ENVIRONMENTAL AND PERSONAL CHALLENGES IN A FAST DEVELOPING ECONOMY by Abu Bakar Jaafar1

In a fast developing economy, like Malaysia, life is sometimes dictated by one's situation than by any specific plan or grand design. The required response in such an environment is to be well prepared to "seize the moment," and not to be too choosy of the nature and extent of a given task. In my case, as a private candidate back in 1968, after having successfully passed the Examination set by the University of Cambridge for full Higher School Certificate (HSC), I wanted to be a building contractor and to pursue a degree in Civil Engineering. But I was advised by my unforgettable mathematics teacher, Mr V. Chakaravarthy, that Malaysia already had too many civil engineers. However, there was a shortage of mechanical engineers. So I decided to opt for Mechanical Engineering instead, and was awarded a Federal Scholarship by the Government of Malaysia to study at the University of Newcastle, Shortland Campus, in the Faculty of Engineering (Class of 1969-1972). My final year thesis was on "Dynamic Testing of Rubber Shear Pads in Compression," thinking that I would be working in the natural rubber industry back in Malaysia. Things did not quite happen the way I expected them to. On 22 January 1973, without waiting for the March 1973 convocation, I had to report for duty in Malaysia, as Factories and Machinery Inspector, Factories and Machinery Department (FMD) (now known as the Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH). My first assignment, was not on verification of submitted design
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RECIPIENT OF THE UoN CONVOCATION MEDAL 2011 FOR PROFESSIONAL EXCELLENCE

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of new boilers and pressure vessels to be in accordance with the applicable British Standards nor on safety inspection of dangerous machinery and equipment, but on the subject of "pollution". The task was, after having read through transcripts of telegraphic messages transmitted by the Special Branch of Royal Malaysian Police which captured the illicit broadcast by underground communists who were still active and waging a guerrilla war with the government, was to verify claims made by them that the government of the day was capitalistic; promoting industries in the hinterland; polluting the waters, and affecting the masses." Indeed, there was more than a grain of truth to their claims. None of the palm oil mills, as natural rubber processing factories, had any form of wastewater treatment nor any form of control for untreated or partially treated discharges into immediate watercourses. Moreover these polluted watercourses were found to be mainly located upstream of domestic or drinking water supply intake points. The most affected were those who had no direct access to public water supply and sanitation, largely the rural poor, and thus, the easy targets of communist propaganda. My immediate supervisor then was the late Ir Abdul Aziz Ahmad, a mechanical engineer, who chaired the Technical Committee responsible for drafting the Environmental Quality Act (EQA) 1974, and he reported to the Chief Secretary to the Government, the late Tan Sri Shamsuddin Kadir, who was also Secretary to the National Security Council. Not so much to address the pressing environmental problems per se, but as the issue was deemed as a threat to national security, it prompted and motivated the legislators to enact federal environmental law, despite the fact that the word "pollution" was not found in the federal Constitution of Malaysia, nor I could find such a word in the 1963 Edition of Oxford Dictionary in the FMD Library on the first day of work as a trainee- engineer. Nonetheless, since the subject of pollution was very much related to factories and machinery, which were in the Federal-List, the federal legislative arm of the government found sufficient legal basis to introduce the necessary provisions in the EQA 1974. A rainy Sunday back in June 1974, there was not much to do but I was attracted to a small advertisement at the back of one of the issues of the Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association: "... Master of Environmental Science Program,
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Institute of Environmental Sciences, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (MU-Ohio)... " The next morning I dashed into my boss's room, and with his strong support and encouragement, I managed to secure another Federal Scholarship to enrol in September 1974 at the MU-Ohio, and earned a Masters degree in Environmental Science in June 1976, after having spent 6 months as a research intern-cum-staff engineer at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research & Development Industrial-Environmental Research Laboratory in Cincinnati, Ohio and completed a thesis-equivalent report on "Applicability of Solar Energy Technology for Industrial Pollution Control and Production: the Case of the Primary Copper Smelting Industry". On another fateful Sunday in October 1976, my late father-in-law, Tuan Haji Md Taha Saad, called me and drew my attention to a small advertisement in Mingguan Malaysia (Malay Weekly) on a new vacancy in the Division (now Department) of Environment (DOE), Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (MOSTE) for a senior position, Principal Assistant Director (Water Quality). Such a government position was not advertised in the English dailies or weeklies, which I subscribed to. The next morning without hesitation, I approached my big boss for permission to apply for the position, and after a successful interview by a panel of members from the Public Service Commission, I joined the Division headed by Dato' Hamzah Majid, a former diplomat, and supported by three Directors: Mr Khalid Ramli (now a Tan Sri), Director of Administration; Ir Goh Kiam Seng, civil engineer, as Director of Air Pollution Control; and the late Mr A. Maheswaran, Chemist, Director of Water Pollution Control, my immediate boss. My counterparts were Ir Tan Meng Leng, mechanical engineer, for air pollution control; and Ir Godwin Singam, chemical engineer, for water pollution control. Our immediate tasks were, other than setting up nation-wide networks of air and water quality monitoring, drafting the first set of major regulations relating to the control of air pollution and effluents from palm oil mills, natural rubber processing factories and industries. These included untreated and partially treated sewage. The regulations were enforced in 1977, 1978, and 1979 respectively. Also drafted were the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)
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Procedure and Requirements in 1977 which came into force on 1 April 1988. The underlying principles in such swift lines of regulatory action as taken are that "prevention is better than cure," and "prior assessment, a prerequisite to management." What gave me greatest satisfaction during my time with the DOE from 1976 to 1995, other than formulating and implementing the EIA Order of 1988, were the following environmental projects: (i) the successful promotion of private investment with an initial capital over US $100 million in establishing the integrated toxic and hazardous waste treatment facilities owned and operated by Kualiti Alam Sdn Bhd (www.kualitialam.com), by applying the polluters-pay principle, as an economic policy instrument; and (ii) the privatization of nation-wide networks of continuous monitoring of ambient air quality and river water quality operated by Alam Sekitar Malaysia Sdn Bhd (www.enviromalaysia.com.my), based as much on the principle of unit cost saving to the Government, as to the classic "economics of information" as advanced by Professor George Joseph Stigler, Nobel Laureate in Economics: that is the willingness of the public to pay for information that matters to them. The environmental problems do not recognize political boundaries, and thus, the importance of ever strengthening intergovernmental co-operation at all levels: bilateral (Malaysia-Singapore) inter alia to address the dumping of tankers' cleaning sludges; trilateral (Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore" to control and mitigate annual haze episodes; regional (ASEAN cooperative programmes on marine sciences); international (IMO for oil pollution, UNEP for the control of ozone depleting substances, and that of transportation of toxic & hazardous waste and its disposal; IPCC on Climate Change Assessment, and numerous other programmes relating to biodiversity, biosafety, chemicals, nuclear waste, transportation, renewable energy, population, food security, water, sanitation, domestic & commercial waste, depleting resources, the oceans and the surrounding seas, common goods, tragedy of the commons, and sustainability. All these issues ought to be seen in the order of importance from the most basic needs of the population to that of the environment as follows: clean air, safe
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drinking water, adequate food for sufficient nutrition, minimum wage and housing, sustainable mobility; and affordable access to sustainable energy supply, health care, environmental education, and sustainable employment opportunities. The initial job functions were not frequently reviewed nor updated. But in my case, the last function: "... Any other duty assigned to ..." had taken up, over a period of time, 80 per cent of my time and attention. In 1978 and 1979, I was assigned as a member of the Delegation of Malaysia to the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (1972-1982), covering the subjects of "protection and preservation of the marine environment" and "marine scientific research (MSR)", including the control regime of MSR on the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles (M).

The assignment prompted me to take up a study leave after having secured, not another Federal Scholarship, but an East-West Center (EWC) Research Grant under the EWC Environment and Policy Institute's Program on Extended Maritime Jurisdictions, and in August 1980, enrolled in the Department of Geography, instead of Oceanography, for a PhD degree awarded in February 1984. The Institute Aloha! provided almost perfect, short of heaven, a place as much to study as to "sparring one's thought and ideas", particularly during the almost daily organised colloquium or at brown-bag lunch talks by passing scholars or fellows in residence, and at anytime, with fellow researchers and research grantees in a multi-cultural and inter-disciplinary environment. In the pursuit of academic excellence, process is equally crucial, and a critical success factor, as "substance".

On 1 September 1995, I took up optional retirement, from my position as Director-General of the Department of the Environment (DOE), Malaysia, and at the age of 46, joined Kumpulan Guthrie Berhad, a public-listed company on Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange, in order to take up the challenge of "modernizing" palm
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oil milling, which until today has yet to advance its processing technology, by using oil, instead of water, to extract crude oil from fresh oil palm fruits. This research agenda remains outstanding, if it is not a life-time dream. As stated by the Production Manager of DANI of Monza, Italy, the supplier of non-methane hydrocarbon analyzer used in monitoring the precursor in the formation of ozone and oxides of nitrogen at the street-level in the City of Kuala Lumpur and other major cities in Malaysia: "... to dream is free, to realize one's dream is very expensive." Putting the dream aside, I was head-hunted twice: first, to turn around Alam Sekitar Malaysia Sdn Bhd (www.enviromalaysia.com.my) from 1997 to 2000, which had suffered so much down-time of non-tropicalised monitoring equipment and instrumentation, due to humidity, fungus, and lightening, and second, from 2001 to 2002, on the commercialization of a patent in the manufacturing of virtually weld-free mufflers for automotive industries. The challenge of the latter was not so much the lethargic tempo of the tropical environment, but in dealing with the boundary-management of the client's organization. As summarized by the major shareholder of the emerging venture company, "the only qualification required in order to do the job was that one has to be comfortable with a pauper, and fit enough to speak to a King." Indeed, it was, in order, for the company finally to have secured the first order to supply its newly engineered part to a local motor assembly industry. Over the period 2003 to 2007, other than providing advisory and consultancy services relating to the subject of the environment, with two other school friends, one a Professor in Policy Planning and another ex-CEO of an Islamic Bank, I decided to venture on my own, after having been challenged by close friends, associates and fellow-pensioners as much as to add-value to a traditional food products (to be produced with the most advanced, energy efficient, environmentfriendly heat-pump technology), namely, smoke-free soft-dehydrated tropical fruits, including (new "pisang salai"). The noble intention was to help raise the income of rural folks, including single mothers whose husbands were killed while serving in the armed forces. Indeed, the old "pisang salai" (fresh ripe bananas after having smoked with wood-fire) was the staple food of the old seafarers, and
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it could have been the main diet of Captain Henry Black who went around the world by sea. Bananas, being almost complete food then, and now or ever, for which not many of us can go without. The challenge of the rural-urban business was not so much in the production but in product distribution and marketing. The retail market, especially those "little napoleons", did not see what ought to be on the floor, on the shelves, or on the table, but under. In the meantime, my assignment at the United Nations Headquarters (HQ) in New York since 1997 relating to the work of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) (www.un.org/depts/los) has been getting heavier, and the number of weeks of meetings in the Commission and its Subcommissions increased exponentially from two to four weeks in a year, and up to 26 weeks a year. The commitment, and thus, the experience gained, has been long drawn almost throughout my life-long career. As written not only all over the wall, but along the footpath of the streets leading away from the UN HQ Building, "Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny (our) own convictions or experience ", said Dag Hammarskjold. In conclusion, having studied engineering has prepared me well to deal with whatever has thrown my way. May the future hold for one, and all, peace, security, and sustainability. _______________________________________________________ 2A Jalan Menara Satu U8/5A, Bukit Jelutong, 40150 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: bakar.jaafar@gmail.com 11 October 2011