Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment in the Humid Tropics (1993) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Malaysia
Malaysia
Pages 440-482
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 440... ...
Rubber, oil palm, coconut, and cacao accounted for 83 percent of the area devoted to agriculture in 1988 (Ministry of Jeffrey R Vincent is an institute associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Yusuf Hadi is dean of Fakulti Perhutanan (Faculty of Forestry)
|
From page 441... ...
(4) What are the environmental impacts of conversion of natural forests to tree crop plantations?
|
From page 442... ...
A Mean annual rainfall in millimeters: <2,000, 2,00~2,500, 2,500-2,750, 2,75~3,000, 3,000~ 3,250, and >3,250.
|
From page 443... ...
The Economic Planning Unit (Malaysia)
|
From page 444... ...
projects the rate to remain at this level during 1988-2000 and to fall to 1.2 percent/year during 2000-2025. The urban population has been growing more rapidly than the rural population.
|
From page 445... ...
In 1988, total land per capita was 0.95 ha, agricultural land in use was 0.28 ha per capita, and forest area was 0.45 ha per capita (Ibu Pejabat Perhutanan, Semenanjung Malaysia, 1990; Ministry of Agriculture [Malaysia]
|
From page 446... ...
The export value of rubber and oil palm products alone totaled M$10.4 billion, more than the value of total imports of food and agricultural products. The export value of forestry and wood products totaled M$7.5 billion in 1988.
|
From page 447... ...
Kuala Lumpur: Ministry of Agriculture; Ministry of Primary Industries (Malaysia)
|
From page 448... ...
Most of the increase had occurred by 1981, and most was due to the expansion of tree crop plantations. The four major tree crops rubber, oil palm, coconut, and cacao—covered 16 percent of the peninsula's land area in 1966 and 26 percent in 1988.
|
From page 449... ...
One might speculate that some of these areas were affected by shifting cultivation. If so, this could help explain why the forest inventories reported larger areas as being affected by shifting cultivation (see Table 4)
|
From page 450... ...
reported that 282 of the 370 bird species that make heavy or exclusive use of forests or the forest fringe are associated with lowland dipterocarp forests. He cited studies, carried out at the Pasoh Forest Reserve in the state of Negeri Sembilan and at the Kerau Game Reserve in the state of Pahang, that recorded 196 and 202 bird species, respectively, in areas of 2 km2 each.
|
From page 451... ...
The information they provide, however, is substantially less detailed and probably less accurate than the information generated by forest inventories carried out specifically to estimate forest areas and timber stocks. The most recent forest inventory in Peninsular Malaysia, Forest Inventory II, was carried out during 1981-1982 (Ibu Pejabat Perhutanan, Semenanjung Malaysia, 1987~.
|
From page 452... ...
5. Rome, Italy: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and United Nations Development Program; Ibu Pejabat Perhutanan, Sememanjung Malaysia (Forest Department Headquarters, Peninsular Malaysia)
|
From page 453... ...
in superior, good, and moderate virgin forests was in trees classified as noncommercial species (Ibu Pejabat Perhutanan, Semenanjung Malaysia, 1987~. Moreover, the minimum commercial log diameter is as low as 27 cm in Peninsular Malaysia today.
|
From page 454... ...
l991b. Land use and biomass changes
|
From page 455... ...
~ as__ \ ~~q ' ^ `~¢ ~ ; %. of forests in Peninsular Malaysia, 1972-1982: Use of GIS analysis.
|
From page 456... ...
Between inventories, the Forestry Department of Malaysia estimates total forest area by using annual records on areas logged and cleared for development. The most recent estimate is for 1988, 6.288 million ha (Ibu Pejabat Perhutanan, Semenanjung Malaysia, 1990~.
|
From page 457... ...
Assuming a timber growth rate of 1.0 to 1.5 m3/ha/year, the annual sustained yield from Peninsular Malaysia's productive PFE is in the range of 2.85 million to 4.28 million m3. In contrast, the harvest in 1990 was 10.6 million m3 (Ibu Pejabat Perhutanan, Semenanjung Malaysia, 1990~.
|
From page 458... ...
They also made available to land developers huge profits when forests were clearfelled in preparation for conversion to agriculture and other uses. TREE CROPS VERSUS NATU - L FORESTS Expansion of tree crop plantations has been the major cause of deforestation in Peninsular Malaysia (Table 5 and Figure 3~.
|
From page 459... ...
Are Tree Crop Plantations a Sustainable Land Use? There is ample evidence that rubber and oil palm plantations can produce stable, in fact, increasing, yields on a long-term basis in Pen
|
From page 460... ...
Rubber has been grown on some sites for nearly 100 years, and oil palm for more than 70 years. Yields of both crops continue to increase as a result of the research efforts of the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia (RRIM)
|
From page 461... ...
Conversion of forests to tree crop plantations could still be undesirable, however, if the economic costs of conversion exceed the economic benefits. The growth of rubber small landholdings before independence, when government policies discriminated in favor of estates, and the growth of oil palm estates since the mid-1960s offer market-based evidence of the financial feasibility of these two crops.
|
From page 462... ...
Various aspects of the application of benefit-cost analysis techniques to land development schemes in Peninsular Malaysia have been discussed by Dixon (1977~. Estimates of financial and economic rates of return for investments In rubber and oil palm plantations are presented in Tables 6 and 7.
|
From page 463... ...
463 dent rubber small landholdings explain why the private sector has historically been interested in investing in these crops. The tendency of both financial and economic rates of return to be higher for oil palm than for rubber indicates why, from the 1960s onward, many estates converted from rubber to oil palm and land development schemes increasingly emphasized oil palm.
|
From page 464... ...
Policies within the rubber and oil palm sectors in Peninsular Malaysia were designed, for the most part, to make estates and smallholders pay their own way. In some instances, policies might even have forced plantations to bear more than a fair share of development costs.
|
From page 465... ...
He also disputed the argument that schemes were justified because of increasing returns to scale, particularly in the case of oil palm (Barlow, 1986~. He argued that land development programs based on assisting independent smallholders would have been less costly for the government (the costs per hectare for rubber could have been reduced to two-thirds those of FELDA)
|
From page 466... ...
The most obvious omission from benefit-cost analyses of rubber and oil palm plantations is the environmental impact. Environmental impacts of converting natural forests to tree crop plantations include increased soil erosion, increased variability of stream flows, and loss of biodiversity.
|
From page 467... ...
The amount of erosion that occurs depends on the erosivity of the rainfall, the credibility of the soil, and the speed at which ground cover is established and the tree crop canopy closes. Mean annual erosivity exceeding 15,000 I/m2 places the entire east coast, the portion of the rubber belt on the west coast from Kuala Lumpur to Pinang, and most of the land development schemes in the states of Terengganu, Pahang, and Johor at high risk for soil erosion (Morgan, 1974 [cited in Soong et al., 19803; Morgan, 1979~.
|
From page 468... ...
Whether these rates are sufficiently high to undermine the long-term sustainability of rubber plantations is not clear. Soil loss is probably less in oil palm plantations, even though the canopy remains more open for a longer period of time, because oil palm plantations tend to be established on slopes that are less steep (Aiken et al., 1982; Soong et al., 1980~.
|
From page 469... ...
(1979 [cited in Ng, 19833) estimated that runoff and leaching from oil palm plantations resulted in the loss of 17 percent of the nitrogen, 10 percent of the phosphorus, and 9 percent of the potassium fertilizers applied.
|
From page 470... ...
According to Gill (1978 [cited in Hill, 1982:2053) , in the 1970s "oil palm factories contributed 80 percent of all pollutants to rivers in Peninsular Malaysia." The biological oxygen demand produced by palm oil processing mills in 1978 was estimated to be equivalent to the amount produced by domestic sewage from 15.9 million people a population greater than that of Peninsular Malaysia today (Abdul Aziz bin Ahmad, 1974 [cited in Aiken et al., 1982:Table 7.11~.
|
From page 471... ...
Rubber plantations tend to contain more pockets of remnant natural forest, generally wet areas where rubber trees grow more poorly than oil palm trees do. Crowns of rubber trees provide better nesting conditions for birds and small mammals and are disturbed less by the collection of latex than are oil palm crowns by the collection of fruit bunches.
|
From page 472... ...
Expansion of land development schemes in the 1970s benefited from a windfall of government revenue created by oil production (Malaysia is a net petroleum exporter)
|
From page 473... ...
be merged and reoriented toward land rehabilitation, market assistance, and enhancing the productivity of existing land development schemes. Although significant additional expansion of rubber and oil palm plantations is not anticipated, it is conceivable that a new tree crop could follow of]
|
From page 474... ...
from 1904 to 1988 to logged area and rural population growth rate (Vincent and Hadi, 1991~. Three scenarios were considered: scenario 1, the base case, in which the rural population grows at 0.83 percent/ year and the area deforested equals the area of agricultural expansion; scenario 2, the worst case, in which the rural population grows at 0.83 percent/year and the area deforested equals 1.86 times the area of agricultural expansion; and scenario 3, the best case, in which the rural population grows at 0.53 percent/year from 1990 to 2000 and -0.45 percent/year from 2000 to 2030 and the area deforested equals the area of agricultural expansion.
|
From page 475... ...
It also demonstrates that the creation and adoption of sustainable agricultural systems will not, on their own, forestall the expansion of agriculture into undisturbed forests. In fact, the sustainability of rubber and oil palm plantations is a fundamental reason why their area has expanded: their ability to produce ongoing yields increased the area where they earned minimum acceptable economic returns.
|
From page 476... ...
Although populations of many species are shrinking as the few remaining areas of lowland rain forests are converted to other uses, there is little evidence of largescale extinctions. Moreover, environmental impacts surely would have been greater if farmers in Peninsular Malaysia had lacked the option of sustainable tree crop plantations and had practiced shifting cultivation instead.
|
From page 477... ...
The factors involved in Peninsular Malaysia's success included an active research program that raised yields and reduced the costs of growing tree crops (and thereby offset declines in product prices) , public investments in infrastructure that enabled growers to get latex and palm oil to markets efficiently and to purchase food and other supplies they did not produce themselves, and land tenure policies that enabled estates and smallholders to obtain secure, long-term leases or outright ownership.
|
From page 478... ...
1986. Statistical and Economic Analysis of Oil Palm Fertiliser Trials in Peninsular Malaysia.
|
From page 479... ...
1976. Plantations as a habitat for wild life in Peninsular Malaysia with particular reference to the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis)
|
From page 480... ...
1972. A Social Cost Benefit Analysis of the Kulai Oil Palm Estate, West Malaysia.
|
From page 481... ...
1983. Advances in Oil Palm Nutrition, Agronomy and Productivity in Malaysia.
|
From page 482... ...
1971. The Present Land Use of West Malaysia (1966~.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.