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by TIM CURTIN
Sustainable and legal logging
The Papua New Guinea Eco-Forestry
Forum, in a notable display of unpatriotic behaviour, recently
wrote to Yale University to complain that the latter had been
cited by the Forest Industries Association as deeming PNG’s
forestry sustainable, defined as “no more than 3% of timber net
harvesting per year”.
Yale’s Melissa Goodall (of its Centre of Environmental Law &
Policy) replied to Damien Ase, chairperson of the PNG Eco-Forestry
Forum, on June 11 to claim that the Yale group had now decided
that in fact “existing management practices are not sustainable in
Papua New Guinea”.
There are some reasons to doubt the credibility of Ms Goodall and
her team.
Yale did indeed give Papua New Guinea a clean bill of health on
forestry issues in both of its 2005 and 2006 reports setting out
their “Environmental Performance Index” (EPI).
For example, in Yale’s 2005 Report, PNG was ranked 22nd out of all
non-OECD countries, or about 47th in the whole world, for the
quality of its overall record on environmental management and
other indicators (including such items as level of democracy, on
which PNG scored 100%).
PNG was actually ranked ahead of Netherlands, the US and UK.
PNG’s overall EPI ranking in Yale’s 2005 report was 35th out of
146 countries, and since around 80% of its people live in its
forest areas, which account for 75% of its land mass, they must be
doing not just something but a lot right in terms of sustainable
management of natural resources, which overwhelmingly comprise its
timber and tree crop output that far exceed mineral production in
value per PNG citizen.
Ms Goodall’s letter cites what are in fact wholly-unfounded
allegations by the World Bank that “70% of the (timber) harvest in
PNG is illegally obtained”.
The World Bank has never provided any evidence for this claim, and
has indeed admitted that it was based only on claims concerning
Indonesia.
The facts on sustainability of logging in PNG are much less
dramatic.
The largest log timber exporters from PNG are Vanimo Forest
Products, Stettin Bay Lumber Company, Open Bay, Jant, Rimbunan
Hijau, and PNG Forest Products (PNGFP).
All of them are fully compliant with all relevant PNG legislation,
and have all been in operation for at least 20 years, over 50
years in the case of PNGFP.
If their harvesting was “unsustainable” and therefore, according
to the World Bank and its NGO associates like the World Wildlife
Fund, “illegal”, how have they managed to maintain production for
on average 30 years or more?
The NGOs that unite in claiming that PNG’s forestry industry is
“unsustainable” and thus “illegal” base themselves on
unsubstantiated allegations that any timber harvesting that
exceeds 0.7 cubic metre per hectare per annum is illegal. That
amounts to about two wheelbarrows of wood per hectare a year.
Why are PNG’s timber exporters castigated by the Eco-Forestry
Forum for exceeding this absurdly low level when for example,
Tasmania’s Labor government’s state-owned forests routinely
harvest over 100 cubic metres per hectare over a 17-year cycle (ie
six cubic metres per hectare per year)?
There is a simple answer to this question – the Forum has its own
hands out for subsidies from aid donors for funding of its own
hopelessly inefficient community logging projects that so far have
generated NO income, NO wage employment, NO revenues for the
government, and NO export revenue.
Tasmania’s remarkably high-harvesting rates show what could be
achieved in PNG if its people would only see through the bogus
credentials of the Eco-Forestry Forum, whose national members (if
any, other than Damien Ase) seek only to ingratiate themselves
with Greenpeace and the like, and then put in place the
institutional arrangements that would allow exploitation of PNG’s
vastly larger forest resource on the same scale as Tasmania’s
Labor government achieves.
Using the McAlpine-Quigley very-conservative estimate that PNG’s
commercially viable forestry area is only eight times larger than
Tasmania Forest’s area of 776,500 hectares, PNG could be earning
A$2.4 billion (about K5.9 billion) a year from its forestry,
instead of the pathetic K520 million that the “patriotic” PNG
Eco-Forestry Forum considers to be too much.
Note: The writer is a member of the
Emeritus Faculty at the Australian National University. He was a
consultant for the PNG Government’s Office of Bougainville Affairs
in 2000-2001 while he was a visiting Fellow at the ANU's NCDS
where his attachment was funded by Aus-Aid.
 
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