Villagers in a dilemma over rainforest

Extra

By Sam Vulum

We have lived a long time in our traditional way and we do not want that any more.

We want to live differently”.

This was the view of a villager from Papua New Guinea’s Sandaun Province, bordering Indonesia, in 1997. But it is one reiterated in a recently released 1996-1999 report for the European Commission on the impact of logging amongst 15 villages in the Kilimeri census division of the Sandaun Province.

The EC-DGVIII funded report was compiled by Christin Kocher Schmid with members of the Future of the Rainforest Peoples Programme. And it appears to agree with view - expressed generally throughout logging areas in PNG - that people want change. “The wish to participate in the “Western” lifestyle is high and logging money seems to the Kilimeri people to constitute the key to at least temporarily achieve this goal,”

Schmid said.

“People from Osol and Hup villages made this clear during group discussions that life in the bush was considered to be inferior to the Western way of life: the main staple of sago and vegetables being a poor diet, the houses built from bush materials being inadequate.

“People wanted to have permanent houses like those ones built by the logging company for school teachers and aid posts orderlies, electricity, water supply, roads and cars and recurrent topic. They wanted to replace their traditional diet by rice and tinned fish and meat.”

Kocher Schmid, on a five-month research attachment with PNG’s National Research Institute, said people from territories not yet subject to logging in early 1999 (block two), were closely monitoring the progress of the operations in block one which were coming to a close. They were eagerly awaiting the beginning of operations in block two.

“These expectations were high, as these people had to watch their neighbours joyfully spending the logging money, eating store food, drinking beer and proudly displaying their cars,” she said. Kocher Schmid said people still want to participate despite being shown at close quarters the short-term nature of such an influx of easily earned money. They want to

experience the short-term bliss of having seemingly inexhaustible amounts of money to spend on whatever they like.

When asked what they would spend their logging money on, many of those who were critical of their neighbors’ excessive drinking and gambling, listed the purchase of consumables as a first priority. She said it is tempting to consider the people of the Kilimeri area greedy and spoilt by the influx of logging money and high wages for semi-skilled labor.

However, before such assumptions could be made, one has to understand the history of the area as far as early European contact is concerned. Kocher Schmid said the area had long been a quiet backwater, and with the exception of Krisa and Osima, where the Catholic Mission set up schools in the 19505.

But local people have only had access to schooling since about 1995 and the vast majority is illiterate and innumerate. This effectively excludes them access to information and ideas.

They have to build their understanding of the Western world with its technology and monetarisation on scraps of information handed to them by word of mouth. Therefore, information is prone to be altered, abridged, or reinterpreted before reaching them.

“How can they be expected to make well informed decisions on spending and investing large sums of money? And how can they negotiate on equal terms with representatives of the logging company and of the administration?” Kocher Schmid asked. She said the income generated by timber royalties was considerable - up to K 20,000 per household with a rate of KlO per cubic metre.

The sum is incredible for people who make, at most, a few KlOO per year selling crops or garden surplus.

Most of these monies are spent on consumables like store food, clothes, beer or on vehicles. Women tend to replace their family’s diet of sago, collected greens and

proteins, and garden produce by store-bought

prestige foods like rice and tinned fish.

The men tend to spend their money on beer and gambling and, often, a car is bought.

Rarely maintained and driven ruthlessly up and down the rough Bewani highway, they do not last long.

Among other problems, Kocher Schmid said semi-skilled employment in the logging sector was only on a casual, temporary basis, while salaried employment other than with the logging company was minimal.

“Money and their dependency on it, is an ever-recurring concern of the people. For instance, only seven out of 132 adults in one of the villages had a wage income in 1996, and more than half of the people said that their cash income was between zero and K2OO.

“At Krisa during the peak of logging operations, there were four tradestores operating, but as the logging operation died down, three tradestores broke down,” she said.

Kocher Schmid also raised concern about the impact on the environment. She said logging had serious negative impact on the supply of clean water for local people.

“Skidding roads are often built across watercourses and not equipped with proper culverts. After rainfall, the creeks on which people are dependent for their water supply are muddy. Worse, the chemicals used to preserve the felled logs from rot further pollute the same water resources,” Kocher Schmid said. She suggested two prevention measures.

In the short-term, logging can only be stopped when landowners receive at least the same amount of money for not selling their trees as they currently receive from the logging company.

All other measures, such as landowner awareness programs, take too long to be effective. In the long-term, Kocher Schmid said only better access to information by rural villagers would prevent degradation of the environment through large scale resource extraction such as logging or mining.

Most landowners who now make decisions about logging or mining on their land are illiterate and innumerate.

Education would give the next generation of landowners access to the necessary information to sustainably manage and preserve their environment.

However, she said such long-term measures are only effective if they are combined with short term measures.

“Once the forest has disappeared, even a well-educated generation of landowners cannot bring it back,” Kocher Schmid said. ■