Forest department opens 215 investigation papers since 2020

Awang Tengah said 55 of the total cases were still under investigation by the Sarawak Forest Department. – File photo

KUCHING (May 27): A total of 215 investigation papers were opened from 2020 to April this year to look into various forest-related offences, said Deputy Premier of Sarawak Datuk Amar Awang Tengah Ali Hasan.

The Second Minister for Natural Resources and Urban Development said 55 of the total cases were still under investigation by the Sarawak Forest Department.

He added that 160 other cases had been submitted to the State Security and Enforcement Unit (UKPN) and the State Attorney General’s Chambers (SAG).

“Of this total, 40 cases were categorised as No Further Action (NFA), five cases were convicted of offences, 14 cases were compounded, 10 cases were still in the trial process while the remaining 91 cases were still in various stages of investigation.

“During the same period, compounds worth a total of RM1,340,783 were collected,” he said when delivering his winding up speech in the august House yesterday.

Awang Tengah urged all parties to co-operate by coming forward with information should they come across any suspicious activities taking place in their respective areas.

He said this is to enable early action to be taken against those causing the destruction of forest ecosystems and leakage of revenue to the Sarawak government.

He pledged that the Sarawak government, through the State Forest Department, will continue to implement the Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR) programme, which is now rebranded as the Greening Sarawak Campaign.

“This program aims to enrich the degraded forest area and involve all stakeholders including the local community.”

He said the programmes were in line with the Malaysian Greening Programme to plant 100 million trees by 2025.

He added that the Sarawak government was committed to planting 35 million trees over a period of five years or seven million trees per year.

“Since its implementation last year, Sarawak has planted a total of 12,247,189 trees which is the highest planting record in Malaysia.

“These tree planting areas include government land, logging areas, forest plantations, NCR land and privately owned land,” he said.

Awang Tengah asserted that the forest plantation industry played an important role in ensuring that timber-based raw materials were sufficient to meet the needs of the timber industry and reduce dependence on timber resources derived from natural forests.

In this regard, he said the Sarawak government had set a target of one million hectares of industrial forest by 2025.

He added that so far, only 552,369 hectares had been planted with various species such as Acacia, Eucalyptus and various local wood species such as Batai (Paraserianthes falcataria) and Kelampaian (Neolamarckia).

“As this achievement is not encouraging, the government has instructed each licencee to submit a catch-up plan to ensure that this target can be achieved,” he added.

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