KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 7): The government should scrutinise the costs and benefits of projects that impact the environment before giving approval, former minister Tan Sri Rafidah Aziz said today, amid outcry over the pollution caused by bauxite mining in Pahang.

Too often, the government only steps in when a project has already wreaked near-irreparable damage to the environment, she wrote in a Facebook post today.

“We must think through in detail the costs and benefits attached to any endeavour that involves the exploitation of the environment,” she wrote.

"Short-term ‘benefits’ especially to only a few, should never supersede the long-term costs that would need to be borne by us and the generations after us … costs that cannot even begin to be evaluated in monetary terms."

The former trade and industry minister said the bauxite mining had allowed land owners to become “rich overnight”, but at the cost of river waters turning red.

She said the government had apparently failed to learn from past tragedies caused by “almost unscrupulous exploitation of land and resources”, including collapsed buildings, landslides and massive flooding.

“The responsibility of care for the environment should never be taken lightly.

“A polluted environment, whether the air we breathe in order to keep alive, the water resources, and our highlands and lowlands… will impact not only us in this generation … but those generations coming after us.”

Yesterday, Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Dr Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar announced a three-month freeze on all bauxite mining activities in Pahang starting January 15, in order to resolve the pollution it caused.

He said the moratorium would be extended indefinitely if the industry failed to “contain” the pollution problem within three months.

Rampant bauxite mining has been blamed for turning rivers and the shoreline off Kuantan, on the peninsula’s east coast, red after two days of heavy rain last week.

Since Kuantan ramped up its mining of bauxite for export to China last year, residents in the area have complained about pollution, caused by red dust from the mining activities and leakage from lorries transporting bauxite to the Kuantan port.

It was reported that in the first 11 months of 2015, Malaysia exported more than 20 million tonnes of bauxite to China, up nearly 700% from the previous year. In 2013, it only shipped around 162,000 tonnes.

Pahang Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Adnan Yaakob said the state government had earned RM46.7 million in royalty from bauxite mining last year, compared to RM2.4 million in 2014.