08/10/2008 (New Scientist) - Clearing tropical forests to plant oil palms is lucrative for oil-producers, but is ecologically disastrous. Space for about half of 5 million hectares of oil palm planted in Malaysia and Indonesia between 1990 and 2005 came at the expense of tropical forest, much of it pristine.

Now indigenous people in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, have taken a stand. Instead of selling their forests for palm-oil plantations they have decided to hang on to their ancestral land.

The Malaysian Star reports that representatives from the Berawan-Tering ethnic group voted against a proposal to turn 80,000 hectares of their land over to a private firm for oil palm development. A representative of the Berawan-Tering said the oil company had offered the native people jobs as labourers but said "we don't want to end up as labourers on our own ancestral land."

"We are also worried that if we give up our land, we will lose our food resources and, once the land is turned into an oil-palm plantation, the social structure will be changed," the representative said at a press conference.