By Customary Land Advocate

Due to the lack of affordable housing in urban areas, especially in the larger cities of Lae and Port Moresby, working class people are moving away to the periphery of these two cities to have access to cheap land where they can live and work without having to pay for rented accommodation. People in overcrowded and crime-infested squatter settlements in these two cities are also moving away to the periphery of the two cities to resettle and have a new lease of life.

Carbon trading, which is being heavily promoted in Papua New Guinea, will not help reduce global warming and instead risks implicating indigenous communities in the obsessive overconsumption in wealthier countries that is destroying the planet. 

Carbon trading is just one more example of greenwashing being used by big corporations and foreign governments to cover up their failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions and their ongoing destruction of the natural environment.

The Tavolo Community Conservation Association from East New Britain have won a major victory against a Malaysian logging company that has been threatening to log their customary forests.

The National Court has granted the Association a temporary injunction suspending a Forest Clearance Authority granted to Mekar (PNG) Limited by the PNG Forest Authority and stopping any large-scale conversion of forest to agriculture or other land use.

ACT NOW! and Jubilee Australia

Papua New Guinea’s Constitution is unique as it gives the people rights to be custodians over their land, 95% of which is still under customary control.  For thousands of years, over 800 cultures have allowed our land to sustain every generation till the idea of registering customary land was introduced from outside our shores and clouded the real value and importance of that land.

FIGURE 1: Round Log Export Timeline

The aspiration to ban round log exports is now at least 15 years old, but consecutive governments have failed to meet their own deadlines. After putting aside the agenda for over a decade they now say a ban will be imposed in 2025 and the country will move finally to fully downstream processing.

Papua New Guinea’s tropical rainforests have enormous local, national and international importance but are under threat from a variety of sources including commercial logging.

The government has committed to drastically reduce the rate of commercial logging and increase financial returns from downstream processing by ending the export of unprocessed round logs by 2025, but a new research paper by ACT NOW shows there are serious questions over whether this target will be achieved.

Research and advocacy organisations Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre have welcomed a report that the bank accounts of 30 logging companies operating in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have been closed.

Updated 18 March 2022 with the details of four further new log export operations that started in December 2021

Government claims that it has stopped issuing new log export licences to foreign owned logging companies are not borne out by the evidence.

There are twenty new foreign-operated log export operations that have started up since 2020, according to the government’s own log export data.

Nine years after a Commission of Inquiry exposed the huge illegal SABL land grab, government efforts to cancel the leases have completely failed.

Last week Lands Minister, John Rosso, told Parliament that of seventy SABL leases recommended to be be cancelled only twenty have so far been rescinded. 

Just twenty leases cancelled over a nine year period is frankly pathetic.