By FORCERT

In Papua New Guinea, approximately 97% of land is customary, collectively controlled by clans, tribes and communities. This land serves as the foundation of life and security for the country’s rural communities, and is protected from alienation except under special circumstances, with the communities’ consent.

ACT NOW! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre are urging a United Nations Committee to act on human rights violations in PNG arising from illegal logging. The organisations have filed a formal request to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to consider taking urgent action at its next meeting in August. Bismarck Ramu Group has also endorsed the action.

A new report on logging in Papua New Guinea calls for urgent action by authorities in PNG and overseas to address long standing issue related to illegal logging, human rights abuses and environmental harm.

Nearly 70% of Papua New Guinea’s round log exports between 2019 and 2021 were concentrated in the hands of just ten groups of companies, all with strong links to Malaysia, according to new research by Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre.

There are a lot of important issues for the new Forest Minister, Salio Waipo, to address, especially rampant illegal and unsustainable logging.

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John Rosso, told Parliament that of seventy SABL leases recommended to be be cancelled only twenty have so far been rescinded.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

Source: Mongabay / Rachel Donald  (7 December 2021)

Commercial banks operating in Papua New Guinea have given at least K300 million (AU$144 million) in available credit, since 2000, to the country’s five largest exporters of tropical logs, according to a new report, The Money Behind the Chainsaws, from Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre. 

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