Special Purpose Agricultural Business Lease or SABL

In case you are in the dark what an SABL is, as the name implies is a special lease that was provisioned for under Section 11 of the Land Act (1996)

 ‘the Minister may lease customary land for the purpose of granting a special agricultural and business lease’

This lease was supposed to give traditional landowners economic benefits from the rent and employment opportunities created by those businesses that leased land from them.

Of course we know now that these leases have been grossly abused. Instead international logging firms have used them as a means of clearing thousands of hectares of virgin rainforest and consequently destroying not just the biodiversity of the area but alienating our people from their land, their means of shelter, food, water and imprisoning them in their own land!

So this little thing called a Commission of Inquiry was initiated (after some confusion) on May 6^th 2011 by the then Prime Minister Sam Abal, which officially began proceedings on the 30^th of August that year.

November 2012 Mista Prime Minista promised that a report would be made available on the findings of this CoI.

ONE YEAR AND FIVE MONTHS LATER…we are still waiting for the promised report. To add further to the insult - Mista Prime Minista is now reported (Post Courier) to have been helping plant an oil palm plant in Markham in an area that has been leased under the SABL!!!

Not only that but we have people like the Housing and Urbanization Minister (Member for Markham) Paul Isikiel who thinks that SABLs are the key to enhancing Markham’s future!

Before anyone else follows Markham’s example everyone needs to look at ALL the other places where land has been leased under the SABL with no past, current or foreseeable benefits to the landowners.

Western Province with 2.1 MILLION HECTARES of land leased has a hole in the rainforest that was supposedly meant to be part of an agricultural project that would plant cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes and Asian Trees? Not to mention the trans-Papua Highway!

Sandaun has 704 395 ha leased including our own Sandaun Sniper’s Bewani Oil Project – haven’t seen much development there either.

East Sepik, Madang, New Ireland, Gulf, West New Britain, Central, Milne Bay and of course Oro all together with the first two mentioned amount to 5.2 million ha of land leased and NONE of those areas have the landowners benefiting from sustainable and meaningful development.

I’m not going to hold my breath in anticipation of the report of that CoI being finally released and I can only hope that the Markham Oil Palm project turns out to be different to all the other hundreds of so-called Oil Palm projects that have been initiated.

©Klaireh