Papua New Guinea is home to one of the richest rainforests in the world. It is also one of the few countries that still allows the export of raw logs. As the practice has been banned in Malaysia and Indonesia, Asian logging companies have exploited this loophole to extract huge volumes of timber from PNG’s forests. The World Bank estimates that 70% of all logging in Papua New Guinea is illegal – and most unofficial sources put the figure even higher.
Directed by David Fedele, Bikpela Bagarap is a documentary that puts a human face on the devastating effects of deforestation in Sandaun Province, one of PNG’s most resource-rich and least developed regions. Told entirely through the voices of local villagers without narration, the film reveals a story of broken promises and systematic destruction. Customary landowners are pressured into signing documents written in a language they don’t understand, in exchange for promised “development” – fresh water, roads, health services, education. These promises are never kept. Instead, traditional hunting grounds are cleared, ancestral ways of life are dismantled, and the profits disappear to Malaysian logging companies and corrupt politicians thousands of miles away.
Local landowners receive less than 1% of the open market value of the timber extracted from their land, if they are paid at all. An estimated 200,000 logs leave Sandaun Province every year, with a market value of over US$300 million. The PNG logging documentary captures this exploitation with unflinching clarity – revealing how deforestation in Papua New Guinea is as much a human rights issue as an environmental one.
Deforestation is also a defining issue in neighbouring West Papua, under Indonesian military occupation since the 1960s, where local tribes are routinely forced from their ancestral lands – a story documented in our West Papua film Forgotten Bird of Paradise.
Bikpela Bagarap won the Best Newcomer ROSCAR Award at the Wild Talk Africa Film Festival in South Africa and the Audience Choice Award at the Kuala Lumpur Eco Film Festival in Malaysia, among other international awards.
