Malaysia, the second biggest palm oil producer after Indonesia, is a home to 2.43 million hectares of peatland, 27.5 percent of which has been developed into palm oil plantation, while Indonesia with production of 23 million tons last year is a home to 16 million hectares of peatland with 1.6 million hectares of it developed.

Unlike Indonesia which prefers to follow the mainstream views of the environmentalists and has decided to launch a moratorium on new development on peatland since 2011, Malaysia fully supports its palm oil industry who have tried to prove that peatland cannot be classified as “sacred land”.

The Malaysian government established the Tropical Peat Research Laboratory (TPRL) in Serawak state to facilitate its scientists to conduct research on the economic and environmental aspects of peatland development.

They claimed that they have managed to eradicate the negative impacts of peatland exploitation. However, their arguments were nearly unheard as they were inundated by the mainstream opinion of the environmentalists.

Militant environmentalists have long believed any peatland exploitation would cause serious problems—land subsidence, water scarcity, forest fires, flooding and worsen global warming. They disapprove of any peatland exploitation—either for producing raw materials such as fertilizer, agricultural media and biomass briquettes or for plantation purposes.

In trying to get attention from other parts of the world, Malaysia lobbied members of the International Peat Society (IPS) so that the peatland country could host the International Peat Congress. As a result, the 15th congress was held in the Sarawak state capital of Kuching from Aug. 16 to 19, attended by hundreds of scientists, the first ever peatland congress in Asia since its first edition in 1954 in Dublin.

“We want it to be organized here because anytime a peatland congress was organized in Europe, Malaysia and Indonesia were always ‘hit black and blue’. We were accused of being criminals against the environment,” Lulie Melling, a TPRL director and chief of the congress’s steering committee, told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the congress.

Malaysia managed to manuever the congress as a showcase for the results of TPRL’s research, particularly for its finding on mechanical soil compaction, which claimed to effectively reduce susceptibility of peat-fire outbreaks during the dry season and flooding during the rainy season as the land had higher capability to absorb water. They also said the compaction also reduces CO₂ emissions from peatland up to half from what was believed previously by many scientists.

However, Susan Page, a professor of physical geography at the University of Leicester in the UK, who was a keynote speaker at the congress, insisted that developing palm oil plantations was unsustainable. “People talk about sustainable development on peatland. But it really doesn’t exist because the only sustainable peatland is a peatland that is left alone,” Page told the Post in an interview.

Certain crops and vegetables may be allowed to be cultivated on the peatland, but not an intensive peatland development because a conversion into palm oil plantation which in fact improves the economy and people’s welfares was not equal to the big losses that will follow, she believed.

Meanwhile, Bjorn Hanell, the IPS president, said environmental activists and scientists should not just prevent people from utilizing peatland, while ignoring new findings on peatland management. “They should be ready to discuss the new findings on peatland management openly,” he added.

But, for palm oil players, criticism against palm oil development on peatland is not merely a scientific matter. They believe it is part of a trade war because palm oil is a tough competitor to soya bean oil and sunflower oil that have been developed in America and Europe.

They claim the two vegetable oils were less sustainable as people need much larger land to cultivate bean and sunflowers. They even criticized scientists in developed countries, who called for stopping peatland development in developing countries while ignoring the fact that their countries have earlier exploited peatland in the past.

Responding to that, Page admitted that Western countries have committed the same mistake in the past. “It is very true that there was intensive exploitation of peatland in Europe. But it happened hundreds of years ago when the people had not been informed about gas emissions and global warning,” she said, adding that European countries had already paid the cost for their past mistake by building large seawalls with expensive pumping systems to prevent seawater flowing into land.

But certainly such finger pointing will not end the differences. Scientists across the world now have an opportunity to look into documents presented by their Malaysian and Indonesian counterparts, as well as those from other countries about sustainable peatland development that had been presented in the congress.

The result of this research has now been well-documented by the IPS and countries like Malaysia and Indonesia are waiting for a fair discussion on the issue. Member of IPS executive board Moritz Bocking promised to follow up the result of the congress by inviting all involved parties in a roundtable meeting.

Meanwhile, Supiandi Sahabian, the Indonesian Peat Association (IPA) chairman, called on the Indonesian government not to be just passive in the peatland issue. Instead, it needs to support more research on peatland management so that the major peatland country will not just accept the mainstream opinion that peatland should remain a “sacred ground” and ignore its potential. (bbn/ags)

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