Kota Kinabalu: When Sabah was Malaysia’s leading timber-exporting state for more than four decades since the 1960s, Japanese trading houses known as “sogo shosha” like Mitsui, Nissho Iwai, Marubeni and others like Nicheman Corporation , Mitsubishi, Itochu had their representative or their branches (now the most closed) in the state capital until the exit of the Japanese involvement in the controversial export of the production of the Mamut copper mine to Japan .

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After 2018, when the Warisan Plus government took power and banned log exports, little was known about measures taken by resource-poor Japan to offset Sabah’s tropical log import deficit. Sabah Timber Association President Norman Wong pointed to a report by Kei Sekiguchi and Konatsu Ochi that Japanese log importers have turned to timber supplies from Papua New Guinea. Kei Sekiguchi and Konatsu Ochi write that: The Malaysian state of Sabah, a major supplier of tropical logs, has banned exports in the name of forest protection. Japanese importers then turned to Papua New Guinea, where Japan now accounts for 80% of its tropical log imports. ”

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