Logged To Death -Commercial Logging Will End In Solomon Islands By 2010 - Nothing Left To Cut

[hatrack]

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.

EDIT

In 2005, the country exported S$510 million worth of forestry product. Last year's figure is projected to be higher and that's not necessarily because of increased logging activities, says Darcy. "We have increased the value of logs for calculation of duties and cut back on the generous tax breaks given by previous administrations," he adds. All these measures are too little too late as the present Government seems to realise. It is looking at alternatives to logging more seriously than any government before and has decided to concentrate on its next biggest sectors, farming and tuna fisheries.

EDIT

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10451393

[DBoon]

1. Isn't this how civilization on Easter Island collapsed?

nt

[hatrack]

3. Yeah, but the Solomons won't even get giant stone heads for the tourism industry

Bummer.

[Whoa_Nelly]

2. This has been a horror going on for many years

If interested, read this article, as well as opening the .pdf link that has more information and pictures from 2004.

http://www.apace.uts.edu.au/docpublish/si005.html

And article that led me to the above link:
http://www.countercurrents.org/en-soo310804.htm

[jgraz]

4. See Lorax, The