Fiji

Melanesia, which includes Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kanaky (New Caledonia), Fiji, East Timor and West Papua (Indonesia), is unique in the world in that 95% of land is still under community ownership by the indigenous people. The forests they control are part of the largest remaining rainforest in the Asia Pacific region and the 3rd largest tropical forest on Earth after the Amazon and Congo. Illegal and destructive industrial logging is rampant, mainly by Malaysian companies who have moved from Sarawak and elsewhere in Asia as the forests were exhausted.

It is already a well-known fact that large scale tree monocultures result in a large number of social and environmental impacts. However, we had not yet heard of a situation such as that of Fiji, where plantations generated such acute social and economic tensions that they eventually led to a coup d'etat.