Wednesday, 22 Jan 2025

Fighting off the bulldozers in the sacred kwila forests of Papua New Guinea

Fighting off the bulldozers in the sacred kwila forests of Papua New Guinea


Fighting off the bulldozers in the sacred kwila forests of Papua New Guinea
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Towering kwila trees were among those locals say were felled by loggers. This is a coveted, high-value species that yields the rich red timber familiar in Australia as merbau.

Locals say the bulldozer felled 18 kwila and 100 mixed hardwoods.

When one of the local chiefs heard what had occurred, he says he lay down in his hut grief-stricken, and stayed there for days.

Others ordered the young men of the clans not to retaliate with violence. Instead, on 19 May Lavate, the secretary of a collective of local clans known as the Yikmol Landowners Association, was dispatched with a letter advising the loggers they had caused damage to the external border of a designated conservation area, that they had no right to be there and should withdraw immediately. And they did.

Omben, the chief from neighbouring Arenduk village, says that since the letter to the loggers at Suburam in May, the logging crews have moved away.

But the Tivia have continued to fight back, seeking justice of some kind, although Lavate says their loss can never be compensated. And so it is that when they hear a reporter from the Guardian is in Madang town, a delegation of 21 men, including seven chiefs, walk hours overnight to catch a ride into town and tell their story.

Just three weeks before the bulldozers arrived, Suburam village had been the site of a 20-clan, five-pig feast and extravaganza, as the community celebrated the creation of a conservation area covering nearly 10,000 hectares of forest.

For decades, forest communities in PNG have fallen back on selling their trees as one of the only ways to earn income in a country where basic services are scarce and households struggle to cover school fees. It has rendered communities vulnerable to exploitative deals. Loggers are offering 35 kina (about $US10) a cubic metre for prized kwila trees, but often pay less, locals say. These same trees often sell in China for $US500 a cubic metre, according to a 2021 PNG government report.

Rather than sell their trees, Lavate and other landowners are trying to safeguard them for future generations, negotiating fraught clan politics, agreeing terms and mapping boundaries for a patchwork of locally controlled conservation areas.

According to mapping done by locals and seen by the Guardian, the logging crew that arrived near Suburam in May carved their road hard along the boundary of the new Yikmol conservation area, despite regulations requiring a 100 metre buffer zone around protected areas, before pushing inside it at least once. Perhaps they were unaware of the new conservation area, or unpersuaded of its authority.

The paperwork formalising the new conservation area could not be lodged with provincial authorities because they were on a protracted strike. Meanwhile, legislation enshrining new protected areas across PNG has been stuck by political inaction for years.

But there are also questions around what rights the Malaysian-owned logging company, Woodbank Pacific Limited, had to be operating in the area at all. The company has not responded to questions, and neither has the PNG Forest Authority.

In a soon-to-be-published analysis for the ANU Development Policy Centre drawing on 40 years of insight and data, veteran PNG forestry expert Prof Colin Filer observes that outdated TRPs have produced more log exports than any other type of licence for the clearing of PNG forests, and that almost two-thirds of exports in the past three years have come from areas where TRP agreements have expired.

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