Almost a million hectares have already been cleared and allocated for settlements, with lucrative contracts awarded for clearing and construction. A Canadian company,  Lavalin, has been contracted to conduct the surveying. The World Bank has bet·r~ the major financier of the scheme.
Local transmigration is generally a case of the Department.of Trans-migration and Forest Squatter Resettlement moving dispersed  communities  to more  accessible  areas  and encouraging them to produce their everyday necessities by settled agriculture, on a small area of land. The forest they have left behind is usually designated as protected, or as part of a concession for commercial logging. The claimed rationale is that it will make the people more accessible to development programs and to protect the forest from the alleged excessive damage caused by slash-andburn agriculture.
Forest dwelling people have been practising shifting cultivation successfully for thousands of years. They understand their own envirornment and ~a~ow how to manage and farm the forests sustainably using a rotational method. The traditional method is to clear a small area of forest in which to grow a subsistence food crop for two or three years, then move on to another area of forest as soil fertility declines, leaving the process of natural regeneration to restore the land to its former state. This does no permanent damage to the forests. Long fallow periods are an essential part of this system if fertility is to be restored  and  the  same  land cleared again for further crops.
The traditional Amungme, Dani and Mbua regions are in the highlands where resistance to diseases such as malaria is low, but forced resettlement, away from what are prospective mining zones has involved moving people to lower altitudes.
Many local transmigrants have been unable to make the drastic change in their way of life, for example, from sage producers to wet rice farmers, and have abandoned their new settlements to return to their homelands.
The Transmigration Pro~-am is not without criticism within the government itself. A study by three Indonesian government departments (Forestry, Population, Environment and Development) reported: "Given the current objectives and operational procedures of the Transmigration Program, the team considers Transmigration as the single sectoral activity with the greatest potential to advance forest destruction - often to no constructive result".
The destruction of West Papua's culture and environment is taking place with the full knowledge of the governments of the western nations, protecting the business interests of numerous large multi-national corporations active in West Papua Throughout the period of  Indonesian  government  rule, Soeharto and his associates have exploited the resources of West Papua in the worst tradition of military-based, authoritarian  governments, and have sought to keep the issue hidden from the outside world. A highly controlled Indonesian press, restrictions on movement within the province, geographical remoteness and difficulties of access, have combined to make West Papua the silent genocide of modern times.