Geographic Insights: Southeast Asia

After you read this chapter, you will be able to discuss the following geographic insights as they relate to the nine thematic concepts:

1. Climate Change, Food, and Water: Conversion of forests to oil palm plantations, rice farms, subsistence plots, and settlements all add to greenhouse gas emissions, which intensify climate change and leave many people vulnerable to both flooding and occasional droughts.

2. Globalization and Development: Globalization has brought spectacular economic successes and occasional, dramatic economic declines. Urban incomes soar during periods of growth, but the poor are vulnerable during periods of global economic decline.

3. Power and Politics: Militarism, corruption, and favoritism are recurring issues in Southeast Asia. Although modernization and prosperity have brought significant increases in democratic participation, there have also been reversals, especially during periods of economic downturn. These sometimes result in violence, often against ethnic minorities.

4. Population and Gender: Economic change has brought better job opportunities and increased status for women, who are then choosing to have fewer children. The improving role and status of women has increased awareness that sex trafficking is an abuse of human rights.

5. Urbanization, Food, and Development: The development of export-oriented modernized agriculture and agribusiness have forced farmers who were once able to produce enough food for their families to migrate to cities, where jobs that fit their skills are scarce, where they must purchase their food, and where the only affordable housing is in slums that lack essential services. Surplus skilled and semiskilled workers, especially women, often migrate abroad for employment.

GLOBAL PATTERNS, LOCAL LIVES

In December 2005, a group of indigenous people in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo (see the Figure 10.1 map), attended a public meeting wearing orangutan masks. They carried signs informing onlookers that, although the government protects natural areas for orangutan, it ignores the basic right of indigenous people to live on their own ancestral lands and practice their forest skills (Figure 10.2A).

FIGURE 10.2 Indigenous people in Sarawak, Borneo. 10.2a Courtesy Yvan Cohen/LightRocket/Getty Images, 10.2b Courtesy Mattias Klum/National Geographic/Getty Images

Over the years, Sarawak forest dwellers have tried many tactics to save their lands from deforestation by logging companies preparing to expand oil palm plantations (see Figure 10.2B). Palm oil is a major food and cosmetic export; it is sold primarily to Europe, North America, Japan, and China. In the mid-twentieth century, the Sarawak state government began licensing logging companies to cut down tropical forests occupied by indigenous peoples (Figure 10.3) and export the timber. By the 1980s, 90 percent of Sarawak’s lowland forests had been degraded and 30 percent had been clearcut, with much of the cleared area replaced by oil palm plantations. As a consequence, indigenous people found that even on uncleared land, their hunts declined. Meanwhile, streams and rivers became polluted with eroded sediment and by fertilizers and pesticides applied to the palm trees. However, virtually none of the profits from palm oil were returned to the communities affected by the conversion of forests to plantations.

FIGURE 10.3 Indigenous groups worldwide. There are about 5000 distinct indigenous groups in the world. On this map, each color represents one or more of these groups that are related by language, culture, or an affinity to a geographic location. Many of these peoples have participated in community mapping projects, similar to those of the Sarawak forest dwellers, in order to identify and protect their rights to their traditional lands. The symbols reflect some of the global issues that affect a particular group.

In the 1990s, a group of citizens in Berkeley, California, who were concerned about news reports of the deforestation in Sarawak, organized the Borneo Project. They offered to become a “sister city” to one indigenous group in Sarawak, the Uma Bawang, giving help wherever it was needed. With the help of the Borneo Project, the Uma Bawang began a community-based mapping project in 1995. Using rudimentary compass-and-tape techniques, they began mapping both the extent and the biological content of their forest home. Since then, indigenous people from across Sarawak have learned how to use global positioning systems (GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), and satellite imagery to make more sophisticated maps. The power of these maps was demonstrated in 2001, when they helped win a precedent-setting court case that protected indigenous lands from encroachment by oil palm plantation.

This favorable court ruling was challenged in 2005, when the government appealed, but in 2009, the Malaysian federal court ruled in favor of the Uma Bawang. The decision stated that native customary land rights had been protected since 1939, when British colonial officials had directed the district lands and survey departments to map the boundaries of native lands. Now indigenous people have the right to sue the government for past illegal leases to logging companies; as of 2011, some 203 such cases were in litigation. The outcome of this litigation is as yet unclear; in the Indonesian part of Borneo, deforestation for oil palm plantations is proceeding rapidly, as shown in the 2011 video, “Indigenous Community Witnesses End of Forest for Palm Oil,” at http://tinyurl.com/d5pmr49. [Source: The Borneo Wire. For detailed source information, see Text Credit pages.]

THINGS TO REMEMBER

• Indigenous land claims are no longer just local issues. Indigenous groups have shifted their efforts to secure their rights to ancestral lands to the global scale, highlighting a trend in which many issues that were once local or national are now becoming global concerns.