Malaysia Info Guide
for Locals & Visitors

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian marine police said Sunday they had seized 6,250 turtle eggs smuggled in from a neighbouring country to be sold on the island of Borneo as a delicacy.

Gan Ping Sin, the marine police chief of Sandakan, in Borneo's eastern state of Sabah, said the eggs, worth RM11,250, were seized in an operation on Friday.

"The turtle eggs were seized from a boat in the Malaysian water during our operation but the boat operator managed to escape," Gan told AFP.

"We believe the eggs are smuggled in from a neighbouring country," he said but refused to identify which one.

The turtle eggs have been handed to wildlife authorities, Gan said, vowing to step up police operations in the area which he said had seen "quite rampant" turtle egg smuggling.

Turtle eggs are openly sold in markets in parts of Malaysia. Turtles once arrived in their thousands to lay their eggs on Malaysian beaches but are now increasingly rare due to poaching and coastal development.

Under Malaysian law, it is illegal to collect turtle eggs without a permit from the fisheries department but steady demand for turtle products and eggs in Southeast Asia continues to drive the illegal trade.

This prompted environmental group WWF to launch a campaign to stop Malaysians eating turtles in April last year, in a bid to help save stocks of the sea creatures.

JOHOR BARU: Local researchers have managed to capture ground images of the spotted leopard, the first official documentation of the animal in the country.

The images were captured using a state-of-the-art camera trap, specially designed to work under extremely humid conditions.

Wildlife Conservation Society Malaysia programme director Dr Melvin T. Gumal said the images confirmed the existence of spotted leopards in the country.

“Previously, we have only heard of sightings of these animals but now, we have documented proof they exist,” he told reporters at the Taman Negara Johor Biodiversity and Conservation Symposium held here yesterday.

Known as a powerful herbal aphrodisiac, Tongkat Ali is hugely popular in the country and abroad.
It has become such a big hit that there has been an explosion of Tongkat Ali food products online and offline.

There is the "kopi power" available in almost every coffee shop, also sweets and carbonated drinks, all touting to contain Tongkat Ali.

Question is: Are they effective? More importantly, are they safe? Is there even Tongkat Ali in some of the products, or are consumers just ingesting plain old coffee powder, sugar and nothing more?

If products contain barely discernible amounts of Tongkat Ali but are marketed as such, are manufacturers flouting any regulations?

No, says the authorities. Even if a so-called Tongkat Ali product contained barely detectable traces of the wonder root, but was marketed as such, manufacturers are not doing anything wrong.

This is because there is no requirement under the Food Regulations 1985 specifying that a product must have a certain amount of Tongkat Ali (Eurycoma longifolia Jack) before it can be marketed as such.

There is also no requirement for the authorities to check whether Tongkat Ali products in the market are actually effective or deliver the results as claimed.

Tongkat Ali products are consumed for general-wellness, but they are generally used as an aphrodisiac by men.

"So long as the product does not contain anything poisonous or detrimental to health, we do not monitor their efficacy," says Siti Aida Abdullah, the deputy director of Centre for Product Registration with the National Pharmaceutical Control Bureau.

Kota Kinabalu: Wildlife activists have built a treetop bridge in an orangutan sanctuary to help the endangered apes find new mates and prevent inbreeding.
The 43-metre suspension bridge was completed last month at the Lower Kinabatangan Sanctuary in the east coast.

"But this is a temporary measure. In the long run, we must create forest corridors for orangutans and other animals to move about," said Nobuo Nakanishi from the Borneo Conservation Trust Japan, which helped fund the project.

Orangutans are unable to swim and thus the bridge idea to help them get across rivers in search of food.

Orangutan habitats in Malaysia and Indonesia have been decimated as their jungle habitats are cleared by logging and to make way for plantations, putting them at risk of inbreeding as they are split into smaller populations.

The 26,000-hectare (64,250 acre) Lower Kinabatangan sanctuary is divided into 10 lots among oil palm plantations and villages.

Experts say there are about 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans left in the wild, 80 per cent of them in Indonesia and the rest in Malaysian's eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo island.

A 2007 assessment by the United Nations Environment Program warned that orangutans will be virtually eliminated in the wild within two decades if current deforestation trends continue.

KUALA LUMPUR: Despite years of campaigning, environmentalists are struggling to keep turtle eggs off the dinner table.

An unpublished report by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Malaysia said 90 per cent of those who buy and eat turtle eggs were Malaysians.

WWF (Coral Triangle) senior adviser Kevin Hiew said consumers bought turtle eggs in Terengganu, Pahang and Malacca.

The consumption of turtle eggs, together with poorly planned coastal development, pollution, the illegal trade in the animal and its parts, and getting caught in fishing nets threatened the existence of all four species that nest in Malaysia -- the leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea), green turtle (Chelonia mydas), hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata), and Olive Ridely (Lepidochelys olivacea).
 

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia is more concerned with building shopping malls, skyscrapers and highways, than with ensuring that rivers are clean and forests are protected.

"We are still far away from achieving sustainable development," said Malaysian Nature Society executive director Dr Loh Chi Leong.

"However, it is not all gloom and doom as the policies are in place: the problem is in the implementation.

"Even though the environment is always mentioned, it's always the last to be implemented," he said, adding that the government's "sectorial approach" to handling issues was also a stumbling block.

"The government usually handles one issue at a time. We're still not thinking holistically."
Dr Loh stressed that policy makers understood the seriousness of green issues but this awareness did not filter down to lower officials.

World Wide Fund for Nature Malaysia (WWF) executive director Datuk Dr Dionysius Sharma said Malaysia was still "too far off" from sustainable development.

"It's sad that the global indicator for development is still on the economics such as the gross domestic product."

He said since the first Earth Day 39 years ago, the same themes were cropping up.