- Malaysian timber giant Samling has held logging concessions in the Bornean state of Sarawak since the 1970s, many of them overlapping with Indigenous customary lands.
- In a recently settled lawsuit, Samling described complaints against its operations in Sarawak as defamatory.
- Mongabay recently traveled to Sarawak to meet with Indigenous and local leaders, who said that while the company has recently made more efforts to meet with villages affected by logging, it’s not doing much to address their complaints and suggestions.
UPPER BARAM, Malaysia — When James Nyurang became headman of Tanjong Tepalit village in 2008, he learned from his predecessor — and father — of the terms set by timber giant Samling Group.
When the company began cutting trees and leveling roads in Tanjong Tepalit in the 1990s, the headman of this Kenyah Indigenous village along Sarawak’s Baram River signed a deal with Samling. They agreed that the company would pay a commission of 0.50 ringgit (10.5 U.S. cents) for every metric ton of timber extracted and transported out along the edges of newly built logging roads. Timber cleared from the wider areas that branched off these roads were excluded from the community’s compensation deal.
As Samling Group grew into an international timber conglomerate, Tanjong Tepalit modernized slowly alongside it, but Nyurang felt his community had been compelled into making that deal and should have received more for the dense forests and clean waters they lost three decades ago.
Nyurang says he was surprised to meet Samling again last year. Though he’s no longer a headman, he says the company sought him out to discuss complaints raised by residents of his and neighboring villages against one of the company’s concessions, the Gerenai Forest Management Unit, which abuts Nyurang’s village.
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