pulsipherconcepts3e

10.1 Chapter 10 SOUTHEAST ASIA

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chapter 10

SOUTHEAST ASIA▶

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GEOGRAPHIC INSIGHTS: SOUTHEAST ASIA

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

1.	Environment:	Many of Southeast Asia’s most critical environmental issues relate in some way to climate change. Deforestation is rapid in this region and is a major global source of greenhouse gas emissions, which intensify climate change. This region is also highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Increased flooding and droughts threaten food production on land and rising ocean temperatures strain aquatic ecosystems.
2.	Globalization and Development:	Globalization has brought both spectacular successes and occasional declines to the economies of Southeast Asia. Key to the economic development of this region are strategies that were pioneered earlier in East Asia: the formation of state-aided market economies combined with export-led economic development.
3.	Power and Politics:	There has been a general expansion of political freedoms throughout Southeast Asia in recent decades, but authoritarianism, corruption, and violence have at times reversed these gains.
4.	Urbanization:	While Southeast Asia as a whole is only 43 percent urban, its cities are growing rapidly as agricultural employment declines and urban industries expand. The largest Southeast Asian cities, which are receiving most of the new rural-to-urban migrants, rarely have sufficient housing, water, sanitation, or jobs for all their people.
5.	Population and Gender:	Population dynamics vary considerably in this region because of differences in economic development, government policies, prescribed gender roles, and religious and cultural practices. With regard to gender, economic change has brought better job opportunities and increased status for women, who then often choose to have fewer children. Some countries also have gender imbalances because of a cultural preference for male children.

The Southeast Asia Region

The region of Southeast Asia (shown in Figure 10.1) has attracted global attention for several decades because so many of its countries emerged poverty-stricken from World War II only to embark on a rapid journey to relative prosperity. There have been ups and downs: difficulties in finding smooth paths to stable democratic processes and institutions; urbanization at too rapid a pace; and a tendency to rely on development strategies that carry grave environmental and social side effects. Some of this region’s transitions are now emulated by other developing regions: rapid industrialization, expansion of the middle class, education for the masses, the empowerment of women, improvement of food security, public health care, and slower population growth.

Figure 10.1: Regional map of Southeast Asia.

The five thematic concepts in this book are explored as they arise in the discussion of regional issues, with interactions between two or more themes featured. Vignettes, like the one that follows about the rights of a group of people indigenous to the state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo, illustrate one or more of the themes as they are experienced in individual lives.

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.

Over the years, Sarawak forest dwellers have tried many tactics to save their lands from the deforestation that logging companies do in preparation for expanding the oil palm plantations (see Figure 10.2B). Palm oil is a major food and cosmetic oil 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 (see Figure 10.3) and export the timber. By the 1980s, ninety percent of Sarawak’s lowland forests had been degraded and 30 percent had been clear-cut. Much of the cleared area was replaced by oil palm plantations. As a consequence, indigenous people found that even on uncleared land, their hunts declined. Streams and rivers became polluted with eroded sediment and by the fertilizers and pesticides applied to palm trees. Virtually none of the profits from palm oil, though, were returned to the communities affected by the conversion of forests to plantations.

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 were used to help win a precedent-setting court case that protected indigenous lands from an encroaching 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, and as of 2011, some 203 such cases were in litigation. The outcome of this litigation is as yet unclear, and 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 Sources and Credits.]

This account of the tactics that indigenous groups are using to secure their rights to control and manage their ancestral lands mirrors the accounts of similar struggles in Middle and South America and highlights a number of themes in this book: the environment, globalization and development, and power and politics. In particular, it shows how issues that may seem to have only local significance can gain global attention. This connection of the local to the global presents both challenges and opportunities for the world’s indigenous people (Figure 10.3). On one hand, the global market provides the demand for timber and palm oil; on the other, it is support from groups like the Borneo Project that help communities such as the Uma Bawang have their land claims validated. In fact, the use of mapping to help indigenous groups secure their legal rights to ancestral lands has now become a global phenomenon. Hundreds of indigenous groups throughout the world are collaborating with mapping specialists, many of them geographers, often resulting in their land rights being formally recognized by governments for the first time. In 2007, the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs passed the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People and issued a report, State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, that documents several indigenous community mapping efforts.

Figure 10.3: Issues affecting 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.

[Sources consulted: “Struggling Cultures,” National Geographic Atlas of the World, 8th ed. (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2005), p. 15; “Globalization: Effects on Indigenous Peoples” map, in Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, eds., Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 2006)]

What Makes Southeast Asia a Region?

Southeast Asia is physically a manifestation of tectonic forces that are described in the “Physical Patterns” section. Aside from physical commonalities, the peninsula and island countries of Southeast Asia today share a deep cultural past, related to but separate from the cultures of southwestern China. With the exception of Thailand, they all also share more recent experiences with European colonialism. During and after World War II, most countries went through severe political turmoil followed by the rapid modernization and industrialization that continues into the present.

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Terms in This Chapter

The mainland Southeast Asian countries are Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore; the island countries are Indonesia, Brunei, Timor-Leste (East Timor), and the Philippines. Malaysia occupies part of the peninsula and parts of the island of Borneo (Figure 10.4).

Figure 10.4: Political map of Southeast Asia.

Many governments in Southeast Asia choose to dispense with place-names that originated in their colonial past. However, when the governments that make these changes lose respect in the international community by violating the human rights of their citizens, their chosen name may not be acknowledged. Such is the case with Burma (see Figure 10.4), where a military government seized control in a coup d’état in 1990, shortly after an election, and changed the country’s name to Myanmar. As discussed later in the chapter, the government of Burma is once again in transition; in press reports, both names are used. In this text, we use the country’s traditional name of Burma, not Myanmar.

Another potential point of confusion is Borneo, a large island that is shared by three countries. The part of the island known as Kalimantan is part of Indonesia; while Sarawak and Sabah on the north coast are part of Malaysia; and Brunei is a very small, independent, oil-rich country, also on the north coast.

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.

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