Malaysia
Formerly Malaysia was characterized by rubber plantations and tin mines, and by lush tropical jungles inhabited by orangutans. In the production of rubber and tin, Malaysia is still in the running for first or second place in the world, but those lush tro
- PDF / 1,465,085 Bytes
- 7 Pages / 595 x 791 pts Page_size
- 65 Downloads / 202 Views
Japan Enviromental Council (ed.), The State of the Environment in Asia © Springer-Verlag Tokyo 2000
76
1. Introduction Fonnerly Malaysia was characterized by rubber plantations and tin mines, and by lush tropical jungles inhabited by orangutans. In the production of rubber and tin, Malaysia is still in the running for first or second place in the world, but those lush tropical forests have largely disappeared. Now the country is one of the world's major manufacturers of consumer electronics, and its economy has changed to the point where industrial goods account for most exports. People traveling certain roads from Penang Intemational Airport toward downtown Penang will see long lines of foreign-capital factories on both sides. This is the Bayan Lepas Industrial Park. Many are Japanese companies, but there are also many signs with Gennan and U.S. company names. Crossing Penang Bridge to the Malay Peninsula, ocean pollution becomes more evident as one approaches the peninsula. Nearby is Prai Industrial Park, one of Malaysia's largest, where the factories of Japanese corporations have a conspicuous presence. Since the latter half of the 1960s, Malaysia has brought in much foreign capital and established many export processing zones, thereby achieving fast industrialization, which in turn induced fast urbanization that has resulted in heavy traffic jams clogging the streets of Kuala Lumpur, one of Southeast Asia's most beautiful cities. And since about 1980 the excessive logging of tropical timber in eastern Malaysia has caused the loss of forests. This chapter will focus on a number of points in briefly examining how environmental damage in Malaysia began, how it changed in the subsequent process of development, how people began calling for environmental protection, how their demands were reflected in actual policy, and how government administration and legislation responded.
2. Environmental Damage from Colonial Times 2·1 Tin Mining and Water Pollution Although Portugal had first colonized part of Malaysia, it was in the latter half of the 19th century that colonization geared up when England made Penang Island into a free trade zone. England had noted the value of the highquality tin mines throughout Malaysia, and at the beginning of the 20th century put major effort into tin mine development. Much tin mining was pit mining that resulted in many open pit mines in tin-producing areas such as Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh. Mining waste turned to mud and polluted many rivers, and that was the outset of environmental damage in Malaysia.
2·2 Plantations and Deforestation Worse than tin mining in tenns of diminishing species diversity and forest cover was the creation of large-scale
plantations for rubber and other products. In response to rubber demand, which grew quickly with the advent of the 20th century, the English planted rubber tree plantations over much of the Malay Peninsula, increasing the mere 4,500 ha existing in 1903 to 810,000 ha in 1921. The ecosystem was devastated and natural forests disappeared. Rubber p
Data Loading...
