The rest has become agricultural land, plantations, settlements or unproductive scrub and grassland. Illegal logging is rife, and the forests will be commercially logged out within 10 years. Sampit, a thriving port town, is the centre of the legal and illegal timber industry and the trading and administrative centre for the area. Almost all of these activities are dominated by outsiders. There is just one asphalt road which cuts across the district from Palangkaraya to Pangkalanbun, and this is in very poor condition because of the heavy traffic of logging trucks.
Corruption is everywhere.
The local police, who used to levy a 10 percent tax on tourists, are now said to be soliciting extra income from refugees desperate to leave Kalimantan. The mobs of angry local youth who appear in photographs bearing severed heads on spears are being portrayed as Dayak warriors, headhunters or savages. While they are carrying out ethnic cleansing, they are, in effect, the victims of the destruction of their ethnic identity. It has offered young indigenous people little in return. The majority have only had a few years of primary education due to a lack of schools and the money to pay fees.