“FORWOOD”

“FORWOOD”

The question of how to make the best use of PNG’s forest resources has been and still is a complex issue. It is affected by the laws of the market, supply, demand, and competition, coupled with environmental concerns and even by history intertwined with traditional owners’ practices of subsistence agricultural systems using forest regeneration fallow methods.

Always a major issue in the implementation of development assistance efforts that adopt a sustainable livelihoods approach, is that to alleviate poverty in the first instance there is the need to provide food, shelter, and fuel. This necessitates cutting down forested land to grow crops and to obtain materials for shelter and fuel for heating. During the period up to 1975, there was a need for PNG as an emerging nation, to develop its forest sector to assist in creating its own economy utilising its resources (including wood fibre) but at the same time ensuring peoples’ interests were protected. The Papua New Guineans owned the lands on which the forests grew. This created an enormous task, because given the pattern of traditional land ownership, the landowners had no direct or community investment in an overarching forest sector institution.

Globally, wood is grown in three structures; State; industrial forestry companies and landowners. In Papua New Guinea, all wood fibre resources were privately owned by traditional owners. The issue facing landowners worldwide is that their wood fibre prices are taken from State forest revenue systems which are nominally negotiated at less than the cost of sustained production. Much of the work of Australian foresters prior to 1975 was to establish some format by which individual landowner groups could expect reasonable returns for their woods. The involvement of communities in forest management was a cornerstone of Australia’s forest management development in PNG. Australian foresters had to ensure that any forest management systems developed, must have an ecological basis of rainforest management, within a sphere of multiple use of forest resources, encompassing subsistence agricultural methods. 3FAO stated that during the early development of a country, it is not financially practicable to establish a series of properly integrated forest industries or special industries that can utilize all available products of a forest. Planning must be on a practical business basis and the initial start must be made with industries that are both technically easy to establish and sufficiently profitable to amortize the capital investment. It is a question, above all, of markets, although even the initial industries should be designed with a view to their ultimately fitting into a pattern of fully integrated use of the forest as markets and finance permit. At the same time, there was an enormous need to develop wood preservation methods for PNG timbers. Throughout PNG’s history, there were no long-standing timber structures. This was because the sapwood of all PNG timbers and the heartwood of some PNG timbers are liable to attack by wood destroying fungi, boring insects, and termites. In addition, all

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untreated timber placed in saltwater is liable to attack by a variety of organisms collectively known as marine borers.

The business of creating PNG forestry was to build a better PNG and at the same time ensuring PNG’s wood fibre was an increasingly strategic resource for tomorrow.

At the same time, given the enormous demand for fuelwood throughout PNG, major forest extension programs were initiated and undertaken by Australian foresters to ensure fuelwood production, especially in areas of sparse tree cover.

Fuel wood Acacia managium Markham Valley via Lae PNG. Photo credit Dick McCarthy 1995.