As a company with a global network of timber producers, Lionex has a certain responsibility to the people living in and from the forest. Often these people belong to the indigenous groups of the country, and it is our due responsibility to ensure that we protect their welfare and livelihood.

Often presented as defenceless victims of deforestation, they have lived in and worked with the forest for many generations, and hold a treasure of information about it. In Peninsular Malaysia this group is called the Orang Asli, comprising many different groups of people.

Lionex hopes to learn from them and in co-operation with these people make better timber trade possible through the Centre of Orang Asli Concerns, combining their knowledge with ours to create a CSR policy that cares. Lionex also makes it a strategy not to buy timber from areas where known conflicts over indigenous land rights exist and using sustainability certificates as a guarantee.

In our Accepted Timber Supply Program we state that all our suppliers need to comply with the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights that also concerns indigenous rights.

United Nations definition (1986) of Indigenous: ‘Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which have a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories; consider themselves distinct from other sectors of society now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present non dominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems.’ (Dove 2006, 192)