By Jeremy Hance

Forests spanning an area larger than Costa Rica—5.6 million hectares (13.8 million acres)—have been handed out by the Papua New Guinea government to foreign corporations, largely for logging. Granted under government agreements known as Special Agricultural and Business Leases (SABLs), the land leases circumvent the nation's strong laws pertaining to communal land ownership. Now, the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), the world's largest professional society devoted to studying and conserving tropical forests, is urging the Papua New Guinea government to declare a moratorium on SABLs. 

"SABLs, which were originally intended to promote local agricultural development, have been used on a large scale in [Papua New Guinea] to circumvent forestry reforms by granting protracted (often 99-year) land leases, mostly to foreign or multinational corporations," the ATBC states in a resolution. 

SABLs have been granted without permission of the local community, and, in some cases, without even the community's knowledge, a direct violation of Papua New Guinea's communal land ownership. 

Once a SABL is granted, authorization to log the land is handed out through an aptly named Forest Clearing Authority. Currently almost half the land covered by SABLs—2 million hectares (nearly 5 million acres)—have already received authorization for clearcutting. According to the ATBC much of the forest on the chopping block "is of outstanding biological and cultural significance". 

"These land-clearing authorities will promote the exploitation of native forests by foreign interests without requiring them to comply with existing forestry regulations," says the ATBC, adding that SABLs are "a clear effort to circumvent prevailing efforts to reform the [Papua New Guinea] forestry industry, which has long been plagued by allegations of weak governance and mismanagement". 

Before forest communities are alienated from their traditional lands, biodiversity undercut, and forest ecosystem services severely diminished, ATBC says the government should put a moratorium on granting new SABLs and new authorizations to clear-cut forests. In addition, existing SABLs and Forest Clearing Authorities should be put through a "thorough, transparent, and independent review". 

In its resolution, ATBC states it is not trying to undercut Papua New Guinea's "urgent goal" to reduce poverty in the country, but that such efforts must be wary of "predatory industrial exploitation of the country’s forests, lands and other natural resources, which far too often fail to yield fair or equitable benefits for the majority of [Papua New Guinea] citizens." 

Papua New Guinea to date had been thought to have avoided mass deforestation, thereby retaining one of the last great rainforests outside of the Congo and the Amazon. However, a 2009 study found that between 1972-2002, nearly a quarter of the country's forests were already lost or degraded by logging.