EXISTENTIAL ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTION
Originally published in STORM 18/06/2022 with embedded references, graphics and bibliographies
Full script accessible here
https://monsoonsstorms.wordpress.com/2022/06/17/existential-ecological-extinction/
1. CLIENTEL CAPITALISM in collusion with STATE GOVERNMENTS
At the Parliament’s first session in 2022, the National Forestry Act 1984 was amended to make public consultations on any proposed forest degazetting exercise mandatory.
A] Yet an ecological existential threat has arisen because the Malaysian Islamic Party (Parti Islam Se-Malaysia) PAS-led Kelantan state government has allowed logging in the Nenggiri permanent forest reserve in Gua Musang without such prior public consultations.
It needs to be that many of the logged trees in the 292ha of special forest reserve, gazetted as virgin jungle under the National Forestry Act 1984, are the merbau species which are valued at RM4,000 per log. An estimate of such illegal logging activities would likely ensure RM7 million in profits to the pockets of clientel capitalism.
The Kelantan state government had, in fact, suspended a certification requirement that would have compelled logging companies to meet sustainable forest management standards since 2016, according to an eco-activist NGO: Sahabat Alam.
The environmental watchdog said the PAS led administration had put a stop to the ‘Malaysian Criteria and Indicators for Sustainable Forest Management’ (MC&I) indefinitely for six years now, a policy that casts serious doubts over its forest conservation pledge.
The MCI, a programme under the Malaysian Timber Certification System for six years, was introduced as a way to bind logging firms to sustainable practices by reserving licences for those that meet the certification standards.
“If the Kelantan government is genuinely committed to ensure all permanent forest reserves are managed under the Sustainable Forest Management (PHSB) and meeting the annual logging quota target, then why is the MC suspended by the Kelantan Forest Management Unit since 2016?” Meor Razak Meor Abdul Rahman, an activist with the group, asked.
“Was the certification by the Kelantan UPH suspended because they have transgressed the logging quota and raised monoculture farms in forest reserves that are supposed to practice selective management system (SMS)”
B] Not forgetting that Nenggiri is also facing the construction of a RM$5 billion hydroelectric power plant which the local Orang Asli villagers have protested for fear of losing their ancestral land.
The villagers are concerned the dam, slated to be developed at Mukim Ulu Nenggiri, would submerge four Orang Asli settlements as well as inundate 5,384ha of forest land.
Indeed, one hundred villagers had submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister’s Office amid their concerns, while Tenaga Nasional Berhad had vowed to address the issues raised.
C] Similarly, massive forest conversions are occurring in Pahang, peninsular Malaysia, second only to Kelantan in magnitude, raising the concurrent issue of the possible abuse of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process when Big Farms’ plantation companies are dividing the size of their projects to not exceed 500 hectares. This practice, by permitting monoculture plantation project between 100 and 500 hectares in size, the EIA process would be bypassed as it does not require mandatory public consultation, (malaysiakini, March 22 2022).
D] Then, there is the emerging issue of illegal gold mining activities in the Tersang Forest Reserve in Raub located in Ulu Renggol, at the heart of Pahang forest reserve. The Pahang Forestry Department director had not deny that an experienced gold mining syndicate likely behind the illegal activities.
E] A total of 1,547 lots of land in Kelantan needed for phase one of the East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) project have been acquired and gazetted under Section 8 of the Land Acquisition Act 1960, said energy and natural resources minister Takiyuddin Hassan, malaysiakini 17/06/2022.
He said the land acquisition in the districts of Kota Bharu, Machang, Bachok and Pasir Puteh were undertaken by the department of the director general of lands and mines (JKPTG) of Kelantan.
The expansive degradation of Malaysian natural resources is not a mere plot of deforestation, but a continuous extension of its neoliberalism economic expression to support capitalism in an alignment connecting to neo-imperialism monopoly-capital domination.
Neither is an attempt to avoid the EIA process a new matter. State and Federal governments have to be held responsible in failing to ensure that such manipulation does not take place. That it exists is because increasingly fewer hands (belonging to clientel capital for instance, and ethnocapital specifically with its dominance on economic affairs and activities – assuming entitled positions – that enforce political power to redefine economic dominance) that are incapable of balancing the needs of profit with the genuine needs of society as a whole; read STORM, PLACE POSITION POWER – A CLASS ANALYSIS OF ETHNOCAPITAL RELATIONSHIP, April 2021.
The whole spectre of development of underdevelopment can, therefore, be discerned in the relentless, and irreversible, Global North intrusion into our land to exploit, and disfigured, our pristine environment – whether it is the Lynas case, the gold mine in Pahang or copper mining in Sabah, and meanwhile, taking everyone for a ride along the Borneo Highway.
2. EXTENSIVE ECOLOGICAL EXPLOITATION
While we try to move forward to amend the forestry law to enforce mandatory consultations, at the same time, our existing consultation spaces are being circumvented through sheer capitalism encroachment,influence and manipulation.
The existing Ecological-Epidemiological-Economic crisis can be related to “the global ecological rift,” where the disruption and destabilization of the human relationship to nature on a planetary scale, emerging from the process of capital accumulation without end, (Foster, Clark, and York, The Ecological Rift, 14–15, 18). In The Return of Nature, Foster has explored how socialist analysts and materialist scientists of various disciplines, first in Britain, then the United States, from William Morris and Frederick Engels to Joseph Needham, Rachel Carson, and Stephen Jay Gould, sought to develop a dialectical naturalism, rooted in a critique of capitalism. In the process, Forster delivers a far-reaching and the fascinating exploration in reinterpretation of the radical and socialist origins of ecology.
This argument is reinforced by Japanese Marxist-author, Kohei Saito who has shown from researching on Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Volume IV/18, that the nature-human interaction and Marx pointed critique of the ecological harm produced by capital accumulation. This concept of ‘metabolic rift’ (Stoffwechsel) lies in the understanding on circulation of soil nutrients between countryside and town thereby contributing to human disharmonies from the natural world, (Kohei Saito).
It is in this context that Marx’s central concepts of the “universal metabolism of nature,” “social metabolism,” and the metabolic “rift” have come to define his critical-ecological worldview, (Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, London: Penguin, 1981), 949; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 30, 54–66).
The totality of ecological Marxism elsewhere: in China as explained by Zhihe Wang and expanded by Zhihe Wang, Huili He and Meijun Fan; and the extension to Iran with Persi interest in John Bellamy Foster’s The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet bears witness to a need in this country of that rising consciousness in preserving our Mother Earth.
3. EXISTENTIAL ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTION
Since implementation of the enthnocratically-administrative National Economic Policy in 1970, (Navaratnam 2020, Zainuddin 2019, Jomo 2005,) succeeding kleptocractic regimes had continued maintaining a clientel ethnocapitalism domain over the working class rakyat2 with 1% of the bumiputera population of about 40,000 ethnocapital families of the ruling class running and looting – and ruining – the national economy in alliance with Global North monopoly-capital.
In reality, Global North monopoly-capital investment in Global South is little more than a collaborating strategy for profiting on planetary destruction.
“Agribusinesses,” Rob Wallace writes, “are moving their companies into the Global South to take advantage of cheap labor and cheap land,” and “spreading their entire production line across the world.”
For instance, soy has become one of the world’s most important agroindustrial commodities – serving as the nexus for the production of food, animal feed, fuel and hundreds of industrial products – and South America has become its leading production region. However, the soy boom on this continent entangles transnational capital and commodity flows and disrupted social relations deeply in contested ecologies and economies, see The Journal of Peasant Studies Soy Production in South America: Globalization and New Agroindustrial Landscapes and John Wilkinson, The Globalization of Agribusiness and Developing World Food Systems, Monthly Review, Sep 01, 2009.
The outcome is that, for instance, prominent transnationals have had an important presence in the Brazilian agrifood industry since its birth; players that include: Nestlé, Unilever, Anderson Clayton, Corn Products Company, Dreyfus, and the Argentine transnational Bunge y Borne (now simply Bunge). They were later followed, as different markets matured, by Kraft, Nabisco, General Foods, and Cargill from the United States, and United Biscuits, Bongrain, Danone, Parmalat, and Carrefour from Europe.
The consequences are that uneven and often uncoordinated foray of metropolitan corporate capital is subjugating the agriculture and domestic food markets of many developing countries, particularly smaller, peripheral ones undergoing rapid urbanization, to the needs of global agribusiness monopoly-capital.
Indeed, it seems the Brazilian government remains firm in its objective of handing over indigenous lands, which make up 12% of Brazilian territory, to private hands, preferably agribusiness and mining. In other words: it is not enough to steal, it has to destroy. Since he took office, Jair Bolsonaro has accumulated a long history of attacks on indigenous peoples with the argument that they do not offer any benefit to society, so they have to be “integrated” to become workers. With that logic, the government dismantled the Funai (the body that should protect the indigenous people) and has turned a blind eye to all the attacks by grileiros (landowners thanks to false documents), jagunços (gunmen) and fazendeiros (landowners) on indigenous lands. The clandestine mining continues at full steam.
Similarly, in our country, for every far-sighted decision that has been made in previous years that can ensure the greater protection of forests, there had been contradictory direction leading to further forestry degradation and forest destruction.
In the past years, we witnessed, and many rakyat2 had experienced, floods, landslides, logjams and mudflows, in particular during monsoon seasons. From rural Kedah to rural Pahang, across urban parts of Selangor and the suburbans of Negeri Sembilan, these natural disasters have their roots in rampant deforestation and the failure in appropriate economic development planning. If state governments continue to allow forest conversions despite our international commitments on forests, biodiversity and climate change; and Big Farms elements of the plantation sector continue to disrespect the law and community rights, how can international climate funds be sufficient to protect us from future climate impacts – and the imminent existential ecological extinction in our tanah-ku?