LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Martin Khor : Fighting to Save Rain Forests and the World Environment

Martin Khor’s unpretentious and calm demeanor belie his fearful message: “The Earth is in great danger” because of deforestation, global warming and government inaction in the face of such threats. Yet in urging the industrialized nations to change the production and consumption habits that endanger the global environment, he notes, “We all have a little Imelda Marcos in us. We all have our walking shoes, our Sunday shoes, our play shoes, and tennis shoes.”

At 39, Khor is director of the World Rainforest Movement, based in Penang, Malaysia, and Third World Network, a coalition of more than 200 non-governmental organizations. Recently, he was a primary speaker at the Other Economic Summit in Houston, where he eloquently spoke on the negative implications of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on the environment and the Third World.

Khor, a widely respected economist and environmentalist, was a representative and speaker at the EnviroSummit, which coincided with the summit of the seven leaders of the highly industrialized countries in Houston. The result of the meeting, attended by more than 150 international environmental groups, was a six-point plan of critical actions that world leaders must take if they are true to their environmental promises of last year in Paris. The proposals dealt with global warming, energy, ocean pollution, biodiversity protection and assistance for sustainable economic development in Third World countries.

In presenting the Third World perspective on trade, development and North-South relations, Khor, a Malaysian, eschews the “us against them” approach. Instead, he gently, but firmly, pushes for acceptance of a new standard: that “Third World peoples need to be represented because the decisions of the richer nations affect them tremendously.”

In Malaysia, Khor is research director of Consumers Assn. of Penang, a nonprofit organization that fights for the rights and interests of Malaysian consumers. He is also vice president of the Friends of the Earth, which, in 1988, was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (the “alternative Nobel Prize”) for its environmental work in Malaysia, especially its battle to save tropical forests, including the world’s oldest, in Sarawak.

Khor is married to anthropologist Evelyne Hong, who has lived with the Kayan tribe of Sarawak. They have a 10-year-old daughter. Although he harbors a desire to be a poet, Martin’s writing priority is to educate the rest of the world on the problems of the Malaysian rain forests.

Question: You have said that certain aspects of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, currently being negotiated in Geneva, are destructive to the Third World. What do you mean?

Answer: The Uruguay Round would like to restructure GATT to magnify its powers to include such services as banking, electronics, telecommunications and insurance . . . to become the enforcement agency for investments of companies worldwide . . . plus protector of the intellectual property rights of the transnational companies. If these proposals go through, and the industrial countries persuade the Third World countries to agree, what we are going to see is the transformation of GATT into a charter for transnational corporations . . . . What is happening at the GATT talks is that the industrial countries--representing the transnational companies’ viewpoint--are saying that we must remove the regulatory powers that governments now have over the transnational companies.

Q: Are you saying that the transnationals will be not be accountable to the countries they conduct business in?

A: Yes. The small man and the small woman, the small farmers, the small firms, the small countries, the small consumers, the environmentalists--they are being asked to sacrifice their interests at the altar of “free trade,” which actually means increasing the rights of the transnationals.

Q: The advocates of the GATT agreement say that it will allow freer trade among Third World countries and, in the long run, help Third World countries. Why do you disagree?

A: Of course, if trade is conducted in a fair manner, it will mutually benefit all partners. But when you have partners who are not equal--when you have one partner who is very strong and another who is very weak--then you apply the principles of free trade. A sports analogy would be to have Carl Lewis and a 3-year-old African child compete in a race . . . without giving a handicap to the African child. That might be free trade, but it is not fair trade. Fair trade would benefit both partners only if you had a Carl Lewis running against a Ben Johnson.

What needs to be recognized is that Third World countries, because of colonial rule and so on, have very weak domestic capacities--very weak local companies--that will not be able to compete on fair terms with the transnational companies. These Third World countries must thus get certain handicaps or privileges until such time that they are able to compete fairly on the world market.

Q: In what way would a liberalized GATT hamper environmental efforts within the Third World countries?

A: If a government wants to stop the export of the country’s very precious natural resources--tropical wood, for example--it might be accused of being against the principles of free trade. If a government would like to ban the import of toxic waste or of food considered dangerous because of excessive pesticides, it might be similarly accused. . . .

A few years ago, for example, Indonesia proposed to ban the export of rattan, an important tropical-forest product that is getting scarce. The U.S. and the European Community raised objections in GATT, saying Indonesia’s action was against GATT principles and free trade. . . . What is happening is that the transnationals are pushing governments to the wall and saying that (they) want “more flexibility” in order that “free trade” can be unhampered. . . . In reality, “flexibility” means more powers, more monopoly powers. . . . For free trade, they actually mean more freedom to operate as they want to. . . . So as the Cold War winds down . . . what we are going to see is an intensification of the competition among the multinational companies and the multinational companies with other sectors of society such as governments, legislatures, the public, the small firms and medium-size firms.

Q: You live in Malaysia, the home of the Sarawak rain forest. It is the oldest living rain forest, with the highest concentration of plant-specie varieties. What is happening to it?

A: I think Malaysia is the largest exporter of tropical woods in the world--about 70% of the world’s supply of raw logs.

We are currently facing a very severe deforestation problem. Every year, about 800,000 hectors of our forests are being depleted, the majority primary forests. So it is a very serious situation. We are looking at very serious ecological consequences--the tremendous loss of biodiversity, the pollution of the river systems, the erosion of the soil, the destruction of the forces of livelihood of half a million native people. It’s really an ecological--and economic--catastrophe that is now occurring.

Q: Why is the Malaysian government allowing such massive deforestation to take place?

A: It appears the federal government is unhappy with the Sarawak rate of deforestation, especially since most of the logs are exported raw, thus earning the country minimal income. It recently announced its intentions to ban raw-log exports from Sarawak and Sabah (another Malaysian state in Borneo). But, constitutionally, the Sarawak state government has jurisdiction over the forests, and it has resisted any logging slowdown. In fact, it has allowed logging to speed up despite native and environmental protests. Besides timber being a major state revenue earner and job generator, there are vested interests who obviously benefit from continued logging.

Q: So the issue of sovereignty is also important in the struggle against deforestation?

A: If we define sovereignty as the right of peoples to determine their own culture, their way of life, the way in which they would like to participate with and communicate with other people, these native peoples, many of whom are living in or near the forest areas, are finding that their way of life, their cultures, their livelihoods are being decimated . . . by people coming from the outside world and removing lands and forests that have been theirs for thousands of years. Most adversely affected are the 10,000 Penan people who live in the forests. Most of them are nomads or seminomads; they have been in the forefront of a very big battle to defend the forests by setting up barricades on the roads or the trails that lead into the forests. So far, their plight is worsened. (Their action) has not managed to stop logging in any significant way. But it has made the world aware of the problems, the human problems, as well as the ecological problems, of deforestation.

Q: What do you propose the world leaders do about the alarmingly fast rate of deforestation in Malaysia’s and other countries’ rain forests?

A: It is very important that all logging and all development activities in the remaining primary rain forests be stopped. In secondary rain forests and in the degraded rain forests, we could have reforestation programs. We could even have tree plantations, but they must be of tree species native to the areas so that they do not disrupt the environment. . . . This (should) be done as soon as possible; otherwise, the forests will be wiped out in maybe 20 years.

For this to become practical and real, two conditions have to be met. First, the developing countries need to recognize that the Third World countries are being asked to save the forests on behalf of all humanity and not only on behalf of themselves. For this to happen, the Third World countries--I think quite fairly and justly--are asking for some kind of compensation mechanism on the ground that the developed countries have already harvested or wiped out their own primary forests and, therefore, contributed to the greenhouse effect. . . .

So if we want the tropical countries to preserve their rain forests, there has to be some kind of mechanism through which the developed countries compensate the tropical countries for preserving their forests. Once this principle is accepted--as the principle of compensating or funding the Third World for transfer of technology on reducing chlorofluorcarbons in the CFC protocol--we can work out a formula of compensation.

The second condition is that the developing countries take pressure off the forests by giving more land to the landless farmers. One of the causes of deforestation is . . . the burning of the forests by poor settlers who have no land because of the very unequal distribution of land resources in their country. Some kind of redistribution of land or the provision of land to poor farmers through land reform or other means will . . . remove pressure from the forests and still give the poor a livelihood of agriculture--but not on lands that are now planted with forests.

In other words, we have to evolve principles for sustainable development. That we have development in the Third World that is ecologically viable and, at the same time, economically satisfies the basic needs of people. It is even more important to have sustainable development in the industrialized countries, where their system of production is now no longer viable--it is already obsolete.

In the context of the survival of Earth, you have to restructure your economy, your type of development and your consumption patterns so that the race for production and the race for consumption is very much reduced. This is the key to solving the problems of the greenhouse effect, and of all the other ecological problems like toxic waste and so on. At the same time, I think the world would be a happier place to live in.

Q: Are you saying that environmental issues are tied to the trade issues to be covered in the new GATT?

A: Trade and economy issues are very integrally linked to environment issues. If, for instance, we would like to save the rain forests along the lines proposed (above) . . . It would call for strong regulations on the part of governments. This is against the principles of the Uruguay Round and the new GATT talks, which calls for minimal government participation in economic decision-making. So we have to actually make a very important decision: Is the survival of Earth and the rights of the majority of people on this Earth important?

In which case we need strong action by government to control the bad activities that are destroying the rain forests and are causing all the other problems of climatic change and toxic waste, etc. Strong governmental action to regulate companies and people who have an impact on the economy and the environment is also needed. Now, this seems to be counter to what the GATT talks are aiming to do--to remove the powers of government to regulate economic activity.

We have come to a crossroads in these last 10 years of our century. Will the environmental movement and the consciousness that we have to save the Earth--and, therefore, the right of peoples and governments to take action--win? Or will the multinationals, which are asking for more and more powers to operate in an environment in which there are minimal regulations from governments, be the trend that succeeds? . . .

These two trends are contradictory. . . . Both are very strong. One is a public trend, and one is very important for the public to make up its mind about. And for our government and legislators to be aware of them and to play a balancing role so that the right choice is made.