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By Michael Field, Auckland (AFP)

SOLOMON ISLANDS, 9 May 2002 -- A nasty little forgotten war in the South Pacific is creating an environmental disaster thanks to Asian businesses willing to exploit the tragedy.

Taiwanese companies want to turn the Solomon Islands, up until now an environmental paradise, into a toxic and nuclear waste dump, while Malaysian, Chinese and Japanese companies are hacking down its jungles.

"The forests are fast disappearing and little serious effort is being put into stopping it," Solomons Forestry Minister David Holosivi told a conference in Honiara Wednesday.

He said the current level of exploitation, carried out by companies from Asia, was unsustainable.

Sources in the Solomons who did not want to be named, for fear of their safety, said it was now possible to see over wide areas of the country unregulated logging.

"These Asian ships do not come into the capital, they unload their bulldozers and just gouge out a bit of the forest and then fill up with the logs for Japan," one eyewitness told AFP.

The lagoons are stained with run-off in many areas and the government, broke and divided, is powerless to do anything.

The Solomon Islands, nicknamed "the Happy Isles", was placid until 1998 when a group of politicians exploited inter-island feeling between those of Guadalcanal and Malaita.

In the three years of civil war that followed 100 people have been killed and 20,000 people turned into refugees.

Independent from Britain since 1978, the Solomons has 446,000 Melanesian people living on seven major islands and hundreds of minor ones with a land area of 28,530 square kilometres.

It has one of the world's largest untouched lagoons, Marovo, and East Rennell, covered in dense untouched forest, is a United Nations World Heritage Site.

The civil war led to a coup in 2000 which saw the illegal Malaita Eagle Force (MEF) seize the capital, Honiara, and turn it into an enclave on Guadalcanal.

Democratic elections were held last year but the government of Prime Minister Allan Kemakeza remains dominated by the MEF.

The economy has collapsed the Kemakeza's government has been propped up by Taiwan, which in return for diplomatic recognition, has lent the country 25 million US dollars.

Solomons Agriculture Minister Steven Paeni said this week a Taiwanese company, Primeval Forest, would be granted a license to dump 10,000 tonnes of garment factory waste at a time in Makira Island up to a total of three million tonnes.

"Cabinet has approved this proposed invitation last week, and the officers are still having consultations with the public service officers," he said.

The deal will see the central government receive 35 million US dollars per shipment, to a total of 200 million US dollars for the lot.

While the money will go to Honiara, the waste is destined for Makira or San Cristobal, a 3,235 square kilometre (1,294 square mile) island, home to around 23,000 people.

It has a small administrative centre, but no industry and most of its people live in subsistence style off the forest and lagoons.

The Taiwan waste is destined for the swampland on the coast.

But there has been deception over what is heading into the Pacific.

Initially a company called Haura Development Investment Holdings Import and Export Company Ltd said it was to bring in "humus soil" and sold the idea to Makira chiefs on the basis that it would make growing crops easier.

The material was described as "treated-sewage solids" and "non-toxic, non-radioactive humus soil... suitable for plant cultivation" and "mud".

But the government's Quarantine Division, which has protested the cabinet decision to allow the material in, says the material, to be exported by Primeval Forest is waste from garment factories and is rich in lead, mercy and arsenic.

The Taiwan Power Company, which has 97,000 barrels of what it says is low-radiation nuclear waste, is now looking at the Solomons as a storage site. Also on their list is Russia, China and North Korea.

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