commission, or Suhakam, had investigated the community’s plight and made several recommendations to the government on helping the Penan.

Regarding the logging, Suhakam found there were inconsistencies in the EIA report for a forest plantation by the company concerned and recommended that the Natural Resources and Environmental Board, the agency in charge of approving the EIA report, verify and ascertain the accuracy of its findings. - FMT