26 May 2006 - Lake Murray,
Papua New Guinea — After three months, our Global
Forest Rescue Station (GFRS) in remote Papua New
Guinea has come to an end.
The GFRS was established when
Lake Murray tribes invited Greenpeace to help
protect their ancient forest. Volunteers from
around the world took up the invitation, and went
to live and work alongside the Kuni, Begwa and
Pari tribes.
Together, they set about ‘boundary
marking’ an area of over 300,000 hectares of remote
forest.
Logging companies, mainly from
Malaysia, have already acquired 70 per cent of
Papua New Guinea’s available forest resource.
The livelihood of forest communities – who rely
on the forest for food, clean water and medicines
– is under immediate threat. Less than 1 per cent
of these communities have any form of official
protection.
Boundary marking is the first
step towards gaining official recognition of the
ownership of land under state law. Throughout
the process, two worlds collided. Landowners called
upon the stories of their ancestors to help them
identify areas and features of their land. Land
use ‘maps’ were made out of string and different
types of leaves.
The landowners and volunteers,
with guidance from highly skilled foresters from
Foundation for People and Community Development
(FPCD), walked the boundaries and placed demarcation
ribbons at selected points along the way. The
foresters collected GPS readings of these points,
for later calibration.
The boundary marking was a precursor
for the local people’s dream of establishing their
own eco-forestry businesses. Eco-forestry is the
opposite of large-scale, destructive logging.
Trees are harvested using portable equipment and
milled on the spot, before the wood is carried
or floated out of the forest. Eco-forestry causes
minimal damage, and the money made from just one
tree can pay a child’s school fees for a year.
Local community development
organisations, including Barefoot, held workshops
explaining the concept of ‘sustainable development’
and the benefits it could bring to the 6,000 people
in Lake Murray.
In the past, some tribes have
been duped into handing over their land to logging
companies, for very little financial return. They
are no longer willing to lose their forest for
someone else’s gain.
The ten foresters from FPCD
trained the landowners in forest management, business
skills and the use of a portable sawmill.
The GFRS culminated in the felling
of the first eco-forestry tree. The tree was milled
using the portable sawmill, and loaded onto a
barge the landowners had retrieved from the bottom
of the lake. This eco-timber was shipped locally.
In future, eco-timber will be milled for local
and international customers.
Greenpeace campaigns director,
Danny Kennedy, said the GFRS was an example of
“mass networking”, PNG style. “Working from village
to village, always in alliance with half a dozen
community-based organisations, we have demarcated
clan lands and prepared them for ecoforestry,
trained five clans in portable sawmilling and
business skills and begun training members of
a dozen more clans,” he said.
In doing so, the GFRS has turned
Lake Murray into an “island of resistance to the
industrial logging that plagues the province around
it”.
“Over 4 million hectares are
at risk in Western Province, but with this beach-head
and the commitment of the communities here to
sustainable ecoforestry we aim to stop the spread
of logging from the east,” Kennedy said. “This
is a direct challenge to the industrial logging
industry in PNG.”
“We have done all this as equals,”
he added. “Not as some big company coming in with
a development model to foist on people here, but
as friends in common cause to save the magnificent
forests in the area with some tools and ideas
about how to do that.”
The people of Lake Murray offered
untold hospitality, warmth and friendship to the
GFRS participants. They were kind, generous and
patient with each of the 26 volunteers – all of
whom wanted to learn every little detail about
life on the lake.
Strong connections were forged;
friendships were made that won’t be forgotten.
Sep Galeva, who initiated the project on behalf
of landowners, said the community would always
remember the volunteers.
In the final weblog to be posted
from the GFRS, Sep wrote that Lake Murray felt
empty and lonely without the volunteers. “Today
I could not hold back my tears any more,” he said.
Although the GFRS is over, the
real work for the landowners is just beginning.
So far, one clan village has used the portable
sawmill. Now, each eco-forestry business must
set up a camp for the foresters. When this is
done, the foresters – who have returned to their
homes in the PNG highlands to visit their families
– will return, moving from clan to clan and supervising
the start of each new sustainable eco-forestry
business.
