Victoria Lauries article, Australian Weekend Mag, Aug 20-21, 2005

Indigenous Sandalwood

The article in the Weekend Australian said it all: "Bush Bounty" but when will Indigenous communities be given the opportunity to harvest sandalwood on their own country.

Victoria Laurie's article in the Weekend Australian features a profile of Indigenous community collaboration with French perfume companies in the harvesting of sandalwood.

"We'd like to get the right to harvest sandalwwodon our own country, and sell the product in the open market" argued Darren Farmer. "Now we've got a contract for $1200 a tonne {but} we've discovered twe could sell it for $8,000-10,000 a tonne. The only way we can do that is if we have some sort of intellectual property rights over it. We may get native title rights, but what does that do for us? We can camp and hunt out here, but we don't benefit from the resources".

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