The World Bank is on a mission to encourage sweat-shop style factories in Papua New Guinea and we need to tell them NO!

Please ACT NOW! by sending an email to the World Bank - it is really quick and easy to do.

Papua New Guinea is crippled by corruption and democracy has, effectively, been suspended - but the World Bank is using this crisis as an opportunity to write the legislation to impose Special Economic Zones. Legislation that will never be debated on the floor of Parliament.

SEZs are fenced tax-free areas where international companies will be encouraged to set up sweat-shop type factories exempt from the usual laws of PNG. This foreign concept is being imposed on PNG with no notice or debate, despite the many likely problems.

SEZs involve taking land from local people who rely on it for their subsistence lifestyles and importing labor for low-paid jobs that cause social problems, pollution and environmental damage. But SEZs deliver very few benefits as the operations are largely tax-free. 

Please ACT NOW! and tell the World Bank this is not the sort of development that PNG wants or needs.

The land for first SEZ, the Pacific Marine Industrial Zone, is already being cleared in Madang. The project is going ahead despite the massive social and environmental consequences foreshadowed in its own Impact Assessment.

There are plans to build up to 10 tuna processing factories within the PMIZ that will export duty free to the European Union under the terms of PNG's Interim Economic Partnership Agreement. The existing RD Tuna factory in Madang has already caused huge problems -  imagine how much damage 10 such factories will do!

PNG is already struggling to regulate and manage the huge impacts of a number of new multi-billion dollar resource projects, including the Exxon-Mobil LNG project, the Chinese owned Ramu nickel mine, and the world's first undersea mining operation.

These new projects are being implemented alongside existing mining, oil, logging, tuna and oil-palm projects that have their own negative social and environmental impacts.

Papua New Guinea's economy, its people, its infrastructure and its bureaucracy simply do not have the capacity to deal with SEZs and we need to tell the World Bank to back off.

Please ACT NOW! and send your email to the World Bank - if enough of us send a message then the World Bank is going to have to listen, for a change, to what PNG wants.

Thank you for taking action for a better PNG

Your ACT NOW! team