5 million hectares of Papua New Guinea forests handed to foreign corporations

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com
March 23, 2011 During a meeting in March 2011 twenty-six experts—from biologists to social scientists to NGO staff—crafted a statement calling on the Papua New Guinea government to stop granting Special Agricultural and Business Leases. According to the group, these leases, or SABLs as they are know, circumvent Papua New Guinea’s strong community land rights laws and imperil some of the world’s most intact rainforests. To date over 5 million hectares (12.3 million acres) of forests have been leased under SABLs. “Papua New Guinea is among the most biologically and culturally diverse nations on Earth. [The country’s] remarkable diversity of cultural groups rely intimately on their traditional lands and forests in order to meet their needs for farming plots, forest goods, wild game, traditional and religious sites, and many other goods and services,” reads the statement, dubbed the Cairns Declaration. However, according to the declaration all of this is threatened by the Papua New Guinea government using SABLs to grant large sections of land without going through the proper channels. However, according to the declaration all of this is threatened by the Papua New Guinea government using SABLs to grant large sections of land without going through the proper channels. Already 2 million (nearly 5 million acres) hectares of the leased land has been slated for clearing by the government’s aptly named Forest Clearing Authorities. Daniel Ase, Executive Director of the Papua New Guinea NGO, Center for Environmental Law and Community Rights (CELCOR), who participated in the meeting, told mongabay.com that this was “massive land grabbing […] basically for large scale industrial logging,” adding that “most of these areas are located in areas of high biodiversity in the country.” The SABLs undercut indigenous communities by handing land over to largely foreign and multinational big corporations for leases that last 99 years, severing indigenous people from their land for generations. Last year alone, 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) were granted under SABLs. Local communities have often not consented to the deals and in some cases weren’t even notified. “Virtually all of Papua New Guinea is owned by one communal group or another, and at least in theory these groups have to approve any development on their land. This is one of the key reasons for the SABLs—it’s a way for the government to carve off large chunks of land for major logging and other developments, and to greatly diminish the role of local communities,” explains William Laurance, a leading conservation biologist, to mongabay.com. According to Laurance, the revenue made from these deals is not aiding poverty alleviation efforts in Papua New Guinea, but instead the profits are “mostly ending up in the hands of foreign corporations and political elites in Papua New Guinea.” …