SOUTH PACIFIC: Fighting Off a Bare Future

SYDNEY, Dic 31 (IPS) - South Pacific island nations have succeeded in convincing the French to suspend underground nuclear testing in their midst for another year, but their tropical paradise faces another threat, this time from unsustained logging activities by foreign companies.

In the past few years, the people of Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands have watched with alarm as Asian loggers who had been shut out from forests in their own countries began feverishly cutting trees in the South Pacific to fulfill long-term contracts with Japanese and Korean mills.

The recorded level of the timber harvest in Solomon Islands alone increased from 292,000 cubic metres in 1991 to 700,000 cubic metres in 1993.

This year, the harvest may be as high as three million cubic metres, and officials fear the country's commercial timber resources will be wiped out in 15 years.

In July, then Solomon Islands Forestry Minister Joses Tuhanuku said a senior official of the Malaysian timber group Berjaya handed him an envelope containing 4,000 Australian dollars (about 2,850 dollars) in what he said was a bid to speed up the granting of Berjaya's logging concession.

Said Tuhanuku: "The timber industry really is a curse on Solomon Islands, environmentally, politically and economically. It is distorting the normal processes and undermining our sovereignty."

The logging issue dominated this year's South Pacific Forum (SPF) that was held in Brisbane.

Commented Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating at the meeting: "Unless the environmental piracy of foreign logging companies operating in the South Pacific region is controlled, the future for the region will be bleak."

Environmental experts and officials from the SPF's 15 member- nations have been holding numerous meetings since the August conference to discuss a proposed common code of conduct for governing logging of Melanesian forests.

South Pacific governments have also agreed to step up monitoring of logging and timber exports. The countries will meet again this April in preparation for the 1995 SPF conference that will be hosted by Papua New Guinea.

© Inter Press Service (2014) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service