A remote Papua New Guinea forest tribe has a new "walkabout" sawmill to cut logs for export to Australia as "ecotimber" rather than admit destructive foreign logging companies.
The portable mill is part of a new ecoforestry initiative by Greenpeace and other environmental action groups in PNG to encourage tribes to do their own small-scale timber harvesting and milling.
The mill arrived this week in the remote Lake Murray region of Western Province and will be used by the Kuni people and other tribes to mill selectively-logged trees for export to Australian buyers as sought-after "ecotimber".
In 2003, Greenpeace and other non-government organisations helped Lake Murray landowners halt illegal and destructive logging in the area by the Malaysian logging company Concord Pacific.
At the invitation of the Kuni tribe, Greenpeace recently set up a "Global Forest Rescue Station" on tribal land, a concept first trialled in Tasmania to save old-growth forests.
Greenpeace volunteers, eco-forestry trainers and environmental lawyers are working with three Lake Murray tribes to establish their rights over about 300,000 hectares by identifying, marking out and mapping their boundaries to deter illegal and large-scale logging.
At the handover of the mill, Kuni elder Irowa Zewa said the mill would allow his people to sustainably harvest timber to make money from exports and to build houses rather than see their forests destroyed by large logging companies.
The new ecoforestry initiative is part of a Greenpeace campaign to preserve the Asia-Pacific's remaining ancient "Paradise" rainforests stretching from South-East Asia across Indonesia to PNG and the Solomon Islands.
Greenpeace forest campaigner Sam Moko said the initiative should provide returns to communities four to ten times greater than the royalties paid for large-scale logging operations.
In a report this month by the US-based forestry watchdog Forest Trends, Asian logging companies in PNG were accused of flagrantly ignoring the law and working in collusion with corrupt politicians and bureaucrats to log out the country's rainforests to the detriment of local landowners.The Age
