Logging on New Hanover: "This is our customary land. Why would they do this to us?" 

New Ireland Provincial Government has sent in armed police to defend illegal logging and road clearing operations on New Hanover island. Local people have been engaged in a long struggle to defend their land and reclaim what is rightfully theirs from the foreign logging companies.

The dark side of economic globalisation: politics, organised crime and corruption in the Pacific

By Sinclair Dinnen and Grant Walton on DevPolcy Blog

Paul Pavol, with MP Gary Juffa, at a protest outside the Rainforest Summit in Sydney

Mr. Paul Pavol, from the Pomio District of East New Britain, has been awarded the Alexander Soros Foundation Award for Environmental and Human Rights Activism at a ceremony in New York city.

Ninety-nine year SABL leases issued to logging and oil palm companies have been condemned as "oppressive" and unfair by the Supreme Court.

The comments came in a decision endorsing the findings of the National Court that the SABL lease over Portion 144C in the East Sepik Province was null and void and all logging and oil palm planting was illegal.

RH Consultant and ex Managing Director of the PNG Forest Authority, Kanawi Pouru, addresses villagers in the Pomio district

SABL Story Project*

PNG’s largest logging company and multi-sector business group is telling rural communities that human rights and sustainable business principles impede rural development and should be ignored if people want to get rich.

As much as half of the whole of Papua New Guinea could be impacted by potentially destructive experimental seabed mining operations.

Papua New Guinea's Development Strategic Plan for 2010-2030 undermines the principles in our Constitution and will lead to further inequality and poverty if government departments continue its implementation.

That is the conclusion drawn in a study undertaken by University of Papua New Guinea academic, Patrick Kaiku on behalf of the community advocacy group ACT NOW!

The recent corruption case in Singapore involving former Prime Minister Michael Somare emphasises the need for Australia to do much more to crack down on money laundering from PNG.

The oil palm mill at Dirina in Pomio

SABL Story Project*

Who would think that a responsible government, whose income is dependent on tax revenue would allow one of our major export crop to be smeared with more dirt? 

The Singapore court has found Somare received over US$750,000 in corrupt payments and authorities have frozen his Singapore bank account

Source: Amir Hussain – Straits Times