Papua New Guinea has the largest tropical rainforest in the Oceania region and the third largest in the world. With a total land area of 46 million hactares, 77 percent of this is covered in some kind of forest ranging from mangroves on the coast to high altitude alpine forest at about 3000 metres above sea level.
These forest are being developed by logging companies with leave little to no benefits to the resource owners with massive destruction to the forest area. With this FPCD has decided to assist resource owners to develop their own forest using small portable sawmills under its Ecoforestry Approach. The Ecoforestry Approach is conducted with respect to the Principles and Criterias of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification.
Many forest resource-owners choose to go into small scale forestry because they wish to develop their resources by themselves. There is very little Government support for small scale selective logging operations. The Government focuses much of its attention on large-scale, usually foreign-owned and managed logging companies. These logging practices have been unsustainable and unfair.
Many requests from landowners have come into FPCD to assist in this area. FPCD realizes that results are achieved better on a smaller scale and developed its eco-forestry programme to sustainably develop and manage PNG's forest resource as well as ensuring that the indigenous resource owners of PNG fully benefit from what is theirs. FPCD has developed its Community Forestry Approach, to effectively operate its Ecoforestry Programme.
It has chosen to work with Madang Forest Resource Owners Association (MFROA) in the Madang province, hoping that the lessons learnt from this project can be used as guidelines in other areas that it ventures into in the future.
The overall objectives for the Madang Ecoforestry project are two fold:
FPCD's Ecoforestry Programme activities include awareness, forest management trainings, sawmill trainings, start your timber business trainings, good governance trainings, forest survey and inventory, forest replenishement, milling, local marketing and export of milled sawn timber under the Ecotimber label.
FPCD has been working with the Madang Forest Resource Owners Association (MFROA) in building individual member capacity. Three member projects have been setup as models and these three have exported timber. These members will continue to receive guidance and training on business management and go into forest certification setting the way for the rest of the MFROA members.
FPCD has identified that MFROA can purchase mills through commercial loan, own savings or lease-purchase/revolving fund arrangement. FPCD and MFROA are testing the revolving fund option where FPCD and MFROA sign an MOA with members to assist them purchase mills.
