Research and advocacy organisations Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre have welcomed a report that the bank accounts of 30 logging companies operating in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have been closed.

Updated 18 March 2022 with the details of four further new log export operations that started in December 2021

Government claims that it has stopped issuing new log export licences to foreign owned logging companies are not borne out by the evidence.

There are twenty new foreign-operated log export operations that have started up since 2020, according to the government’s own log export data.

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John Rosso, told Parliament that of seventy SABL leases recommended to be be cancelled only twenty have so far been rescinded.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

Download this article as a PDF - Illegality and Human Rights Abuses

Global Witness

A two-year investigation shines a light on palm oil in Papua New Guinea, the notorious industry’s newest frontier. It reveals a litany of human rights abuses and the wide-scale destruction of tens of thousands of hectares of climate-critical rainforest, linked to major financial institutions including BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager.

Download this article as a PDF - Logging and Forest Loss

The forests of Papua New Guinea perform a range of vital functions, supporting communities, ecosystems and the planet as a whole. Despite this, they remain under threat from unsustainable and often illegal logging by foreign logging companies.

The value of Papua New Guinea’s forests

By Eddie Tanago, ACT NOW!

The Prime Minister must extend the government's ban on new logging permits to cover all types of logging consent in order for it to be effective.

The PM last week directed the PNG Forest Authority to stop issuing new permits and permit extensions so the government can meet its deadline of 2025 for an end to the export of unprocessed raw logs.