MORE than 11% of Papua New Guinea forests have been subject to Special Agriculture Business Leases (SABL), Northern Governor Gary Juffa says.

Speaking during grievance debate last Friday, Juffa told parliament that SABL’s appeared to have been designed to continue logging operations with impunity and with no regard for environmental repercussions and landowner rights and entitlements.  Juffa said recent legislative amendments were introduced to monitor and review and ensure that duties and royalties were paid correctly.

“This optimistic development has however been shadowed by a new cunning scam designed and developed that would allow continued access to PNG’s rich forest,” he said.

“The scam was SABL and purportedly designed to free land for agriculture development purposes, mainly oil palm.”

He said in some provinces where there were no forest resources, SABL were “perhaps being properly utilised”.

“However, in provinces where there are forest resources, they are a scam.

They are merely a conduit hijacked by the agents of logging companies to access large tracts of forest on the pretext of so-called agriculture development and freeing up of land.

“In fact, the disgusting situation is of landowners being fooled in their ignorance and innocence, being taken advantage of by logging pirates and elected officials and bureaucrats even more,” he said.

Juffa said the SABL inquiry, like many others, had cost the country so much money and there was no fruit “but merely rhetoric and expenditure of public funds in what eventually seem to be scams within scams”.

“I commend the prime minister for his commitment to the SABL inquiry and for his efforts to address corruption by supporting and sponsoring the efforts of Task Force Sweep, undertaking to introduce ICAC, which I will support.”

Juffa said since independence and especially starting in the 1980s with the arrival of logging firms from Asia, local forests had seen substantial destruction and irresponsible harvesting of logs, with virtually little oversight or monitoring by the government.

“We have allowed the monitoring of logs by SGC forms tasked with the responsibility of reviewing all log exports,” he said.

“But in reality this firm only examines 10% of the actual logs harvested and exported and even these inspections constantly reveal discrepancies that are hardly ever penalised.”

Juffa said PNG was one of the few remaining nations that allowed rounds log exports that occurred with great financial loss to the country collectively as state and landowner due to elaborate transfer pricing mechanisms established by these firms.

“The government has at times been oppressive and harsh towards its own people through its agents as it protects the logging pirates who destroy substantial portions of forest and pay very little royalties or taxes of any sort.

“Once logging has been completed, the land is devastated and the people equally destroyed.

“Their land gone, their forests decimated and the promises of infrastructure development empty and undelivered.”

Juffa said there were no schools and hospitals as promised and if so they were built from the cheapest possible materials in the hastiest manner possible and “fall to pieces almost immediately after they are built”.

He said the roads built were actually dirt pathways that were built to allow loggers to access the timber they wanted to harvest and export.

“Evidence of this is found in Western, Gulf, Northern, Manus, West New Britain, West Sepik, East Sepik, East New Britain, Southern Highlands, Central, Madang and Morobe,” he said.