By Kyaw Ye Lynn
KAWTHAUNG, Myanmar
The “oil bowl of Myanmar” -- a promised land of southern rainforests toward which hundreds of thousands of workers flocked in 1999 when the former junta initiated an industrial oil palm scheme.
But more than halfway into the 30-year plan to transform the Thaninthary region, workers are lamenting broken promises of better jobs and homes for their families, while the ethnic Karen community remains uprooted from lands cleared for plantations.
Maung Nyo Win, now 33, was among those drawn by the state-owned newspapers, television and radio channels used by the junta to recruit workers from other parts of the country.
With his parents and two brothers, Maung Nyo Win moved in 2001 from his native town of Hinthada in the delta of the Ayeyawaddy region to Thaninthary --one of the country’s most important biodiversity areas with 2.5 million hectares of intact lowland rainforest.
He found employment outside Kawthaung -- Myanmar's southernmost town -- at a palm oil plantation owned by Yuzana Company Limited, established in 1994 by Htay Myint, a tycoon with close ties to senior junta leaders.
“We, as casual workers, want a regular job. That’s why our family decided to move here,” he told Anadolu Agency while sitting in one among a row of houses built by the company six years ago -- but not equipped with basic amenities such as electricity and running water.
“We really hoped to have a better life here, as the company promised us.”
Maung Nyo Win and his family, like hundreds of other worker households, were sent to the jungle where they were asked to cut down towering trees after being held for three days at a crowded barracks near the Yuzana Palm Oil Company’s headquarters on the outskirts of Kawthaung.
“I had never seen such big trees before,” Maung Nyo Win said, recounting how there were no barracks or buildings for his family to take shelter in at that time.
“So we had to build the temporary camps ourselves,” he said.
Maung Nyo Win got married in 2005, and is now the father of a 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter.
“Though there is a school provided by the company, it is a bit far from our place. [It’s] exactly 38 miles away from our place,” he said.
His children instead attend a school in a nearby village -- an education which costs the family one-third of their income.
Maung Nyo Win says he has been saving money to return to his native town before his children are grown up.
“I want them to be educated, and don’t want them being exploited working here.”
Workers in the “oil bowl” say they are underpaid while some claim the companies employing them hold their wages for up to nine months to prevent them from leaving their jobs.
Scores of workers have tried to cross the border in search of better jobs in Thailand after realizing that companies in Thaninthary have broken their promises, according to Ko Sanshae, an activist with the Peace and Open Society Foundation led by former student leaders.
“It’s like state-sponsored human trafficking,” the 43-year-old Karen ethnic told Anadolu Agency.
“State TV aired several times a day how a worker could find a better life working in the projects,” he said, referring to the advertisements promising regular jobs with better pay as well as basic infrastructure such as barracks, clinics and schools for children.
“Thousands of workers arrived to the town every day to work in the palm oil plantations,” Ko Sanshae underlined. “Then several migrant workers ended up becoming victims of human trafficking.”
In addition to the labor and human rights violations reported in the palm oil industry, activists accuse the projects of damaging the region’s ecosystem and the ethnic communities that call it home.
According to San Ngwe, an activist based in the coastal town of Myeik, one of the main reasons behind the transformation projects -- besides economic aspirations -- was the military’s intention to “eradicate” ethnic rebels in the region, which is predominantly inhabited by the Karen minority and was once controlled by the Karen National Union (KNU) rebel group.
“Under the military’s ‘Fours Cut’ policy against the rebels, villagers in the jungle were forcibly moved into new villages along the main roads,” he told Anadolu Agency, referring to the military tactics of cutting off access to food, funds, information and recruitment.
“Then the military allocated the land to palm oil companies,” said San Ngwe, himself a Karen ethnic. “After the forests were cleared, the military quickly took over the region.”
Around 730,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) of rain forest have been allocated to more than 40 local companies owned by military-linked businesspeople and three international companies between 1999 and 2016 for a series of palm oil plantations, according to a report by community-based organizations in the region.
However, only 216,506 hectares -- or about 29 percent of the land area granted -- were planted by the end of 2016, said the “Green Desert” report released this week.
Environmental activists accused the companies involved of having already cleared nearly all the forest allocated for plantations, but failing to plant oil palms in its place.
“The companies used the projects as a license for illegal logging,” asserted San Ngwe, who is also a spokesperson representing the six local organizations that published the report.
An international conservation non-governmental organization, Fauna and Flora International (FFI), has called on Myanmar’s government for a halt in palm oil development until the projects’ impacts are better understood and stronger policies implemented to protect the country’s last remaining lowland rainforest.
“Most plantations are clearing high-conservation-value forests, and many companies are even clearing land outside their concession boundary,” said FFI Myanmar program director Frank Momberg in a statement in July.
“That is why we are calling on the government to declare a complete moratorium on palm oil development that means no new forest clearing and no new license... until we can be sure that these plantations are sustainable.”
The current government led by State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi -- the country’s first elected civilian in over a decade -- is reportedly reviewing the former junta’s allocation of land for palm oil plantations in the area.
Analysts and activists, however, warn that such a review would take years to complete as the matter involves land grabbing -- one of the most complicated issues in Myanmar.
“The project hurts the region’s environment as well as its community,” San Ngwe told Anadolu Agency, underlining that around one-third of the land allocated for plantations had been not vacant, but populated by local communities and people affected by decades-long armed conflict.
After the KNU signed a ceasefire deal with the previous government -- led by so-called reformist then President Thein Sein, a former military leader -- in 2012, locals returned home -- only to find their villages and farmlands destroyed and granted to palm oil companies.
“They were forced to flee their homes due to the fighting. And when they returned home after decades of being refugees, they found that there was no place for them to live and no farmland for them to work,” said San Ngwe.
“Can you imagine that?”
