By Jo Chandler in The Global Mail

Only the Amazon and Congo basins rival Papua New Guinea for pristine tropical wilderness. But 5 million hectares of its jungle is under threat from foreign land grabs and back-door logging. The PNG Government is under intense pressure to tear up illegal leases – but the chainsaws haven’t paused.

VLAD SOKHIN/THE GLOBAL MAIL: Children play in the waters of Turubu Bay, near timber that is being prepared for export.

Gabriel Molok is directing us into his clan’s country, a sweep of steamy jungle wrapped tight around the once lost, languorous shore of Turubu Bay, Papua New Guinea. After dozing for much of the trip down from Wewak he’s now wide awake and toey.

Navigating out of the lush lowlands of the Prince Alexander Range toward the coast we pull up at a boom gate slung across the logging track. In a sprawling wilderness where land is tightly held but never fenced the loggers have audaciously staked their claim, no matter that a Commission of Inquiry last year deemed their lease unlawful. Forest people, Molok’s kin, emerge from the bush to swing aside the barricade and wave the borrowed Oxfam LandCruiser on its way.

The gate may be flimsy posturing, a bluff, but the message is hard to ignore: bothersome landowners like Molok and his collaborator Father Willy Suai, a local lad and Catholic priest, are not welcome.

At intervals on the rough track the close green walls of the rainforest open abruptly, exposing great tracts of churned earth. What’s at stake here is also suddenly, starkly laid bare. Red-raw, severed trunks – some as wide as a man is tall – are strewn across the clearings or bulldozed into rough piles awaiting collection.

In these clearings the sun is brutal, baking into dust the once fecund forest floor. Overhead, avenues have been ripped through the blanketing high canopy where the mightiest trees – the coveted kwila, or merbau – have fallen. These giants in their wild habitat are unrecognisable as the tamed, trimmed suburban first-world favourite for durable decking and patio furniture ($4.38 per linear metre in timber yards in Australia).

There’s no birdsong, but then it’s high noon and the birds know better. Somewhere in the distance chainsaws are working, their screeches echo.

There’s the smell of sawdust, and a whiff of menace. Molok is an outspoken campaigner against the wave of foreign land grabs that swept up more than five million hectares of Papua New Guinea’s forests in the space of a decade, deals exposed by the two-year Commission of Inquiry into Special Agricultural Business Leases (or SABLs) as almost entirely corrupt, illegal and without genuine landowner consent. The commission has urged the PNG Government to tear up most of the leases.

But six months after the findings were tabled in the PNG Parliament the well-oiled machinery of sly logging, dressed up as plantation agriculture, keeps turning. Interfering in it is a perilous business.

The henchmen of the often shadowy foreign-controlled companies profiting from the trees are formidable – unscrupulous officials; politicians with a piece of the action; police on the payroll; tribal “big men”. Sometimes they’re blood, “wantoks” (one-talk, one language) turning on their own.

“With corrupt government officials … riding shotgun for them, opportunistic loggers masquerading as agro-forestry developers are prowling our countryside, scoping opportunities to take advantage of gullible landowners and desperate-for-cash clan leaders,” concluded Chief Commissioner John Numanpo.

As the investigation into the land deals at Turubu Bay and dozens of other sites across the country observed, companies “pay off assertive clan leaders, and then use divide-and-rule tactics” to secure their investment, in the process tearing apart families and destabilising fragile communities. The scars on the landscape are just a part of the story.

In early 2012, tensions infamously boiled over on this track when a delegation from the inquiry came to collect evidence and see for themselves what was going on. Local leaders linked to the logging project spotted activist Molok riding with Commissioner Nicholas Mirou and became so enraged they attacked their vehicle. “They wanted to crush me, with the commissioner,” Molok recalls.

He’s not long done telling this story, shouting over the labouring engine, when a heavily loaded log truck appears up ahead, still some distance away. Molok vaults out of his seat and vanishes down an escarpment...

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