Seeing Trees or a Forest?

Fiji Village reports a landmark ruling by the Suva High Court, which has given the landowners of a Serua Mahogany plantation the ability to apply for a forestry harvest license.

This is the excerpt of the Fiji Village article:

Serua Mahogany Landowners Entitled Harvesting License
By fijivillage
Jan 19, 2007, 17:19

In a bench mark ruling, the Suva High court yesterday ordered that Serua mahogany landowners are entitled to a license to harvest their own mahogany.

High court judge Jiten Singh ruled that they are now entitled to a license from the Native Land Trust Board to harvest mahogany planted on their land after the mataqali Naua applied to the NLTB for a license to log the mahogany which was denied.

In his judgment Justice Singh highlighted that the evidence before him indicates that the financial benefits to the landowners are far superior if they log their own mahogany since they have ready buyers for their products

Lawyer representing the landowners Isireli Fa said they have already negotiated a price for the mahogany which is estimated to earn the landowners $1.8 million after costs of extraction.

Prior applications filed by the landowning unit, was understood to have been denied by the agency responsible for indigenous land in Fiji, the Native Lands Trust Board (N.L.T.B).

This court ruling has also inextricably set up a new paradigm, allowing other native landowning units to contest the multitude of resources available on their ancestral land. This new found ability, further underscores the inability of the Great Council of Chiefs (GCC) to achieve such empowering actions, for the people that they supposedly spoke for.

Another contention is that, why these avenues of livelihood were denied in the first place by the N.L.T.B? The agency charted with responsibility of acting and managing these prime acreages of real estate, with the best interest of the landowners in mind; only had dubious intentions, well embedded in greed and subterfuge.

This court ruling has also confirmed firmly held suspicions that, these native institutions were created for the sole purpose of benefit ting this minority indigenous elite in Fiji. The unintended consequences of the agenda driven influences from a clumsy aristocratic hierarchy was, the political dramatization of class warfare in Fiji, resulting in a track record of coups.

Club Em Designs