Paper income

Forest and Bird, Issue 282, 1 November 1996, Page 9

Paper income

Gerard Hutching

THEY MAY NEVER be millionaires, but the people of the Balai village in the Solomon Islands do not measure the success of their enterprise in dollars. What their novel papermaking business has done is provide them with some of the necessities of life — a water supply, medicine and payment of school fees. Like many developing communities in the tropical world, the Balai of Malaita Island have been frequently targeted by loggers interested in their rainforests. But thanks largely to the efforts of one farsighted villager, Abraham Baeanisia, the loggers have so far been kept at bay. A man with strong environmental principles and concerned by the increasing drift of young villagers to unemployment and homelessness in the capital Honiara, Baeanisia reasoned that it was better to create jobs closer to home. The Solomons has a pressing need for creative solutions to its problems. Ranked second to last on the United Nations Human

Development Index for Pacific island nations, its population growth rate is among the highest in the world and expected to double by the year 2013. In 1994, with the help of New Zealander Chris Delany and New Zealand Official Development Assistance, Baeanisia started a project in Balai to make paper from plants and trees. "We made the paper out of anything: banana leaf, sugar cane, all sorts of different tree fibres, and we are still discovering new ones,’ says Delany. "Balai was an ideal village because it has a strong, well organised community, and is well educated in forest conservation and community development programmes. For the past six years they had been actively resisting overtures from loggers." Producing the paper was all very well. But Delany saw there was also a need to add value to it using wood block printing. The carving is done on custom wood first, then the only things that have to be imported are the inks. Quickly the islanders caught on to wood blocking

techniques. Instead of a printing press, a spoon is used to transfer the wood block image on to the paper. "Two years down the track the project is growing and expanding," says Delany. "A third of the profits go to the workers, a third to the community and a third is invested back into the business. An early indication of the long term success of the project was demonstrated at an exhibition at the New Zealand High Commission in Honiara. Around $8,000 worth of prints were snapped up and orders came in from Honiara retailers. Since then orders have arrived from New Caledonia, Australia, Fiji and New Zealand for the paper and prints. Not only are the villagers generating an income without damaging or destroying their forests, they now have a new medium for recording their custom art and designs, and young people are being offered an alternative to drifting to the urban centres in search of money and employment.