The Other Side of the Story: The Danish Public Procurement Policy on Timber and Wood Products

”We [the indigenous peoples in Sarawak] urge buyers to come into our back yard and to see personally by yourself the true situation of logging in Sarawak. I personally appeal to all you buyers of Malaysian timber please spare my old parents, young school children, innocent poor communities and our future generation from being displaced from mother earth please.”1

These desperate words of a headman from one of the indigenous communities of Sarawak (Malaysian Borneo) can be found in a joint NGO press release from late 2005. Indigenous communities all over the world have protested for years at logging companies encroaching onto their lands and undermining their livelihoods. But their voices seldom reach the people who are ultimately responsible for their forests being cut down – namely the consumers of timber and wood products in Europe and other parts of the world where these products have a high market value.