Members of the Gang family and their friends surveying the Native Customary Rights land in Ba Jawi, Sarawak.
In a letter to Samling, the residents of Ba Jawi in the upper reaches of the Baram River said the company should “stay away from our forests and allow us to continue to live like our ancestors and carry on their legacy and culture”. The Penans expressed their rejection of timber extraction and forest certification in its letter to Samling in the context of the on-going surveillance audit being carried out by the Standards and Industrial Research Institute of Malaysia for the FMU.
In May, the Forest Stewardship Council officially accepted a complaint against Samling after determining that there was “sufficient evidence” regarding violation of FSC policies, including alleged violations of traditional and human rights and destruction of high conservation value forests.