(Opposite) Papuan field crews heading out to run an inventory transect in the tidally flooded forests of the Kikori River Basin, Papua New Guinea. The tide was coming in; before the transect was finished, water levels in the forest were waist deep.
Town of Kikori (S7°25´07´´, E144°14´52´´) and surrounding forests and villages in the Kikori River Basin of Gulf Province, Papua New Guinea, 1999–2002
Papua New Guinea (PNG) is one of the few countries in the world with extensive areas of tropical forests owned by local communities.1 Among indigenous communities in the Highlands, timber extraction—a disturbing percentage of it illegal—is a key industry, although few efforts are made to develop long-term management plans or regenerate important local timber species. Villages located in the tidal swamps along the southern coast of the island, in contrast, are consistently ignored by timber companies and excluded from government forestry ventures. This is not because the swamps lack forests or merchantable timber volume. Local forests exhibit a relatively simple floristic composition, contain a high density of merchantable timber species, and have excellent fluvial access to the Gulf of Papua. Rather, none of the larger timber concerns in the region wants to bring heavy equipment into swamp forests, where skidders, tractors, and front end loaders inevitably bog down in the mud and end up covered with water. As a result, no one wants to buy timber from these communities, and local forests are frequently viewed as an economic impediment instead of a resource.
In response to this situation, in 1999 I started collaborating with a community forestry project in the tidally flooded swamp forests along the southern coast of Papua New Guinea. Our goal was to provide indigenous communities in the Kikori River Basin with the technical skills needed to manage their forest resources on a sustainable basis. A small sawmill would also be set up to turn their logs into boards. We would initially train the communities to collect the inventory and growth data needed for management. If they were able to organize themselves to collect these data, we would help them develop a management plan, go into the forest with them to mark the first group of harvest trees, and pay them a premium price for the logs. Such was our plan.
The first difficulty we ran into was acquiring the sawmill. Our community forestry initiative was an extension of a previous project in which several portable sawmills had been imported into PNG and communities in the Kikori River Basin trained in how to use them.2 When the project was over, the sawmills, for reasons unknown, had remained in the communities, which had become accustomed to cutting and selling timber. Apparently, it was never made clear that the sawmills were on loan for the project, and that they would have to be either purchased or returned at the completion of fieldwork. Considerable time and energy was invested in trying to convince the communities to return the sawmills. We finally got one of the mills back (actually one entire sawmill and pieces of a second that could be used for parts), and after several months of wrangling set it up for stationary operation on a site near the river in the town of Kikori. The mill, and the community forestry operation supplying it, was called Kikori-Pacific.
A second problem was finding villages to collaborate with us on the project. Convincing arguments can be made for sustainable resource use if forests are generating no revenue for the community, if a certain subset of the community is interested in learning new skills, and if people have the time to invest in counting and measuring trees. Community forestry is a harder sell when an oil company is paying a monthly easement fee to local communities for allowing a pipeline to cross their land. The communities getting paid this easement proved to be uninterested in going into the forest to do a strenuous job in anticipation of a potential source of revenue. Even the communities that were not getting paid by the oil company had hopes that a new pipeline would be built, or that another oil company would move into the area, and that they would, at some point, also start receiving monthly payments. We found it difficult to argue with this logic. After much discussion and community outreach, five village groups—Bisi, Kopi, Verabari, Komaio, and Woubo—controlling a forest area of almost twenty thousand hectares, agreed to give sustainable forestry a try.
The advantages of small-scale community forestry in tidal forests became immediately clear the first time we witnessed a crew of villagers fell a tree. To set the stage, let me first describe how mechanized, industrial logging is done in these forests. The tide has gone out, but the soil is still wet and mushy; pools of standing water dot the low-lying areas. The skidders are slipping around and making deep ruts; they periodically back into or sideswipe a tree and tear off a large strip of bark. Dragging the felled trees to a temporary landing where the logs are being stacked gouges out additional ruts and damages more trees. The whole understory has been churned into a muddy mess of roots, leaves, and shattered crowns of fallen trees—all of which will disappear underwater in a few hours when the tide comes in.
When the villagers set out to fell a tree, they walk into the forest barefoot, carrying their axes. They may have already selected and marked a harvest tree, but if not they will scout around until they find one they like. Felling the tree with an ax takes time, but eventually the tree comes down, parting the leaves of the understory sago palms (Metroxylon sagu);3 the leaves immediately spring back into place to cover the gap. The villagers go home and wait for the tide to come in. They reenter the forest, this time by canoe, and tie a rope or a rattan cane around the harvest log, which is now floating in a meter and a half of water. They paddle carefully out of the forest towing the floating log behind them.
As long as no one is trying to buy logs from their forest, villagers are pretty casual about the boundaries of their property. But their attitude changes as soon as the forest acquires a commercial value. Shortly after we signed management agreements with the six communities, a number of border disputes arose and an uncomfortable amount of suspicion and infighting developed among neighboring communities. If left unresolved, disagreements among kinship groups can easily escalate into clan warfare. In hindsight, we recognized that arriving at a clear consensus about the boundaries of different communities would have been the obvious first step to sustainable resource use, especially in countries where the central government does not own the forest. At the time, however, we were caught by surprise when the community forestry work in PNG ground to a halt until the ownership boundaries of eighteen clans could be surveyed, agreed on, and plotted to scale on a 1:65,000 base map of the management area. It took several months, but we did produce such a map.
Once the boundary disputes were resolved, I gave a series of training workshops on the objectives and methodologies of forest inventory. Foresters have developed a number of ways to count trees, and some are complicated and difficult to understand. (The concept of random sampling, for example, can be especially tedious to explain to farmers. “Not here, not there, but everywhere with equal probability.”) I have tried a variety of inventory methods over the years, with mixed results, and have come to the conclusion that the simplest is decidedly the best.
Years earlier, in Borneo, I was involved in a large forest assessment project designed by a German inventory specialist. We located random plots on satellite photos of the area and had GPS devices to help us find them.4 The sampling scheme was high-tech and statistically rigorous. We would head out from the village in the morning, walk several hours through the forest, arrive at the plot location, and spend the next twenty minutes counting and measuring a few trees. We would then pack up the equipment and start hiking to the next plot, which usually took several more hours. By the end of the day, we had done only two or three inventory plots, but had walked for about six hours. One of the Dayak field assistants complained that he could not understand why we did not just count trees while we were walking. Good point. I have used long transects (a series of contiguous, narrow plots oriented systematically throughout the sample area) for all my community forestry inventories ever since.
I had no difficulty explaining how to run a transect to the village field crews. With a compass, one person first selects an appropriate heading, and then stretches out a twenty-meter length of rope in that direction. The person pulling the rope clears a little path with his bush knife; the rope is left on the ground to provide the centerline of the plot. Two villagers, one on the right side and one on the left side of the line, then start searching within a five-meter-wide strip on either side of the centerline for the tree species on the inventory list.5 Once a tree is found, its diameter and height are measured and notes recorded about the overall form and health of the tree. These annotations are especially important. Finding a timber tree with a diameter of forty centimeters and a height of twenty-two meters is good news—unless the finder’s notes include “trunk is crooked and has a large burl on one side.” The crew continues searching on either side of the line until the men reach the end of the rope. The compass is used to check the bearing again, and the rope is stretched out another twenty meters for the next plot. And so it goes, plot after plot, until the crew arrives at the boundary of the property.
The inventories conducted by the six villages focused on three major timber species—mangrove cedar (Xylocarpus granatum), kwila (Intsia bijuga), and kalofilum (Calophyllum papuanum)6—and working with Kikori-Pacific foresters, the villagers counted and measured all the trees of these three species in almost sixty kilometers of inventory transects. Relative to the quality and quantity of the inventory work conducted by the major timber companies in PNG, this was a major accomplishment. There were, however, a few difficulties to overcome in persuading the communities to do the fieldwork. Several of the villages initially asserted that they would not go to the field unless provided with transportation, per diems, and fuel, and a few others required the continual assistance of Kikori-Pacific foresters to complete the tran-sects.
One day a group of landowners from the village of Gibi showed up at the mill and said they wanted to join the project. We checked on a map and saw that their village was located far downriver in the Kikori estuary on a little finger of land sticking out in the Gulf of Papua. When we asked whether they had a boat to pull logs, they shook their heads. We had doubts about their ability to transport sawlogs to the mill, and were reluctant to commit to the training and inventory work if neither the mill nor the community was likely to benefit. As a compromise, we suggested that they return to their village and fell some trees. If they were able to get the logs to Kikori, we in the project would be happy to collaborate with them. After they left, we promptly forgot about the incident.
Two weeks later, the villagers showed up again. They had gone back to Gibi, felled a dozen trees, and tied them together to make a raft. They floated it up the Kikori River each day with the rising tide as far as they could, and when the tide started to recede they tied up next to the bank and waited for the river to start rising again the next morning. It took them five days to get to Kikori, sleeping on top of their logs. We gave them something to eat and enthusiastically welcomed them to the project.
After three years, Kikori-Pacific was employing twenty-four local people and had a forestry staff of five technicians. There were over two hundred landowners from nine villages collaborating with the project. These landowners had inventoried their forests, carefully selected and marked harvest trees according to a management plan, felled the trees with axes, and floated the logs to the mill at Kikori. The mill had purchased thousands of sawlogs, and paid hundreds of thousands of kina (the local currency of PNG) to participating villages. But the mill was hemorrhaging money. The project probably grew too fast, involving too many communities and acquiring too many logs, which piled up at the mill. In addition, finding markets for the wood posed new problems. We could sell rough sawn boards to the local oil company for temporary housing and storage buildings, or to nearby communities for schools and public buildings, but only at a low price. To obtain a better price for the wood, which was sustainably harvested and of unquestionable quality, we would have to export it. Shortly after the initial funding for the project was depleted, the mill was forced to close.
We can take many lessons from this project. The first, fundamental one is that it is extremely difficult to work in the tidal swamps of Papua New Guinea. The local political and social situations are complex, the long-term presence of a multinational oil company creates unfilled expectations for communities, and the daily rise and fall of the floodwaters can make fieldwork exhausting and tedious.7 Had we chosen to export the wood, the paperwork and permits required would have taken some time to arrange, and we did not consider it worthwhile to go through the complicated process because we did not have a kiln to dry the boards or the money to buy one. And no one was optimistic about the prospects of exporting green boards from PNG to another country.
Timber operations in PNG are thus stymied by the general failure to involve communities in such a way that the timber is harvested sustainably, the wood resources are conscientiously managed, and the value-added opportunities are economically viable. Until procedures for these are set in place, local communities will continue felling trees indiscriminately for whoever wishes to buy the logs, without regard for sustainability, resource management, or even profitability. The Kikori-Pacific experiment took small first steps toward a different goal. We proved that villagers who live and work in the forests of PNG can conduct forest inventories and develop sustainable management plans as well as university-trained foresters—if given the opportunity. The future of sustainable forestry in PNG will depend on whether local communities continue to be given these opportunities.