By PETER KORUGL*

An expert team is to probe how five million hectares of customary land were acquired by foreign firms to cut logs under the pretext of developing the land for agriculture and other business activities.


The commitment was made by Lands Minister Lucas Dekena in response to concerns raised by the United Nations, green groups, NGOs and interest groups in PNG over the allocation of land in PNG by the Lands Department under the Special Agriculture and Business leases (SABL).


“I will get an independent team of experts to look into this matter and address the situation,” Mr Dekena said, but he did not indicate when this would start.

According to reports, much of the land allocations were done negligently which denied hundreds of villagers of their rights to their land for up to 99 years.
 The reports claim the villagers would not seek legal redress for environmental damages because of the amendments to the Environment Act enacted by Parliament last year.


The land allocation has come to the attention of the United Nations Committee on Elimination on Racial Discrimination which has sent a protest note to the Government to explain the millions of hectares of land given away to companies, mainly foreign owned.


“The committee expresses its concern about information according to which indigenous lands are being under threat of alienation through the Government’s practice to issue long term leases to non-indigenous companies. "The committee urges the State to provide information on measures taken to ensure that the application of the Lands Act (1996) does not result in alienation of land, measures to ensure all leases granted with prior consent of indigenous peoples and measures to grant landowners access to justice and an effective remedy in case of violation of their rights,” chairperson Anwar Kemal wrote on March 11. 


The UN letter follows a submission from non-governmental groups over the threats of gross and irreparable harm to customary landowners and adoption of discriminatory laws that deny their access to judicial remedies. 
In March, a large group of experts on environment, social scientists, natural resource managers and NGOs from PNG and the world met at James Cook university in Queensland, Australia to discuss the future management of PNG’s native forest and agreed on the need to halt SABLs.


They described SABLs as “a clear effort to circumvent prevailing efforts to reform the forestry industry in PNG...are also clearly designed to promote industrial developments on an unprecedented scale within PNG while diminishing the rights of traditional landowners”.


PNG has the fourth largest forest resources and the SABLs have angered green groups, NGOs and landowners who were concerned that the forests were under threat from logging.


In the North Fly district SABL, the Western Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry (WCCI) said all the villagers living within the 2.1 million ha have lost their right to the land.


“No Papua New Guinean Secretary of Lands could be so credulous as to believe that any Papua New Guinean villager would no longer require any land whatsoever for the rest of his life, and the lives of his children, grandchildren or even great grand children,” Warren Dutton, the Acting President of the WCCI said.


Minister Dekena said the experts would report to him as to how the Government can address this issue. He said the immediate task was for legislative changes to be made to protect the rights of landowners.
 He said in most cases, genuine landowners were hard to identify because there were interest groups among them that were fighting over each other.

* First published in the Post Courier