Logged to death

Honiara has patches of green but indiscriminate logging could make this a rarity. Photo / Dev Nadkarni

As it enters its 30th year of independence this month, the Solomon Islands finds itself on the brink of a twin disaster. In those three decades, its economy has overwhelmingly depended on just one rapidly disappearing natural resource - timber - which successive governments have failed to manage well, jeopardising the country's environmental health and economic wealth.

Estimates of how much tree cover is left vary, but the general agreement from most international environment groups is that the archipelago will be rendered almost completely treeless in the next five to six years. Moses Rohana, project manager for Environmental Concerns Action Network of Solomon Islands, fears commercial forestry will end as early as 2010.

The International Monetary Fund warned that at current felling rates, the natural forests will be depleted much sooner than envisaged.

Rick Houenipwela, governor of the Central Bank of the Solomon Islands, is clearly worried. "The extraction rate is faster than before. We will get to the other end of the forest much before our earlier estimates," he says.

Despite these loud alarm bells, the country's logging industry is growing at a rate of as much as 12 per cent, according to some estimates.

Against a computed sustainable rate of a quarter-million tons a year, more than four times that volume - more than a million tons - was felled last year.

Perversely, that growth rate makes the Solomon Islands the fastest-growing economy in the Pacific Islands region at an impressive 6 per cent. But it is fated to be shortlived, as the main resource propelling it disappears in the next few years.

Over the years, sustainable forestation initiatives have consistently failed to catch up with this indiscriminate rate of felling, and most replanting projects, except for a handful in the country's western province, have been all but abandoned.

Even worse is the failure of successive governments to maximise the value of this fast dwindling resource for the benefit of the economy. In the past two to three years, log prices in the international markets have increased considerably, according to the Central Bank's annual report. But the benefits of that hike have not trickled down to the economy.

Finance Minister Gordon Darcy Lilo attributes that to the country's failure to invest adequately in downstream processing facilities, thereby missing the opportunity of exporting value-added products that fetch higher prices in the developed world.

Most of the country's raw round logs head for low-yield markets like China and India, where the demand for timber is growing exponentially, fuelled by the near double-digit growth in their economies over the past decade.