Logging - the real firestorm

While corruption in high places and Chinatown burning captured international media attention, the real story was somewhere else, in the dark green mountains of the Solomons.

The corruption associated with commercial logging is legion in Solomon Islands, but it works ceaselessly in the background, not itself erupting into internationally visible luridity, yet all the while underwriting violence such as last month's Black Tuesday and the 1998-2003 'Tensions'.

It does so in rural communities by opening rifts between and within kin groups, undercutting the basics of life (agriculture, reefs and water), damaging social harmony. The money which both flows from logging, and precedes it, oils the wheels of bribery and deception in the public service. And the multi-million dollar profits anchor logging interests in every parliament (and government) elected.

It is the one constant battle in recent SI policymaking, and one this government seems to be willing to take on.

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