ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the long and complicated history of logging and its many ups and downs in the Marovo area. However, increasingly it is the forests that are seen by outsiders as the most valuable market commodity that Marovo Lagoon has to offer. Large-scale logging with heavy machinery has inscribed the land with wide red roads of compacted clay running parallel to the coast and snaking their way inland along ridges. The operations of certain Asian logging companies create, at worst, a chaotic blighted landscape scarred as if by modern warfare. With most government expenditure taking place within Honiara itself, the large contribution that islands like New Georgia make to national revenues is readily seen as a political embarrassment. Copra, for so long the main export of the country, has an entire marketing organisation devoted to regulating its price and monitoring its production and quality.
