Green Chopsticks

Articles on rainforests

• Borneo: The Story Of A Gentle Adventure by Ellen J. Bartlett, 1988
• Nomadic rain-forest tribe in Borneo fears extinction by Beth Duff-Brown, 1999
• Forest exploitation in Papua New Guinea, The Contemporary Pacific 1997
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Borneo: The Story Of A Gentle Adventure

One day, when Eric Hansen was 8, he found a piece of bamboo in his parents' garage. He did what any boy who had seen a lot of jungle movies would do: He sharpened it at one end with his pocketknife and made a spear.

Twenty-five years later, walking alone in the rain forest of Borneo, he learned about real spears, and "what it feels like to look at the receiving end of one when it is held in the hands of an expert."

Needless to say, Hansen survived to tell his tale of the men with the spears and how he convinced them he was not a black ghost by producing a powerful talisman -- a fabric banana pin, about 3 inches long with a yellow polka-dot peel, that a friend had given to him as a going-away present.

In an age when obscure desert islands and frozen continents aren't much harder to get to than Fort Wayne, Ind., if you pay the right people enough money, it seems impossible that there could exist a place the traveling public has not yet found, much less overrun.

Eric Hansen found it in the tangled jungles and central highlands of Borneo, but he had to walk across the island to get there.

He set out in August 1982 from Kuching, a river city in Sarawak, a Malaysian state occupying the northwest corner of this equatorial island. He traversed the mountainous jungle that straddles the desolate border region between Sarawak and Kalimantan, which is in Indonesia. When he reached the southeastern shore, he turned back and recrossed the island.

He spent much of his journey in the company of local tribesmen he hired as guides -- paying for their services in shotgun shells, a commodity that in Borneo is both precious and illegal. Sometimes he traveled alone. He camped in the jungle, falling asleep listening to the nightly rains, awakening to a dawn chorus of gibbon monkeys; he slept on rattan mats in tribal longhouses. He ate what everyone else ate, from smoked wild pig to bats. He mastered the intricacies of the barter system, in operation in Asia since the Stone Age.

Borneo's dense jungle and remote highlands are not destinations for the merely curious. To venture here, you have to be committed, obsessed and possibly, as Hansen says now, a little crazy.

Hansen wrote a book about his journey. "Stranger in the Forest," which appeared in print last month, is a distillation of the journal he kept. It is a chronicle of the journey from its inception in 1976 -- a happenstance stopover in Sarawak -- and a revealing portrait of a traveler who never had been content merely to be a tourist.

"Travel is the act of leaving familiarity behind. Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey," he wrote. "I guess what I wanted from my journey was a unique experience, something so far beyond my comprehension that I would have to step completely out of my skin to understand and become a part of my surroundings.. . .

"The challenge was to do it alone," he said. "To make myself completely vulnerable, and to be changed by the environment."

As usually happens when you leave your world behind and venture into the unknown, things never go exactly as planned.

The original aim of his trip was to follow old trade routes across the island, collect jungle products and medicinal plants of value, and exchange them and Western goods for whatever he needed en route. "The concept was a masterful piece of scholarly lunacy based on anachronistic information and my own half-baked notions of Sarawak that had been gleaned from a 12-day drunken visit six years earlier," he wrote.

His first attempts to reach the highlands by river failed. When he finally set foot in the jungle, he realized he would be spending his first weeks there trying not to fall down.

"The rain forest felt magical and enchanted as long as I was sitting still, but the moment I began walking it became an obstacle course of steep razorback ridges, muddy ravines, fallen trees, slippery buttressed tree roots, impenetrable thickets of undergrowth, and a confusion of wildly twisting rivers running in every direction," he wrote. "I became disoriented. . . . In this giant greenhouse the air was saturated with the smell of damp earth and rotting vegetation. I exhausted myself trying to remain upright. It was futile."

But he did manage to cross the island, he collected the plants he was looking for, he exchanged his shotgun shells and chewing tobacco for everything he needed to survive. When he finally returned to the United States, he brought with him enough stories to fill several books.

Hansen said in a recent interview that many people find him an unlikely jungle explorer. He had to smile, he said, when Cosmopolitan magazine lauded him as a "literary Indiana Jones." Every appearance he makes, he said, people expect Harrison Ford to walk through the door, wearing khaki and a dazzling smile.

They don't quite know what to say when Hansen appears wearing sneakers. He just turned 40, his hair is thinning, his chin mildly receding. Even his own publishers were taken aback, he said. When he walked into the Houghton Mifflin publicity office, he distinctly heard somebody laugh.

"Conventional wisdom," he said, "is that only macho men do trips like this."

But his was not a high-drama adventure.

"It was a gentle way of going into another culture, a personal account of what happens when you leave your credit cards and your passport and your after-shave behind, strip all those things away, the distractions, the necessities, and discover how you spend your time," he said.

It is what Hansen has been doing since he was 18 and went on his first jaunt, which was to drive to Alaska in a Volkswagen van. He worked in a cement factory and then returned to his home in San Francisco and went to college.

The real journey began in 1971, when Hansen was drafted and didn't want to go to Vietnam. With $800 in his pocket and the same Volkswagen van, he left the United States and embarked upon a seven-year odyssey that took him around the world twice.

He worked as he went, picking up odd jobs, renovating houses, designing jewelry. He was an apprentice buffalo catcher, a wild-dog hunter, a rickshaw driver. He worked as a barber in Mother Teresa's Home for the Destitute Dying in Calcutta.

"I think everybody has fantasies, a dream destination," he said. "I have a habit of following up on those fantasies. I don't force situations. But when an opportunity presents itself, I will drop whatever I'm doing and go."

It was precisely how he ended up in Borneo.

"I like leaving myself open," he said. "I have never made the slightest attempt to control my situation, so things present themselves.. . .

"Some people can't quite bring themselves to do that," he said. "You have to adapt to circumstances, whether you like them or not. The sooner you surrender, the sooner you'll start enjoying yourself."

Hansen was one of the first Westerners to ever walk into the interior of Borneo. (His predecessor was a Dr. A.W. Nieuwenhuis, who traveled with two associates and 110 porters and bodyguards. They crossed the island in 1897, and it took them a year.) He may have been one of the last to see it undisturbed.

Hansen returned to Sarawak in June 1987 with an Australian television crew, to find that logging crews had slashed gaping holes in the rain forest. Crude roads ran everywhere. Members of the Penan tribe, one of the dozen tribes of hunters and gatherers who inhabit the rain forest, had managed to stop the bulldozers for seven months, but in the end the army moved in. The Penan were arrested and the logging resumed. The hardwood timber being harvested is used primarily in the manufacture of office furniture and chopsticks.

"It's 4,000 nomadic hunters against a $1.5 billion timber industry," he said. "No way they're going to stop it. No way they're going to survive as they are. The Penan have to move into the 20th century. To survive, they're going to have to find a niche in modern Malaysia."

Hansen is planning his second book, about North Yemen, inspired by his experiences there in 1978. It was another one of those chance encounters. En route from Sri Lanka in a 42-foot cutter, Hansen and his boatmates were shipwrecked and stranded for two weeks on a desert island in the Red Sea between Eritrea and North Yemen. Hansen was rescued by four Eritreans in a 40-foot Arabian dhow. They took him to North Yemen, along with their cargo of 60 goats, whereupon he was arrested by soldiers on suspicion of being a Soviet spy. He said he expects the book to take about two years.

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Nomadic rain-forest tribe in Borneo fears extinction

by Beth Duff-Brown, 1999, "

Copyright Associated Press, Aug 15, 1999

(IN THE BORNEO RAIN FOREST) - The Borneo headman drew his clenched fist to the midnight fire, opened his palm to the moon and revealed the flint he had kept in a bamboo box around his neck. "This was handed down by my grandfather and he got it from his grandfather," says Along Sega.

"I'll show them that I have more power in this fire-maker than all the loggers put together."

The next morning, a shotgun blast boomed through the jungle. It silenced the shrilling cicadas. One young tribesman reached for his poison blowpipe, another for his spear.

The gunshot, almost certainly fired by a hunter from a nearby logging camp, was a reminder that here, hundreds of miles from paved roads and electricity, seemingly centuries from modern civilization, Along and his Penan tribe are fighting a losing battle.

All the loggers put together greatly overpower the people known as the lost tribe of Borneo, among the last rain-forest nomads in the world. Along believes only 260 Penans still live in the jungle. He can't be sure because they don't count one another. Nor do they track time or age.

"But we are dying," Along said. "Of this we can be sure."

The timid nomads are being stampeded out of their dark jungle homeland. Logging, and the tug of city life and modern ways, are pushing them to extinction with the turn of the new millennium.

Environmentalists estimate that in the Borneo state of Sarawak, home of the Penans, 70 percent of one of the world's oldest forests has been denuded, at a rate nearly twice that of the Amazon.

Most of the 9,000 Penans on the Malaysian side of Borneo have moved into temporary government settlements. Only some 63 families remain in the jungle, living off hearts of palm, wild fruit, bear and boar.

The wild game has dwindled, the rivers are polluted by logging waste, and many trees whose bark and leaves provide everything from snakebite antidotes to contraceptives have died out.

"Tell them to stop the bulldozers," Along urged a rare Western visitor who had slipped across logging territory in northeastern Sarawak and hiked into the rain forest with a Penan guide. "Tell them to give us back our lives."

In the jungle, bare-chested with loincloth, Along was a compelling sight. A man in his late 50s, his dense black hair was severely cropped at the forehead and shaved above his ears. Each earlobe was pierced with a three-inch hole, then jammed with a tight spiral of bamboo that dangled to his neck.

Three weeks later and 350 miles west, in the Sarawak capital of Kuching, he cut a different figure. He seemed sadly out of place among the McDonald's restaurants, the businessmen with cell phones, the Muslim women on mopeds with helmets over their headscarves. He wore the blue jogging pants that his Western visitor had left at his camp. He and a dozen other Penans had come to the city to mount yet another protest against the loggers.

At the center of attention was a short, wiry man with a shaved head and an infectious laugh, a former shepherd from Switzerland named Bruno Manser whose lone battle for the Sarawak rain forest has won international attention.

If the Penans regard anyone as their savior, it is Manser. The 45- year-old Swiss has spent 15 years crusading for the Sarawak rain forest and lived with the Penans from 1984 to 1990. He joined thousands of them in confronting the bulldozers in highly publicized logging blockades. Expelled from Sarawak, he has returned secretly several times.

On his latest visit, he had just walked 150 miles from the Indonesian side of the island to elude authorities and mount another stunt to get the government's attention.

He intended to fly a paraglider into the compound of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, Sarawak's highest official. But he kept crashing or getting tangled up in trees. Finally the propeller broke. Things didn't look good.

Manser's difficulties would cause few Malaysians to shed tears.

Malaysia, which shares sovereignty over Borneo with Indonesia and Brunei, is famously prickly about Westerners telling it what to do, and the logging issue is part of that broader East-West standoff.

Already in 1992, on the eve of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad was denouncing Manser's campaign as "the height of arrogance." Today his words are echoed by Barney Chan, general manager of the Sarawak Timber Association.

"I know that it's not politically correct to say, but you have a bunch of white guys running around telling the brown man what to do," said Chan. "It's a situation whereby very few people, 260 Penans, are on one side and on the other side you have a few hundred thousand people benefiting from logging."

By "white guys," he meant U.S. Vice President Al Gore and other international luminaries who have lent public support to Manser's cause.

The timber industry produces $1.5 billion in annual revenue and provides good livelihoods for 100,000 families. It says it's tired of Manser and others crying environmental and human devastation. And it is offering to set aside land for the Penans.

"With or without Bruno, we - meaning the government of Sarawak - are on the side of the Penans and we're willing to help the Penans," said Chan.

Logging began sweeping across Mississippi-sized Sarawak in the 1970s, and Malaysia quickly became the world's No. 1 exporter of tropical hardwoods for scaffolding, chopsticks and furniture.

But by 1991, even the pro-logging International Tropical Timber Organization warned that Sarawak would be denuded within 13 years if the 150 timber concessions didn't cut production drastically. It recommended halving exports and halting logging on steep slopes to prevent erosion.

The government insists it responded well. Within five years, it says, exports were more than halved. And last year, Sarawak's state government passed legislation banning all commercial hunting in an effort to protect tribal food sources.

Asia's 1997 economic crisis also intervened. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand, the biggest customers for wood, cut their purchases and by the following year exports were down 30 percent.

Four-fifths of Sarawak is covered in forest. More than half of it is licensed for logging under a system that fells 8 to 12 trees for every 2 1/2 acres, replanting and then allowing the forest to regenerate for 25 years.

About 12 percent of the rain forest has been set aside as protected areas for national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.

But while the plan appears solid on paper, environmentalists say it it isn't happening in reality, that erosion and river silt have already destroyed ecological gene pools long before regeneration can occur.

"Only the most remote areas of Sarawak haven't been affected by logging," said Thomas Jalong, coordinator of the Sarawak branch of the environmentalist Friends of the Earth. "Logging activities are now carried out right in the interior and most of these areas are sensitive ecological zones."

Only seven hours by foot from remote Penan territory, many patches of balding cliffs are visible where trees have been uprooted.

"We may be on the losing end now," said Jalong. "Despite all the campaigns and all the concerns, both locally and internationally, the logging activities still go on undeterred."

Logging, poaching and man-made fires to clear land for palm-oil plantations have cut deep into Sarawak's rich wildlife. The red-haired orangutan, found only in Borneo, faces extinction, its numbers down from an estimated 180,000 a decade ago to no more than 30,000 today.

Also on the endangered list is the hornbill, Sarawak's state bird, which is known for its huge curved beak and piercing call.

It is revered by the Penans.

"When the hornbill calls, it's like hearing our father speak, it makes us feel warm," said Along. "But now we don't hear our father speak to us anymore."

---

Before daylight fades - early in a land where sunshine rarely breaks through thick vines of mossy elephant ears - the Penan men clear the jungle at the bank of the Limbang River. They whack down wiry palms and put up a platform so everyone can sleep above the wet ground and leeches massing at the scent of human flesh.

The women weave a rooftop of palm fronds for protection from the never-ending drizzle and the children clip kindling for the fire. They flick bloated leeches off their ankles as they boil a thick paste of sago palm and tapioca starch.

Later they will wrap themselves in faded batik sarongs and hum and rock one another to sleep.

While most Penans who have moved into the settlements have been converted to Christianity, nomads are largely animists who believe nature has a soul and forest spirits must be protected and undisturbed.

Their poison darts, made of "tajem" from the latex of the ipoh tree, are only used to kill big game. A hunter will often return with a baby bear or monkey which becomes part of the clan and will never be eaten.

The Penans never walk directly toward another person and when they pass by, they bend slightly and bow. Eye contact is rare.

"Never once in the course of six years did I see a Penan interrupt another, let alone shout at or assault another," Manser writes in his 1996 book, "Voices from the Rainforest."

They are a people unsuited to confrontation. But the ruin of their habitat has forced many of them into an existence of pleading and demanding and blockading, all contrary to their nature.

One of the main problems, according to some environmentalists, is that the government and loggers are one and the same.

Ruled for a century as a private fiefdom by the Brookes, an adventurous English family, Sarawak was ceded to Britain in 1946. In 1949, the British awarded a timber concession to James Wong Kim Min, who pioneered hill logging with bulldozers and made a fortune.

Wong is now Sarawak's environment minister.

Taib, the chief minister, is also the forestry minister, whose department grants logging concessions and approves environmental impact statements.

Wong and Taib declined to respond to questions for this report, but Wong sent a copy of his book, "Hill Logging in Sarawak," an emotional 33-page defense of logging practices in which he proclaims, sometimes through poetry, his love of the land.

He blames most deforestation on centuries of slash-and-burn cultivation by islanders and warns that a boycott of Sarawak hardwoods would result in fewer reasons to protect the forest.

"It would be nice of course if a country could afford to leave its natural resources in a pristine state," Wong writes. "Every nation exploits its natural resources to survive and provide better living for its people."

Wong has hostile words for Manser:

"He went around encouraging the nomadic Penans to continue living in their primeval and unhealthy way of life, but he himself after a few years of vacation decided he had had enough ... - no doubt he missed his Swiss cheese and the comforts of civilization - and ran away from his friends."

The Penans call Manser "Lakei Dja-au," or Big Man. The loggers have dubbed him the new White Rajah, alluding to Sarawak's past as a corner of the British Empire.

"Bruno has some special power; he's like a god sent down to us," says Kayan Etek, another tribal headman.

Manser says he never set out to be a crusader. The Swiss Alpine pastures had become too congested, and Borneo was a magical land he had mused over for years. So he came here "as a human being who loves nature, who loves life and who also loves adventure."

"That's when I found the Penans. I joined their life for six years and they asked me for help. If a child is drowning and crying for help, what would you do?"

Manser has consistently badgered the Malaysian government to honor its decade-old promise to create a 1,280-square-mile forest reserve for the Penans in what they regard as their ancestral land.

But a 1958 British colonial law designates all uncultivated native land as state forests. Since the Penans are nomadic and don't clear land for annual harvest, the law gives them no ownership rights.

"They don't live for dollars. They don't ask for anything," Manser said. "They live only for all the resources that they find in the virgin forests, for the wild game and the wild fruit."

Government policy is to encourage Penans to move into mainstream Malay culture, become rice farmers, get modern medical care and educate their children under the Malay curriculum.

But the Penans describe the government settlements as little more than tin-roofed refugee camps with dirty water beneath the dreaded tropical sun. They are heartsick for home.

"We want the choice to go back to the forests," says James Lalokeso, a spokesman for the 1,500 partially settled Penans in Ulu Baram in northeastern Sarawak. "But so far, we have no reserved land, no protected areas, and loggers are operating on our land even as we speak."

In 1990, the European Community passed a resolution calling for the protection of tropical forests. Al Gore, then a U.S. senator, introduced a resolution in Congress demanding that Malaysia end "the uncontrolled exploitation of the rain forests of Sarawak."

Even some Manser antagonists have a grudging respect for him - such as Chan of the timber association, who has known him for years.

When Manser called Chan to tell him he was going to paraglide into Taib's compound, Chan tried to talk him out of it.

"I told him, `Don't be stupid. This is not the Asian way."'

---

On the second day of the holiday to celebrate the end of the Muslim hajj, or pilgrimage, Manser and his small crew from Europe, armed with a more powerful propeller, tried again to get his paraglider up over Kuching and into the chief minister's compound.

"I hope the chief minister will celebrate by helping to protect the Penans and one of the most beautiful forests in the world," Manser said just before he took off, successfully this time.

A dozen Penans had come from around Sarawak to cheer him on. Dressed in loincloth and holding their spears, they stood in an open field next to a Muslim cemetery as Manser took flight with his blue parachute that read: "Taib + Penans."

As soon as he landed by Taib's compound, he was hustled into a jeep and put on a first-class flight back to Switzerland.

One of those squinting up as Manser glided over the blue-tiled dome of the state mosque was his old friend Along, a veteran of logging protests who once spent two weeks in jail. He had been promised an audience with Taib and was prepared to remain in the big city until he had his say or was thrown in jail.

"Our government is like an old grandfather," Along said. "If the chief minister is not yet ready to talk with his children, then we will just wait until he will see us."

But there was no audience. The next day, Along was put on a bus and told to go home, back to the jungle where now even fewer trees stood.

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Forest exploitation in Papua New Guinea

The Contemporary Pacific 9(1):25-- (Spring 1997)

Copyright 1997 University of Hawaii Press

Papua New Guinea has a total land area of 46.2 million hectares and a population of about 4 million people. Of this land, 97 percent is privately owned by the customary owners. Forest covers some 78 percent or 36.125 million hectares of the total land mass, ranging from mangrove forests along the coast to alpine forests at higher altitudes. About 15 million hectares of these forests are considered operable (commercial) forests. However, some uncertainty exists about the exact acreage of the operable forest because the figure of 15 million hectares was estimated from aerial photographs taken by the Australian military during the war (1944-45) and in the early 1960s, making them about fifty and thirty years old respectively. Further, much of these areas has since been cleared for agriculture, infrastructure, mining and oil exploration, and by logging operations. Of the 36.1 million hectares of forested land, 35.563 million hectares are broadleaf forests, 520,000 hectares are coniferous, and 42,000 hectares are plantation forests (World Bank 1990).

Although Papua New Guinea's forests account for only 1.5 percent of the world's tropical rainforests, they are outstandingly rich in diversity by global standards. Few species of plants or animals are considered endangered, but this could be a consequence of incomplete inventory. The conservation and commercial value of this rich gene pool is considerable. The forests offer many natural resources of commercial, subsistence, cultural, and scientific importance. In terms of timber production, the country's forests contain more than two thousand species of trees, of which about four hundred are known to be commercially useful.

Past forestry legislation allows for the harvest of timber and other forest products through the granting of permits, licenses, authorities, and approvals to private dealings. However, current legislation allows only two types of license: permits and authorities. The maximum annual allowable cut under all concessions at present represents 4.6 million cubic meters, but the actual total annual harvest has been less. In 1991, the harvest up to September was 1.2 million cubic meters.

The export of timber in unprocessed form (logs) is by far the largest activity of the timber industry, representing over 80 percent of all forest-product exports. There are currently some forty log-exporting operations. To correct this apparent imbalance between the high level of log exporting and the low level of processing, the new National Forest Policy includes measures to encourage and require onshore processing. At present, the timber processing industry in the country includes about 50 large sawmills, 1 plywood mill, 1 woodchip mill, and 27 furniture-making factories and joineries. In addition, there are more than 400 small, mobile sawmills scattered across the country.

Since about 97 percent of the land in Papua New Guinea remains under the ownership of the traditional owners through village clans, almost all rainforest areas are owned by them. Access to land and ownership of land together with its resources are important for the people's day-to-day subsistence. Land is also a major determinant of wealth and status. By law, development of forest resources must be carried out with the approval and participation of the local owners.

Experience has shown that landowners' concerns about royalty payments, environmental degradation, and lack of opportunities for meaningful participation in development projects, can lead to disputes that in turn can slow down or even halt a project. Landowner companies are being formed to give local communities greater control over forest development.

In this paper, I give a brief account of forest exploitation in relation to changes in forest policies and acts of parliament, acquisition of forest resources for development, forestry, and economy, future sustainability, and the associated problems.

BACKGROUND TO PRESENT FOREST DEVELOPMENTS

Although the first colonial government in Papua was established in 1884, the first forestry activity was not initiated until 1908, when an Australian forester made a brief appraisal of the timber resource. A timber ordinance came into effect in 1909 in both territories--Papua and New Guinea. The first commercial sawmill began operations at Ulamona, West New Britain Province, in 1898. In the period before the Second World War, C E LanePoole, an Australian forester of worldwide reputation, visited Papua New Guinea as a consultant to the Australian Government. He reported that there was potential of a high order, but no immediate prospect of profitable sawmilling. In 1937 a Forestry Ordinance was enacted to control use, establish a forest industry, and acquire and manage a forest estate. This superseded the 1909 legislation, which had been found inadequate. In New Guinea, nine small sawmills were operating at the beginning of the Second World War and an export trade of Dracontomelum logs, mostly to the United States, had begun in 1937. The volume exported had reached 16,500 cubic meters by 1940-41. During the latter part of the war the large demand for round timber and lumber by the Allied Forces caused the establishment of many logging and sawmilling operations, and more than 188,000 cubic meters of sawn timber were produced between 1943 and the end of the war in August 1945.

Perhaps more important was the establishment by the Australian Army of a forest resource survey unit, which inventoried the forests of the northeast coast of the mainland, parts of the Bismarck Archipelago, and the North Solomons. Aerial photo interpretation supplemented field reconnaissance. During these surveys more than 9,500 botanical specimens were collected, forming the basis for the National Herbarium at Lae. Earlier German collections had been housed in Germany, and most were lost during the war. Using these data, J B McAdam, the first director of the newly constituted Forestry Department, stated that there was a possible resource of 90 million cubic meters in accessible forests in Papua New Guinea.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s a program of resource assessment continued, but the main emphasis was on supporting postwar reconstruction through the operation of the two government sawmills, at Yalu near Lae and at Kerevat near Rabaul. Each mill produced about 4,000 cubic meters of lumber per year, the Yalu mill from 1947 to 1962, and the Kerevat mill from 1946 to 1958. Reforestation projects were begun at Bulolo, Kerevat, and later at Brown River near Port Moresby. In 1957 a forest policy was announced whose seven main elements were acquisition and reservation of a permanent forest estate, establishment of a training center, establishment of a research institute, reforestation with a strong bias toward grassland reclamation in the highlands, timber use research, continuing botanical collection and identification, and promotion of the timber industry.

By 1960 well over two thousand people were employed in the timber trade, which represented half the total labor force in factory employment in the country. Caution was still expressed about the rate of expansion of exploitation because inventory data were considered inadequate--a caution that with the advantage of hindsight was only too well justified. The forestry program of 1962-1967 paralleled increased exploitation with expansion of reforestation, the establishment of the Forestry School at Bulolo, and an increase in forest stations throughout the country. The major forestry activity from 1957 to 1963 was forest inventory, when some 600,000 hectares were covered by reconnaissance-level surveys, making extensive use of helicopters from 1964 on. By 1975, 4.8 million hectares had been appraised, and all the major areas suitable for exploitation had been identified.

In 1968 a five-year development program, extending from 1968-69 to 1972-73, was announced, with the major objectives of a rapid increase in processing, increased export earnings and employment through local processing, the establishment of a fully integrated forest industry by building industrial complexes within permanent forest estates, the promotion of local equity participation in the industry, and increased training and employment in the timber industry. These programs, plus the strategies recommended by the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, shaped the course of the industry's development until the policy revision of 1979. The need for foreign skills and finance was appreciated, as was the fact that new processing in most cases would have to be preceded by log exports.

The government had an eight-point improvement program for the entire economy. For the forestry sector, the 1973 Forest Policy and the 1971 "Private Dealings Act" were defined as an expression of these eight objectives, which included increased opportunity for local equity participation in the forest industry; providing direct revenue to resource owners through shares in timber royalties, equity, and employment; developing extension services to promote local participation in forest industry activities, minor forest products, and reforestation; increased opportunities for employment in logging, hauling, carpentry, and other small industries; improving the competitive position of local timber products against imports; improved marketing and prices for exported timber products to generate more revenue from royalties and taxes; increasing opportunities for female employment in forestry; and the assumption by the Forestry Department of management responsibility for forest resources, to ensure that the national objectives were achieved, that resource owners were fairly treated, and that the industry assumed maximum responsibility for reforestation and use.

Of the major objectives identified, the creation of a permanent forest estate has been the most difficult to implement, not through any lack of effort by the Forestry Department, but because of landownership problems. A gradual increase in the acquisitions of timber rights purchases followed, and to some extent paralleled, the acquisition of land for plantations, peaking in the late 1960s. By this mechanism there was no problem of land purchase, but the rights to the timber were assumed by the government. Initial projects were mainly for log export and, in the case of Madang, chipwood export.

Regrettably, over a period it became apparent that the export of processed lumber rarely showed a profit, for many complex reasons. The main ones include a hard-kina currency policy determined by the far more important nonmanufacturing industries, specifically copper; sizable untied aid from Australia; a regional surplus of processing in the countries of the South East Asian Lumber Producers Association; very high wages in Papua New Guinea relative to its competitors; and small domestic markets that limited the use of lesser known species and of sizes unsuitable for export. Expectations and predictions of forest industry growth made in the early 1970s were not fulfilled, and a series of sawmills closed. The oil crisis of 1973-74 gravely affected the Japanese economy's requirement for processed products, and Papua New Guinea was already firmly tied to that market for forest products. This problem, compounded by the others mentioned, forced the Department of Forests to review its strategy.

In 1979 a revised policy, announced by the minister for forests, was addressed to two fundamental areas of the National Development Strategy: that natural resources will be used to generate revenue, and that opportunities for wage earning and self-employment in the rural sector must be expanded. The essential ingredients of the policy were a relaxation-of-the former stringent limits on log exports, in recognition of the need for the establishment of a profitable industry as a means to increase income for the country; the increased efficiency of existing processing (and any firmly committed to be built); the continuing encouragement of investment from foreign companies with a proven ability to process and market forest products; and the establishment of Forestry Development Corporations.

As a consequence of this policy change aimed at increasing foreign exchange earnings through increases in the export of round logs, large tracts of natural forest lands were destroyed. The log-export trade was characterized by the dominance of a few foreign companies with strong commercial links abroad and often working as subsidiaries to their overseas principals. Coupled with the increases in export logs, the returns to the resource owners, and also to the state, were minimal. Much of the revenue due was lost through transfer pricing, undervaluing of timber through misidentification of tree species, gross mismanagement of logging operations due to lack of monitoring, and an almost complete absence of locally owned international log-trading institutions.

In 1989, then Prime Minister Paias Wingti, through the National Executive Council, established a commission to inquire into aspects of the forest industry and to investigate its activities throughout the country. The results of this investigation showed that the industry was "totally out of control" (Barnett 1989). In 1990 the World Bank came to the aid of the government and began to draw up strategies to remedy the situation. Concomitantly, the government, following the results of the Barnett Commission, began to draw up a new forest policy and by 1991 a new Forestry Act had been passed by parliament. Further amendments were enacted in 1993. The new Act basically aimed at changing the trend toward exploitative industry to one of adherence to the principles of sustainable yield management. This aim was further spelled out in the policy, which can be summarized as: the introduction of sustained yield management principles into all aspects of forestry projects; the expansion of research capacity through upgrading facilities and the management of research programs (by determining exact resource availability, types of species, growth increments and yield, and reforestation and agroforestry requirements with different types of effective forest management systems); the strengthening of planning, extension monitoring, and enforcement capacity; provision for adequate data for use in planning, monitoring, and enforcement capabilities before projects are approved; ensuring adherence to procedures of consultation with provinces, resource owners, and other appropriate bodies in forestry planning; ensuring adequate information to, and feedback from, resource owners on proposed projects and their potential implications; the establishment of appraisal procedures for investors and other developers involved or to be involved in the industry; the establishment of review procedures for the industry, government institutions, and the decision-making processes in forestry; the establishment of a state marketing agency to ensure competitive international markets; the establishment of a National Forestry Service operating under a board with representation from national and provincial government departments, the industry, and nongovernment organizations; the encouragement of local downstream processing of forest products; and the development of an effective training program for forestry personnel, in both the government and private sectors.

For this policy to become effective, a substantial program of support is required. It involves, among other things, a major restructuring of the forestry administration. Support for this was provided by the World Bank initiative that established the National Forest and Conservation Action Plan, many of whose programs are already under way.

RESOURCE ACQUISITIONS

Since the land and its forest resources are owned by the customary owners, the only way to develop the forest resources is to obtain approval from the owners. To acquire such approvals in a legal manner, the government passed various Acts. Prior to 1991, the state was able to acquire rights for the development of forest resources through timber rights purchases, the Native Timber Authority, and the provisions of the Private Dealings Act.

Timber rights purchases, the main instrument for large-scale forest use, enable the state to acquire the rights over the timber resources of a given concession and then to issue a permit to a selected operator to develop it. Conditions of forest management, environmental protection, and royalty payments are all elements of a permit. The royalty collected is variously divided between the landowners and the provincial and national governments.

The Native Timber Authority permits a person to directly purchase small quantities of timber from a customary landowner. It is a useful tool for clearing fragmented resources on land needed for agriculture.

Under the Private Dealings Act private landowners are permitted to directly dispose of their timber resources to any person, subject to the approval of the minister, who must be satisfied that the owners' interests are protected, the agreement does not run contrary to the national interest, and there is a reasonable prospect of economic success.

In 1991, however, the new Forestry Act was passed, superseding the Private Dealings Act and timber rights purchases (which were replaced by the somewhat similar Forest Management Agreement). The Native Timber Authority remained the same, except that it was renamed the Timber Authority.

Under the earlier legislative arrangements, over 4.6 million hectares, or 31 percent of the operable forests, had been approved and allocated for development up to the end of 1990. Further, well over 40 percent of resources allocated were from the New Guinea Islands region, followed by Southern, Momase, and Highlands regions (table 1). The provinces from which much of these resource allocations came were West New Britain (902,888 hectares or 19.29 percent), Gulf (500,355 hectares or 10.65 percent), Western (438,683 hectares or 9.37 percent), and New Ireland (427,211 hectares or 9.13 percent). Most of the prewar forest activities were based in East New Britain and New Ireland Provinces.

Table 1. Resource allocations from the prewar era to the end of 1990 Period Region and Province Prewar 1951-1960 1961-1970 1971-1980 Highlands -- 2,373 164,053 611 Chimbu -- -- -- -- Eastern Highlands -- 374 1,474 -- Enga -- 997 41,890 -- Southern Highlands -- -- 38,000 611 Western Highlands -- 1,002 82,689 -- Momase -- 25,313 356,567 168,500 East Sepik -- 25,313 4,157 -- Madang -- -- 52,265 45,700 Morobe -- -- -- 122,800 West Sepik -- -- 300,145 -- New Guinea Islands 17,199 94,100 609,577 427,743 East New Britain 16,369 21,010 162,960 -- Manus -- -- -- 1,500 New Ireland 830 80 17,600 81,816 (*)131,195 North Solomons -- 4,460 49,940 22,650 West New Britain -- 68,550 379,077 190,582 Southern -- 8,800 275,467 83,288 Central -- -- 78,070 34,311 Gulf -- 6,937 40,065 -- Milne Bay -- 1,863 92,221 -- Oro -- -- 48,506 48,977 Western -- -- 16,605 -- Total 17,199 130,586 1,405,664 680,142 (*)131,195 Percent 0.37 2.79 30.03 11.73 (*)2.80 Period Total Region and Province 1981-1990 hectares Percent Highlands 2,013 169,050 3.61 Chimbu -- -- -- Eastern Highlands 460 2,308 0.04 Enga 596 43,483 0.93 Southern Highlands 630 39,241 0.84 Western Highlands 327 84,018 1.80 Momase 447,456 997,836 21.32 East Sepik -- 28,470 0.61 (*)39,978 (*)39,978 (*)0.85 Madang 288,588 386,553 8.26 Morobe 69,842 192,642 4.12 West Sepik 448 300,593 6.42 (*)48,600 (*)48,600 1.04 New Guinea Islands 760,449 1,909,068 40.79 East New Britain 217,497 417,836 8.93 Manus 13,600 15,100 0.32 (*)19,067 (*)19,067 (*)0.41 New Ireland 83,690 3,184,016 3.93 (*)112,000 (*)243,195 (*)5.20 North Solomons 49,916 126,966 2.71 West New Britain 68,181 706,390 15.09 (*)196,498 (*)196,498 (*)4.20 Southern 1,236,907 1,604,462 34.28 Central 170,893 283,274 6.05 (*)45,000 (*)45,000 (*)0.96 Gulf 453,353 500,355 10.69 Milne Bay 77,013 171,097 3.66 Oro 28,640 126,123 2.70 (*)39,930 (*)39,930 (*)0.85 Western 422,078 438,683 9.37 Total 2,446,825 4,680,416 100.00 (*)501,073 (*)632,268 Percent 41.57 86.49 (*)10.71 (*)13.51

(*) Additional allocations under Private Dealings Act license.

Source. Summarized from PNG Department of Forests 1990.

Among the trends observed during the period from 1951 to 1990 was the sudden increase in resource allocations. For instance, seven years after the war almost twice the available resource was allocated for development, and by end of 1990 (a fifty-year period) it had reached over 4.6 million hectares. Much of the increase could be accounted for in terms of the requirements for postwar reconstruction and the 1979 dramatic change in forest policy.

Further, the increases in the periods 1971-1980 and 1981-1990 resulted from the implementation of the 1971 Private Dealings Act, particularly in the New Guinea Islands region, where 243,195 hectares of forest resource in New Ireland and 196,498 hectares from West New Britain were allocated under the Act during those periods. Resources allocated through the Private Dealings Act amounted to 13.51 percent (632.268 hectares) of all allocated forest resource areas.

Figures for the volume of timber extracted were not available, but assuming that the average density is 25 cubic meters per hectare, from the prewar period to the end of 1990 a total of 114,230,500 cubic meters of logs could have been extracted.

FORESTRY AND ECONOMY

Papua New Guinea has an open economy with a large international trade sector. Important primary commodities include coffee, cocoa, copra, timber, and fish, while mineral exports of copper, gold, oil, and gas are significant revenue earners. The open nature of the economy has meant that Papua New Guinea is vulnerable to international price fluctuations and inflationary impulses. In defense, the major macroeconomic strategy has been the "hard kina" strategy, which has been in place since independence. In 1990, however, the closure of the Bougainville mine forced the country to devalue its currency by 10 percent. As a result of several problems, including some structural and cultural ones, its mountainous landscape, and its many islands, Papua New Guinea is saddled with a high-cost economy.

The role of forests in generating revenue for the nation is indicated in table 2. Generally, the forestry sector earns from K15 million to more than K100 million of foreign exchange, or between 5 and to percent of the total value of all exports. It is the third most important sector of the national economy, in part because it generates revenue, employment, and infrastructure development, especially in remote areas of the country. The revenue from log exports represents over 80 percent of total earnings, followed by woodchips (9 percent), and sawn timber (6 percent). However, the export of sawn timber has declined as a consequence of the 1979 policy (although it was not the intention), with greater emphasis on the export of round logs, high labor and maintenance costs, low recovery, and the low quality of logs processed.

Table 2. Export of forest products by value Logs Sawn Timber Woodchips Year thousands of kina 1973-74 11,804.3 4,731.1 174.7 1974-75 7,307.1 2,719.8 1,512.8 1975-76 6,579.1 5,162.9 3,436.9 1977 10,596.9 5,669.6 4,688.9 1978 11,933.3 3,725.4 5,447.6 1979 20,755.1 7,934.9 4,432.2 1980 31,192.9 6,182.3 7,092.2 1981 31,263.3 3,609.4 5,460.6 1982 49,576.2 3,513.8 5,674.9 1983 44,053.7 3,161,2 5,922.5 1984 70,272.8 3,322.1 6,137.8 1985 30,315.4 1,878.0 2,705.8 1986 70,235.3 1,571.7 5,203.8 1987 105,462.0 863.7 5,990.3 1988 92,551.5 692.5 6,779.4 1989 84,277.7 944.4 5,843.1 1990 74,627.5 1,290.1 7,092.0 Total 752,804.1 56,972.9 83,595.5 Percent 81.02 6.13 9.00 Plywood Chopsticks Year 1973-74 3,235.4 -- 1974-75 2,645.5 -- 1975-76 3,487.3 205.3 1977 2,028.9 551.8 1978 2,371.8 642.1 1979 2,466.6 685.2 1980 2,982.4 1,135.4 1981 3,068.9 1,270.2 1982 2,887.8 862.2 1983 2,464.2 17.0 1984 2,317.2 3.7 1985 332.5 -- 1986 123.1 -- 1987 15.8 -- 1988 3.9 -- 1989 -- -- 1990 -- -- Total 30,431.3 5,372.9 Percent 3.28 0.58

Source: Adapted and modified from World Bank 1990.

FUTURE SUSTAINABILITY

The concept of sustainability is not new to Papua New Guinea. Traditionally, many people lived in self-contained communities that were sustained over a long period of time. Some traditional systems, however, have not proven sustainable. Current economic and population pressures increase the risk that some systems may collapse. The present-day dual economy, which involves both market and subsistence activities, places differing pressures on resources. Our people's expectations have increased, and their needs have changed. Because many now seek a transition from subsistence to the market economy, Papua New Guinea must achieve economic growth and social development without degrading the potential of its renewable natural resources.

The challenge is to create opportunities for development consistent with the broad goal of sustainable development that will optimize all benefits from forest use, tangible and nontangible, while conserving the integrity of the forest ecosystem. Therefore, it is imperative that sustainable development of forest resources in Papua New Guinea recognize the critical role of land and forest resources to the country's way of life and, in particular, the importance of simultaneously considering social, environmental, and market demands. The diversity of cultural practices and traditional conservation practices, largely still in place, must be integrated with the government's objective of achieving "integral human development."

These objectives should maintain biodiversity, the ecological integrity of all natural ecosystems, and the general quality of the environment. To achieve the nation's full economic and social potential, resources must be used efficiently, without detracting from community values, and with equitable. allocation of rights of access and opportunities to develop resources. This should include equitable distribution of the benefits of development to the communities. Further, the strategy of sustainable development should avoid changes that might be irreversible and should acknowledge uncertainties about the impact of economic activity on the environment.

PROBLEMS

Papua New Guinea's approach to sustainable development of its natural renewable resources, in particular the forest resources, is at present being addressed through the National Forest and Conservation Action Plan. The notion of sustainable development requires attention to a number of critical problems.

Given that 97 percent of the land and resources are under customary ownership, government allocation of land, together with its resources, for longer-term developments for purposes other than those of the owners is very difficult. Land is owned through clans and claims to it are enforced by cooperative actions of the descent system buttressed by traditional beliefs that the spirits of the forebears are the ultimate guardians. That land or resources are held under such interlocking systems of rights and obligations makes the likelihood of transfers of such assets to individuals or groups outside the immediate clan group very remote. Not only does this make land purchases or leases impossible, but it also makes it difficult to obtain general agreement for long-term land-use developments that do not show immediate and obvious benefits to the owners.

Other outstanding problems require consideration. Increasing population growth (2.2 to 2.4 percent per year) will place increasing pressure on the forest resources. For gross domestic product per capita to remain the same from year to year the volume of economic activity has to increase commensurately. A sizeable percentage of the population is concerned mainly with day-to-day survival and with overcoming poverty rather than preserving resources for future generations. Among resource owners, the lack of awareness, knowledge, and understanding of the unsustainable development is coupled with unrealistic expectations of returns and compounded by a lack of political will to commit and implement policies conducive to sustainable development, especially regarding forest resources. Legislative arrangements, national forest policies, and environmental management plans are not consistent with each other. Understanding of forest resources and ecosystem dynamics is hampered by the lack of research, trained personnel, and funds to carry out the essential tasks of project design, data generation, evaluation, and monitoring.

This lack of information has far-reaching implications for drawing up provincial and national forestry plans. Decisions about allowable volume of cut at a sustainable level must be based on accurate data and information. Current calculations are based on a forty-year cutting cycle, which is too low to serve as the basis for all other assumptions for drawing up forestry plans. We have yet to determine the extent of the forest resource (15 million hectares?), its growth rates and formation performances (both in the natural state and when disturbed by logging and similar activities), and its environmental requirements. Further, advice is often inappropriate when it comes from experts who do not appreciate the social and political realities of Papua New Guinea, especially in relation to resource use and ownership, or the vulnerability of the country's economy to fluctuations in the international markets. In relation to this vulnerability, Papua New Guinea must also keep its terms of trade within accepted limits and service its debts.

References

Barnett, T 1989 Commission of Inquiry into Aspects of the Forest Industry: Final Report, volume 1. Waigani: Prime Minister's Department.

PNG DF, Papua New Guinea Department of Forests 1990 Timber Rights Purchase and Local Forest Areas: General Information. 31 December. Port Moresby.

World Bank 1990 The Forestry Sector. A Tropical Forestry Action Plan Review. Port Moresby.

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