Note: The following was scanned from a Papua New Guinea
newspaper article. It clearly illustrates that the abuse of
indigenous peoples, which is typically portrayed as something
which occurred in the past and for which we must feel guilty;
continues unabated to this day. Villagers in Papua New Guinea,
the Solomon Islands, and elsewhere; continue to receive the
equivalent of trinkets and beads for their vast rainforest
wealth.
********************************
"The chainsaw massacre"
Post-Courier/Weekend Magazine
Friday, May 13, 1994
By Edward Milner
Page 33
CHECKING out allegations of illegal and destructive logging, a
Gemini correspondent was turned away by a South Korean company
operating in the Solomon Islands particularly when they saw his
camera. So he ignored the company and trekked into the forest to
see for himself what damage was being done. This is his report...
TEDDY Hitukera was threatened with chainsaws when he protested
against the activities of a South Korean timber company which
moved in on his Solomons' island without warning and started a
massive logging operation on his land.
"They brought bulldozers and destroyed our fields, our vegetable
gardens and our coconut trees. When we complained they threatened
us with chainsaws and bushknives," he says. "Now they have
destroyed our forest and spoiled our rivers."
Standing knee-deep in a forest stream on the island of Vela
Lavella, Western Solomon Islands, he says "Look at this. Since
last August all the fish have gone and now we can't use it for
drinking. It's not even good for swimming any more. All my
children are crying and some of them are sick."
The entire logging operation is illegal, contravening the
traditional land rights of Hitukera and others who have lived
here for generations. It is a story repeated in many places on
these mountainous, coral fringed islands dotted over thousands of
square miles of the western Pacific.
The timber has to be moved only a short distance downhill to the
coast where it can be loaded onto the company's ships, wherever a
break in the reef allows them to anchor close to the shore.
Hitukera's family live; opposite just such a deepwater channel,
so it was his coconut grove that the company decided to flatten
in order to build its base-camp and log storage area.
The companies are unsupervised. A forestry official in the
capital, Honiara, explains, "The international logging companies
that comes here have the resources to corrupt the entire
political system from village chiefs to the Cabinet, so what
chance is there of any serious curb on their activities?"
A recent report by the Britain-based TRAFFIC, which monitors
international wildlife trade, shows that illegal timber is a
multimillion-dollar business in Asia. Much exported timber is
effectively stolen from the region.
The International Timber Trade Organisation has set a target of
the year 2000 by which time all tropical timber is supposed to
come from "sustainably managed" sources. But there is no
agreement about what constitutes sustainable management.
Industry definitions do not satisfy outside observers; indeed,
sustaining a timber crop is not the same as sustaining the
biological diversity of a natural forest.
In any case, sustainable logging seems far from the aim of
companies like the one ravaging Teddy Hitukera's land.
The company refused to let me see its operations. So, not to be
put off lightly, Hitukera and his friends took me to the scene of
the destruction.
WE WENT along their own hunting paths deep into the forest and up
onto the ridges where the timber cutting was going on. The
rainforests of the Solomons are steep, wet and dense.
It took nearly four hours to climb 2000 feet and move about five
kilometres inland to where, just out of sight of the shore, the
first ugly marks of clearfelling could be seen.
Swathes of forest 50 to 80 metres wide had been cleared, sparsely
dotted with the stumps of the rosewood and kwila trees the
company was cutting.
But it is the damage to the rest of the forest that is so
disturbing.
The surface of the ground is gouged by the dragging of heavy
logs, churned up by heavy machinery or compacted into hard,
smooth surfaces. Nearly every steam is blocked, diverted or
eroded by abandoned logs or banks of bulldozed earth.
Unnecessary damage to other trees and vegetation is immense;
on every side are great piles of discarded tree-trunks and broken
branches, while bunches of orchid plants torn from falling trees
are crushed into the mud by the tracks of the bulldozers.
An almost universal forestry regulation in the tropics is that
trees are not cut within 50 metres of a watercourse in order to
minimise damage to streams and reduce the dangerous erosion that
can result from tropical rain falling directly on unprotected
soil.
Like most other such ground rules, it is being ignored. Said
Hitukera: "This is no good. They don't build proper bridges, they
just cut the trees and throw them into the river. The company has
spoiled everything here."
He surveyed the wasteland that used to be his forest where he
collected nuts and hunted wild pigs: "It's our land. They don't
have our permission. We have never had a single dollar either of
royalties or in compensation. But we're not leaving."
On Vela Lavella, the logging company had persuaded a local man to
sign papers giving it permission to cut timber, but he was not
the owner of the land.
This is not unusual. As the Barnett Report for the Papua New
Guinea Government commented some years ago: Foreign timber
companies operate outside the law, and are "effectively
unpoliceable, inherently corrupt and beyond reform."
In small island nations like the Solomons, any local man who can
be bribed with beer or a motorbike will do as a signatory. If
legal action is taken, delaying tactics are used while extraction
is speeded up.
Traditional owners all over the Solomons find that once a logging
company moves in, land that has belonged to the family or the
clan for generations is suddenly classed as "disputed." Nearly
every foreign timber company in the Solomons is engaged in legal
disputes with traditional landowners.
TRAFFIC points out that even where companies have legal timber
concessions, there is widespread overcutting and under-declaring
of timber, and disregard of local forestry regulations.
What I saw is typical of the whole region. At the present rate of
destruction it is estimated that the Solomons will have lost all
its lowland forest in five years - and with it will go all its
species found nowhere else in the world: More than 50 unique
orchids, 72 birds, 22 frogs, 27 lizards and nine snakes, as well
as unique species of crabs, spiders and beetles.
Beautiful postage stamps have been produced by the Post Office
featuring many of these animals and plants, yet the government
has neither the means nor the will to protect them.
Two years ago the Marovo Lagoon which lies off the islands of
Vangunu and New Georgia was recommended as a World Heritage Site
in a survey commissioned by the government, yet no move has yet
been made to protect it.
Instead, two separate commercial logging concessions have been
granted within the proposed protected area, and are causing
erosion of topsoil which is washed into the coral lagoon.
This plunder of the natural environment is driven by the demand
for tropical hardwood timber. Garden seats, windowframes, parquet
flooring, boardroom tables, plywood and cardboard; industrial
countries' appetite for tropical hardwood is insatiable, and most
of its comes from tropical rainforests.
While consumer attitudes gradually change, and events like the
Earth Summit slowly put such issues on the global agenda, the
international timber industry is aggressively increasing its
extraction rate from all the forests it can get access to,
legally or illegally.
The may by no tomorrow for commercial logging companies so they
are ripping out every tree they can - and small, developing
countries are in the front line.
--Gemini
###ENDS###
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