Brian Baring, a member of the Gingilang clan, hails from Papua New Guinea and has been involved in protecting the country's ancient forests for some time. His clan have been custodians of the land for thousands of years and are now legally the customary landowners.
As part of a visit to Europe, Brian came to the UK to tell ministers and timber merchants about the dire need for action to save the remaining tracts of forest. Here he explains why the forests are so important and about the devastating impact of the trade in illegal timber.
For generations that stretch into the distant past my people have depended on the forest. It is home to our sacred sites and to our ancestors, and has always provided us with everything we need - our food, medicines, clean water, building materials for our houses, everything.
I grew up amongst my people in a traditional village in Papua New Guinea as one of the Gingilang clan, a part of the Borong tribe. Everyday in the village men would go hunting in the forest and fishing in the river. The women would harvest the vegetables from the food gardens and collect fruit and nuts from the forest.
I remember when I was young, we kids would have so much fun setting traps for birds and bandicoots as we learned how to hunt. We would go into a forest so thick that you could only see thin rays of sun coming through the canopy of branches and leaves. When I looked up I could not see the sky. The bush was full of animals and birds.
But all this is changing. I am twenty-six now, but in my short life I have seen our forests destroyed by foreign companies. They don't respect us or our culture or our sacred sites. They run over our food gardens with their machinery and drive their trucks and bulldozers through our streams, polluting them with oil and mud. Don't they realise that people downstream drink from those streams? I suppose they do, but don't care.
The loggers simply take the trees they want - my people's forest home. In the process they destroy much more of the forest. When they first came they built roads through the forest leaving the earth bare so that when it rained the soil washed away into the rivers. When I go back to the village now, I see what damage has been done, there are areas of bare land and grass land where there used to be forests. My uncle tells me that the hunting is not so good anymore, that the animals have gone.
Without the forests we have nothing. It is like our supermarket, our pharmacy, our building centre. Our everything. Imagine if someone bulldozed down the shops that supply your daily needs and sold everything on their shelves to someone in a country on the other side of the world. How would you feel?
My uncle got a job with the logging company, thinking that he could make some money so he could send his kids to school. But he had to think again - they paid him so badly that he threw their money back at them and told them to pay him properly. Many of the girls who work in the camps, doing laundry and cooking for the Malaysian loggers, fall pregnant by the foreign workers before they are abandoned with their babies. In the village culture this brings shame to those girls and the family. Lives are ruined before they have begun.
The logging companies create tension amongst our people, some people take the temptation to earn money, but the money never comes back to everyone. When a company comes in they are supposed to provide infrastructure such as roads with bridges or culverts to protect our water sources. But even if the roads are built they are of very low quality. In our area the Malaysian company was supposed to put in a water supply for 14 villages, but this has never happened.
I have come to Europe to bring the message of my people to the politicians and people of this continent, to ask them to stop the destruction of my forest home. Many companies here buy products that are made from the forests of Papua New Guinea, stolen from our land and our people.
I have visited people at the European Commission and politicians in the Netherlands, France, Sweden and Belgium and I don't understand why they don't stop importing these products. Why don't you care? Why don't you care that we are treated so badly, with our forests stolen so that you here in Europe can have cheap timber products like plywood. These pour into Britain to feed a consumer society that's fueling the destruction of my home, my culture and my people.
You can easily check to see if your wood products are from well managed forests by looking for the Forest Stewardship Council logo. So now I ask you directly, I plead with you, please stop buying wood that is stolen from my people.
