Carbon trading, which is being heavily promoted in Papua New Guinea, will not help reduce global warming and instead risks implicating indigenous communities in the obsessive overconsumption in wealthier countries that is destroying the planet, says local community advocacy group ACT NOW!
Nearly 70% of Papua New Guinea’s round log exports between 2019 and 2021 were concentrated in the hands of just ten groups of companies, all with strong links to Malaysia, according to new research by Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre.
Community advocacy organisation ACT NOW! says there are a lot of important issues for the new Forest Minister, Salio Waipo, to address, especially rampant illegal and unsustainable logging.
Campaign Manager Eddie Tanago says that it is shameful that more than 30 years after the Forest Act 1991 introduced a raft of reforms aimed at stopping the unsustainable logging and corruption exposed by the Barnett Commission of Inquiry, the situation today is no better.
Effective action against corruption is essential for economic growth and it should be the number one priority for the new Marape government says community advocacy organization ACT NOW!
Recent findings published by the National Research Institute has reaffirmed the importance of good governance and the rule of law in attracting new investment, increasing employment opportunities and boosting government revenues.[i]
Research and advocacy organisations Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre have welcomed a report that the bank accounts of 30 logging companies operating in Papua New Guinea (PNG) have been closed.
Updated 18 March 2022 with the details of four further new log export operations that started in December 2021
Government claims that it has stopped issuing new log export licences to foreign owned logging companies are not borne out by the evidence, says community advocacy organisation ACT NOW!
“There are sixteen twenty new foreign operated log export operations that have started up since 2020, according to the government’s own log export data”, says ACT NOW! Campaign Manager Eddie Tanago.
Nine years after a Commission of Inquiry exposed the huge illegal SABL land grab, government efforts to cancel the leases have completely failed, says ACT NOW.
Last week Lands Minister, John Rosso, told Parliament that of seventy SABL leases recommended to be be cancelled only twenty have so far been rescinded.
“Just twenty leases cancelled over a nine year period is frankly pathetic”, says ACT NOW Campaign Manager, Eddie Tanago.
Commercial banks operating in Papua New Guinea have given at least K300 million (AU$144 million) in available credit, since 2000, to the country’s five largest exporters of tropical logs, a new report by Act Now! and Jubilee Australia Research Centre has revealed.
The Prime Minister must extend the government's ban on new logging permits to cover all types of logging consent in order for it to be effective, says community advocacy group ACT NOW.
The PM last week directed the PNG Forest Authority to stop issuing new permits and permit extensions so the government can meet its deadline of 2025 for an end to the export of unprocessed raw logs.
Community advocacy group ACT NOW is calling on the government to immediately publish the Auditor General’s report on spending for the 2018 APEC Summit.
“The government has repeatedly promised that the APEC Audit report will be made public but it is now almost three-years since the Summit and we are still waiting”, says Campaign Manager, Eddie Tanago.
According to the Auditor General, his report was given to the Speaker of Parliament in April, but has yet to be presented to MPs.