Big damage in Papua New Guinea: New film documents how industrial logging destroys lives

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com
August 29, 2011 In one scene a young man, perhaps not long ago a boy, named Douglas stands shirtless and in shorts as he runs a chainsaw into a massive tropical tree. Prior to this we have already heard from an official how employees operating chainsaws must have a bevy of protective equipment as well as training, but in Papua New Guinea these are just words. The reality is this: Douglas straining to pull the chainsaw out of the tree as it begins to fall while his fellow employees flee the tumbling giant. The new film Bikpela Bagarap (‘Big Damage’) documents the impact of industrial logging on the lives of local people in Papua New Guinea. Filmed over three months by one guerrilla filmmaker—David Fedele—using a simple handheld camera, the movie shows with startling intimacy how massive corporations, greedy government, and consumption abroad have conspired to ruin lives in places like Vanimo, Papua New Guinea. “The whole industry is corrupt from the highest level downwards. The entire system is broken, and people have no other choice than to participate in this system—it is basically an unregulated industry,” Fedele told mongabay.com in a recent interview. The corruption starts at the beginning, when tribal groups sign over land for logging without being able to read the documents they are signing while being told little more than sign this and we’ll pay you. “The local landowners have no idea about the value of their trees—so when a company comes in and offers them a little bit of money, or even offers to pay them with other things such as water tanks or roads or houses, most of the time they just jump at the offer and sign whatever is put in front of them,” Fedele says. Then what the locals call ‘The Company’—in this case a corporation known as WTK Realty—takes over the community. While the forest is destroyed, Fedele says the logging company takes advantage of locals by paying them pittance for their work while making sure they run all the businesses in town. “[The company] owns the only supermarket, the hotel, the gaming machines and control the fuel and shipping. Local people are treated like slaves in their own country, made to work long hours for little money. […] So people try to get money in whatever way that they can. Violent crime is a huge and increasing problem, particularly related to alcohol and marijuana. Prostitution is a big problem, and AIDS is an issue that not many people are aware of, but is increasing at a great rate.” As societal ills expand, the natural resources, on which the locals have depended for centuries, are destroyed for raw logs to be shipped to China and then processed, likely into furniture. “I wouldn’t say having natural resources is a curse in itself—it’s the exploitation and greed of the modern world that is the curse,” Fedele says. […]

Big damage in Papua New Guinea: new film documents how industrial logging destroys lives