By Roderick Kanama

Rod will be providing daily updates from the Commission of Inquiry on this blog from October 10, in this article he provides an overview of SABLs and the issues confronting the CoI.

Land acquisition for developmental purposes has been a Government policy since 1979 when the instrument for Special Agriculture and Business Leases (SABL) was established, later incorporated into the Land Act in 1996. Its application had honourable intentions and was designed to achieve two main objectives;

1. To free up land for the purposes of promoting economic activities and this would generate interest and investor confidence in investment in the resource sector in PNG; and,
2. To enable private companies engaged in extracting resources (developers) to bring development to the localities in which they operated in the form of agricultural and infrastructural development.

Of course the Landowners would make money out of the whole scheme through royalty payments.

The enactment of SABL did generate investor interest with an increase in SABL approvals. The net effect of this has been land alienation with a decrease in customary land tenure of over 5.2 million hectares by 2011 (i.e. from 97% to 86%). The main concern is the alienation of massive areas of customary land, much of which is in the hands of customary land owners with links to foreign companies, particularly where logging is a predominant activity. A large number of the SABL’s for agricultural projects have been issued directly to third parties without proper knowledge or involvement of landowners, with a good number of these being abused for pure logging operations without agricultural development.

The situation has been compounded by the fact that mechanisms required for effective monitoring and compliance of the SABLs are either lacking or not enforced, giving the foreign companies a free reign of destruction and degradation of the environment and biodiversity in the pursuit of their business. The current system of SABL will result in long term economic loss and poses as an impediment to PNG securing REDD funding and combating climate change.

Due to pressures being exerted by many segments of the society including civil societies, prominent leaders and landowner groups on the approval and management process of the SABL, a Commission of Inquiy (COI) has been set up.

The primary function of the COI into the SABL is to investigate and assess issues surrounding (1) issuance - whether proper processes were adhered to in the issuance of the SABL, and (2) compliance - whether the SABL holder has complied with the condition of the SABL to develop agriculture within the SABL locality.

The secondary functions include investigating breach of other legislations concerned with social and moral ethics of the foreign companies and the PNG criminal code.

The Commission of Inquiry comprises Mr. John Numapo as Chief Commissioner and Messrs Alois Jerawai and Nicholas Mirou as Commissioners. The COI was supposed to have commenced on 27/07/2011.