Plunder thy neighbour
It is widely alleged that Japan has regenerated its forests at the cost of tropical forests in developing countries, especially in Southeast Asia. Yasuko Shimizu, a nun from Mercedarian Missionaries of Berriz (MMB), Japan, who has been committed to issues relating to the Pacific region since 1986, says the Japanese governments misused the Official Development Aid (ODA) by bribing politicians in the Pacific region. In 1989, Shimizu joined the ODA Research and Study Group, an NGO.
After conducting a study, the group revealed that the ODA was used to finance three major Japanese logging companies, namely, Nissho Iwai, Kowa Lamber and Honshu Paper (now Oji Paper) for commercial purposes. "Japanese citizens did not know that ODA money was directly financing Japanese logging companies and using Japanese citizens' tax,' Shimizu reminds. "These three companies have been denuding the virgin forests of Papua New Guinea (PNG) since the 1970s. It is the villagers who lose and the multinational companies and the PNG politicians who gain.' "The Pacific Island government and officials were made to shut up through ODA,' says Shimizu, adding that Japan also wanted to silence the opposition through its ODA. After eight years of opposition from the people of Pacific Islands, the government gave up its plans. "It (ODA) was the source of corruption of the Pacific politicians,' she alleges.
Since 1970, logs worth more than US $60 billion have been shipped to Japan from PNG and, unlike Japanese timber that is exorbitantly priced, timber from PNG was cheap. Shimizu emphasises that millions of houses in Japan were built by denuding the forests of Asia and the Pacific. Seeing the indiscriminate exploitation of the forests, an NGO called the Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands Forest Protection Group in Japan was formed. It has organised several campaigns to stop the import of tropical timber from PNG.
It has also appealed to Japanese companies to stop timber trade. Shimizu says the government came up with absurd excuses whenever it was approached, such as the argument that Japan will be punished by the World Trade Organisation if it reduces the import of tropical timber. Shimizu is happy that the government attitude has lately changed a little: "It has started encouraging the use of domestic timber through advertisements in newspapers.'