#ISLAND IN SARAWAK LICENSE#

But as the year came to a close, the pressure on the company mounted.

It issued another a few weeks later, which was also ignored, at first. The Ministry of Environment finally issued a stop notice in August 2018. They tried to buy him off, he says, offering huge sums for a man with no job and a family to feed. He wrote letters too and met with company leaders. They were violating rules on operating close to tributaries too, and had offered one village only an empty water tank by way of compensation for the damage they had caused.Įquipped with this information, Manakako lodged appeals and applied for stop notices. In Honiara he wrote an article calling for Gallego to be investigated. The required local consultations, environmental impact reports, and site inspections all appeared to have been neglected.

#ISLAND IN SARAWAK LICENSE#

Gallego turned out to be operating under a license granted in 2015 for a neighboring area. By the end of the year, Gallego had withdrawn its machinery and its workers from Marasa.

Through sheer tenacity, their efforts over the next few months paid off and Gallego was finally issued with a stop work notice by the Ministry of Environment in August 2018. Desperate and afraid of the consequences, community members began a campaign and reached out to local activist Philip Manakako in a bid to help stop the logging and to investigate the firm. Īccording to National Geographic locals in Marasa became aware of Gallego Resources when it arrived on the scene in February 2018. Foreign companies, mostly Chinese and Malaysian, are now stripping trees at more than 19 times the sustainable rate, according to Global Witness, making Solomon Islands the second largest supplier of tropical logs to China. They knew this because it had already happened most of the way along the Guadalcanal coast-and across nearly every other part of the archipelago since logging began soon after independence from the UK in 1978. There would probably be a spike in alcoholism too, and with it, violence. Teenagers might take dangerous jobs and young women would be coerced into exploitative temporary marriages with foreign workers. And without the trees, they would have to eat imported rice and build their houses with lumber-yard wood bought with the tiny sums the logging firms paid communities for every exported shipment. The forests they relied on for food, water, and timber would be destroyed. The Marasans knew what would happen next. The rare strike against the company named Gallego Resources, which has been destroying vast swathes of land on the Solomons island of Guadalcanal, was highlighted by a major expose by the magazine National Geographic earlier this month. The article said that:Ī Malaysian logging company named Gallego Resources had begun carving great scores through the forest- its men felling the tall, grey-barked kwila and the akwa strung with fruit, then dragging them off the slopes for export, leaving nothing to stop the rains from taking the topsoil. Sarawak Report can reveal that two sons of Tiong Thai King, the current elected YB* for Dudong and the brother of RH founder Tiong Hiew King, are among the shareholders of a company that has been reported as being booted out of the Solomon Islands. If the Season is right, dive and snorkel at the Talang Talang Islands, hike at Gunung Gading National Park to see the world’s largest flower, the Rafflesia, visit watermelon farms galore and more.Once again the Tiong family of Rimbunan Hijau have been caught out illegally destroying remaining forests in the South Pacific. Surrounded by a peaceful, rich, natural environment, during your stay you can take leisurely walks on serene beaches, take a dip in nearby refreshing waterfalls, visit a Selakau longhouse, cycle through hills, padi fields and paper farms, sea kayak, or take a leisurely boat ride to experience island and coastal sight such as Teluk Melano and Tanjung Datu’ National Park. Once you’ve set foot on the resort, you’ll know it’s time to relax and put your worries behind. Opened in 2004, the resort is well known for its long stretch of clean sandy beach. Just one-and-a-half hours (120 km) drive from Kuching, Sematan Palm Beach Resort is the perfect destination for a short and adventurous holiday. Sematan is a small fishing village located at the far west tip of Sarawak Facing the South China Sea and a short distance from the Sarawak-Kalimantan (Indonesia) border.

Island in sarawak