Photo source: Sunday Bulletin
As the Prime Minister heads to the COP30 meeting in Brazil where he will once again urge the international community to pay for the preservation of Papua New Guine’s vital rainforests, back home their is confusion over how much of PNG’s forest is being destroyed by the logging industry.
Almost all the trees cut from PNG forests are sent overseas as unprocessed round logs, but statistics on the volume of logs exported in 2024 vary from 1.8 right up to 7 million cubic metres.
The difference in these export numbers means the amount of forest destroyed or degraded by logging last year could be anything from around 70,000 hectares, right up to 280,000 hectares.
In its September Economic Update, Westpac Bank states that while official figures show log export volumes declined in 2024, there are ‘alarming reports that up to 7 million cubic metres of logs may be illegally harvested’. Westpac says these logs ‘bypass formal export channels and undermine both environmental and fiscal oversight’.
The PNG Forest Authority has not published its own log export data for 2024.
This alarming lack of transparency is typical of the Authority’s general failure to make any information on logging licences publicly available. This is despite a stipulation in the Forestry Act that the PNGFA maintain a public register with details of all logging projects.
The Forest Authority has though given evidence to the Special Parliamentary Committee on Public Sector Reform on its monitoring of log export volumes. In a ‘preliminary report’ to the Committee dated July 2025, the Authority presented two alternative assessments of the volume of logs exported in 2024.
The Authority said its monitoring and inspection of log export shipments had recorded a total volume of 1,891,265 cubic metres of round logs exported in 2024. But this was not a final figure, as the total volume of logs approved in export permits was 2,417,429 cubic metres, a figure more than 25% higher than the volume counted by its inspectors.
The PNGFA said the final figure remained ‘subject to further reconciliation and data verification’.
There are further reasons to doubt the veracity of the PNGFA’s own monitoring figures.
This is because of the glaring inconsistencies in the detail of the data presented to the Special Committee.
For example, in its summary of log exports by Province the PNGFA reports 25,000 cubic metres of logs were exported from East Sepik. Yet in its list of exports by project site, it does not list any logging operations located in East Sepik.
There are also numerous contradictions in the data presented by project site and the data for individual exporters.
Total exports from the Idam Siwai project for example are recorded as 37,596 cubic metres in one table, but in another two different logging companies are recorded as exporting 111,893 cubic metres from the project.
Casting further confusion on the true total volume of log exports from PNG is published data from the International Tropical Timber Organisation.
According to the ITTO, the volume of logs exported from Papua New Guinea in 2024 was 2,501,450 cubic metres.
The ITTO says its data is ‘the most up-to-date and reliable international statistics available’, yet its export volume for PNG is 32% higher than the volume counted by the PNGFA’s own inspectors.
The confusion over log export volumes and therefore the extent of commercial logging in PNG is further evidence of the poor governance that pervades the whole forest sector.
There is high risk that almost all logging operations in the country are illegal, despite being approved by the PNG Forest Authority.
This is becauase of a lack of resource owner consent, a failure to follow proper process in issuing logging licences, applications based on fraudulent agriculture plans and a complete lack of environmental monitoring and enforcement as major legality concerns.
There is also well documented evidence of financial crime associated with the logging industry says the advocacy group.
The Internal Revenue Commission has said tax evasion by logging companies is widespread and the industry is the most delinquent sector in the whole economy. Meanwhile, evidence published by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime points to widespread transfer pricing that has cost the country over K6 billion (US$1.5 billion) in revenue over a five year period. The Bank of PNG has also assessed the forestry sector as a high risk for money laundering and commercial banks in PNG have closed many logging company accounts over the past five-years as a result.
None of these issues of a lack of data, illegal logging and financial crime are likely to be addressed by the Prime Minister in his public statements in Brazil.
It should not be a surprise that the international community is so reluctant to give money to PNG when the Prime Minister himself fails to even acknowledge the damning evidence of a complete lack of governance in the sector that is allowing the Malaysian logging mafia to destroy our forests.
