ACT NOW has launched a new advertising campaign on radio and television calling on the PNG Forest Authority to take immediate action on the abuse of Forest Clearing Authority licences.

This is part of ACT NOW's ongoing efforts to ensure action on forest crime, which encompasses illegal logging and associated tax evasion, money laundering and human rights abuses.

Forest Clearing Authorities (FCA) are a type of logging license designed to support agriculture or other land-use changes that require a discrete area of land clearing for those activities. The FCA allows logging as part of this land clearing, but this should be a secondary outcome of the agriculture project.

However, evidence shows FCAs have frequently been abused for full-scale selective logging operations over large areas of forest by foreign owned logging companies and valuable tropical timbers worth millions of Kina are been exported.

Dispite a moratorium imposed by the PNG Forest Board on issuance of new FCAs two years ago, still one-third of log exports come from FCA areas.

The National Forest Authority must immediately suspend all FCA licences and stop illegal log exports.

STOP THE FCA ABUSE NOW!