The Impacts of Rural Industry on the Native Forests of Papua New Guinea

As a leading member of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, Papua New Guinea (PNG) has a vested interest in proving to the international community that it could reduce the volume of greenhouse gas emissions from the process of deforestation and forest degradation if suitable financial incentives were to be provided for such action. An assessment of the baseline or 'business-as-usual' scenario for emissions from this process is therefore crucial to current debate about the relationship between national forest policy and measures taken to mitigate the impacts of climate change. This paper shows that the PNG government's own attempts to construct a baseline scenario for the contribution made to this process by logging and agribusiness companies have ignored a number of significant supply-side constraints on their economic activities, both in the past and in the future. This can be understood as the result of a perverse incentive for the governments of 'rainforest nations' to exaggerate the past, present and future rates of deforestation or forest degradation in order to claim a reward for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from a fictitious or exaggerated baseline to a level which approximates the real trajectory

The political construction of a land grab in Papua New Guinea

It is still commonly asserted that 97 per cent of the land in Papua New Guinea (PNG) remains under customary ownership, just as it was when PNG gained its independence from Australian colonial rule in 1975 (GPNG 2007b; AusAID 2008). Indeed, some commentators believe that this abiding reality is a major constraint on the country’s economic development (Jones and McGavin 2001; Lea 2002; Gosarevski et al. 2004). But there is now some cause for these commentators to celebrate a new reality. Between the beginning of July 2003 and the end of April 2011, around 5 million hectares of customary land (11 per cent of PNG’s total land area) passed into the hands of national and foreign corporate entities through a legal mechanism known as the ‘lease-leaseback scheme’. This is twice the amount of land which one international study found to have been ‘grabbed’ by corporate interests across five different African countries over a comparable period of time (Cotula et al. 2010). A study by the World Bank picks out sub-Saharan African countries with ‘very weak land governance’ as favoured targets for what it describes as the recent ‘land rush’ (World Bank 2010: 50). The Bank paid no particular attention to the recent land grab in PNG, but in this paper I will show that PNG also counts as a country with very weak land governance, despite the protection afforded to customary tenures by its own national constitution. The Bank also identifies the food price surge of 2008 as a key factor motivating the corporate acquisition of large areas of farmland in developing countries. This appears to resonate with a statement made by PNG’s former Lands Minister and Deputy Prime Minister in 2010, when he spoke of foreign investors pestering his office with demands for 100 000-hectare blocks of land for future agricultural investment (Post-Courier, 3 May 2010). However, my argument in this paper will be that PNG’s land grab began five years before the food price surge, and in order to understand the motivation behind it, we need to understand that what is being grabbed is not primarily ‘farmland’, but what the Bank describes as ‘currently forested unprotected areas with low population density that are potentially suitable for rainfed crop production’ (World Bank 2010: 53). As we shall see, it is a moot point whether the companies interested in the acquisition of such land in PNG have any genuine interest in its agricultural potential, or whether they are simply looking for new ways to log PNG’s native forests without following the rather onerous procedures imposed by PNG’s forestry legislation. In the first section of this paper, I shall summarise the available evidence on the recent operation of the lease-leaseback scheme, with particular attention to its role in the promotion of so-called ‘agroforestry’ projects. I shall then document the operation of the scheme in more detail with three local case studies drawn from different parts of the country. In the third section of the paper, I shall use the insights drawn from these case studies to construct an ideal-typical model of the political and bureaucratic process through which the scheme has been applied to the alienation of customary land. In the fourth section, I question some of the ideological assumptions which have interfered with a pragmatic or realistic assessment of the social, political and economic forces at work in this process of alienation. And by way of conclusion, I shall briefly consider the chances of halting or reversing this process and the possible consequences of a failure to do so

The new land grab in Papua New Guinea: case study from New Ireland Province

"In this paper, I explain this episode [whole island of New Hanover (or Lavongai) was sold by a company called Tutuman Development Ltd (TDL) to a Singaporean company called Palma Hacienda Ltd] by reference to what I call the “new land grab” in PNG. I have already presented a general account of this phenomenon, along with case studies from Central and East New Britain provinces, in another publication (Filer 2011). A more detailed account of the way that customary land has recently been “grabbed” in New Ireland Province is partly warranted by public interest in the episode I have just recounted, and also by the fact that New Ireland is one of the provinces where this activity is both well entrenched and reasonably well documented. An examination of land grabbing in New Ireland can therefore help us to answer two of the key questions that have arisen in broader national debate about the land grab. The first is whether and why some customary landowners might have consented to the expropriation of their own land; the second is whether the formal unity of the legal process through which their land has been expropriated conceals a variety of motives and outcomes on the part of the actors who either support or oppose this process .. " - page 1AusAI

Horses for courses: special purpose authorities and local-level governance in Papua New Guinea

It is generally agreed that local government has been the weakest of the three main tiers of government in Papua New Guinea since it gained independence in 1975. The reasons for this have been documented in the literature on the decentralisation that was brought into effect by the Organic Law on Provincial Government 1977 (Ghai and Regan 1993; Peasah 1994; May and Regan 1997; May 1999). Although this law gave provincial governments the power to create forms of local government more appropriate to local social circumstances than the model previously advocated by the Australian colonial administration, few took advantage of this opportunity. Whatever the standing of individual councillors within their own communities, the councils themselves generally lacked the financial and human resources required for them to function effectively as organisations engaged in the delivery of public goods and services. This problem is still apparent in most parts of the country. I do not propose to discuss here what could have been done, or should now be done, to improve the performance of this third level of government. Instead, I wish to discuss an institutional arrangement, known as a Special Purposes Authority (SPA), which has been used to perform some of the functions of local government in specific local circumstances. My interest in this subject arose from my recent experience as a consultant engaged in the production of a sustainable development policy for the mining sector that would seek to improve the management of project benefits disbursed to local communities and mine-affected areas (PNG Department of Mining 2003). While one of my aims is to document the potential significance of SPAs for this particular policy framework, I also wish to consider the broader question of how such exceptional institutional arrangements might be an instrument of national policy outside of the mining sector.AusAI

The Political Economy of Forest Management in Papua New Guinea.

This book contains the reflections of scholars, policy-makers and practitioners with first-hand knowledge of recent developments in the political, social and economic dimensions of forest management in Papua New Guinea. The first part of the book contains a number of case studies of the local politics of large-scale logging projects in various parts of the country; the second part is devoted to discussion of various aspects of the forest industry at national and regional levels; while the third part deals with the practical problems of achieving a more sustainable regime of forest management.Produced with additional support from: The PNG Biodiversity Conservation and Resource Management Programme and The Australian National University, Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Projec

Dilemmas of Development

The Porgera gold mine in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea is technically one of the most sophisticated and successful mines of recent times. In its second year of operations (1992) it was the third largest gold producing mine in the world. Socially, though, the mine has brought a range of massive changes for the local Ipili community-both positive and negative. Dilemmas of Development is a record of a series of studies of the social and economic effects of the Porgerta mine, commissioned by the Porgera Joint Vemture (PJV)

Is the 'Bogeyman' Real? Shifting cultivation and the forests, Papua New Guinea

A ‘bogeyman’ is an imaginary creature used to evoke fear and anxiety. The question we address here arises from a recent claim by Shearman et al (2008), that shifting cultivation is a real threat to Papua New Guinea (PNG)’s forests, and hence to global warming. We ask: is this threat real, or is it imaginary? We explore the evidence for this allegation by examining research on shifting cultivation in PNG and arguments about its impact on forests from the 1920s to the present day. We argue that the 2008 findings contradict most previous findings and have probably resulted from an incorrect classification of tall secondary-forest fallows as primary forest. Nevertheless, we find that the changes revealed in these forest fallows by the 2008 study are a serious cause for concern for the long-term food security and welfare of about five million people in PNG who depend upon shifting cultivation to feed themselves