Sign outside the PNG Forest Authority HQ in Port Moresby

The Special Parliamentary Committee says weak legislative enforcement, possible systemic corruption and a fundamental lack of will to prosecute offenders has turned PNG forests into an illicit revenue stream for foreign companies

ACT NOW! supports the call from the Special Parliamentary Committee on Public Sector Reform for ‘immediate and nonnegotiable structural, punitive and legislative reforms’ in the forestry sector.

The Special Committee’s recent report lays out a compelling case for immediate changes.

The Committee conducted a detailed review that included oral evidence from the most senior people in key government agencies and written submissions.

The Committee’s conclusion is that weak legislative enforcement, possible systemic corruption, and a fundamental lack of will to prosecute offenders have effectively turned our forests ,which are a vital natural resource, into an illicit revenue stream for foreign interests.

The Committee has stated that ‘emergency surgery’ and ‘immediate and comprehensive change’ is necessary and has set out a series of recommendations for reform that echo many of calls made already by ACT NOW!

These include an independent review of all Forest Clearing Authority licences to see if genuine agriculture projects and other commitments have been honoured and to confirm legitimate landowner consent.

The Committee found that FCA licences are used as a mask for illegal logging, promised agriculture projects are not being delivered and the logging is done without the free, prior and informed consent resource owners.

These findings mirror ACT NOW's own investigations and published reports on the Wammy, Wasu, Loani Bwanabwana, Wanigela and Mengen FCA projects.

The Committee has also called for independent pre-shipping log export monitoring to be immediately recommenced and for the PNG Forest Authority (PNGFA) to promptly resume public reporting of monthly log export data, as ACT NOW has previously advocated for.

The Committee says this should be done together with a comprehensive forensic audit of all log exports over the last ten years with action taken to recover lost revenues including criminal and civil action against the perpetrators.

This should include action by PNGFA, Customs and Internal Revenue Commission (IRC) to impose severe, punitive financial sanctions, including licence cancellations and asset forfeiture against companies with habitual non-compliance

The problems of tax fraud and financial misreporting in the logging industry were first exposed in reports published by the Oakland Institute 10-years ago, and have since been confirmed by the Internal Revenue Commission. Yet, despite many promises of action and international assistance programs only one logging company has been penalised.

The Committee has also called for the establishment of an inter agency taskforce to prosecute corruption and financial irregularities.

It says there should also be immediate cancelation of the licences of logging companies that have failed to transition or invest in downstream processing as directed by the government.

In it’s 2022 Medium Term Development Plan the government set at deadline of 2025 for a complete ban on log exports, a deadline the PNGFA has utterly failed to meet.

This failure to transition to zero log exports, says the Committee ‘demonstrates a collective contempt from logging companies and the Forest Authority for government policy’.

This is described as a ‘betrayal of the governments socio-economic objectives’ that has ‘sacrificed national employment and higher tax revenues’.