Papua New Guinea

The “Small Holder Agriculture Development Project” (SADP) is a World Bank loan recently granted to the PNG Government. The SADP project, a U$S 27.5 million credit “aims to enhance agricultural incomes in a number of communities in West New Britain and Oro provinces.” According to World Bank’s Country Manager for PNG Benson Ateng this project is “a core element of the new Country Strategy, through its support for poverty alleviation in two oil palm growing provinces.

The 85,000 hectares territory of Woodlark Island in Papua New Guinea’s Milne Bay Province is almost totally covered by dense lowland rainforest -- lowland dry forest on the eastern side and dense jungle on the western side --which is home to several endemic species. Woodlark Island holds unique ebony species which include dark/black, grey and grey/black varieties, - there are no other forests of this type in the world.

The present expansion of monoculture tree plantations has not happened by chance or just because some governments got this idea. On the contrary, it is the result of the action of a group of actors that set out to promote such plantations. In the fifties, the FAO became the main ideologist behind the large scale monoculture eucalyptus and pine plantation model in the South (as part of the so-called Green Revolution, promoted by this organization), as a response to the needs of large industrial companies that were exhausting their traditional sources of raw material.

Large scale oil palm plantations have proved to be a very bad development for local people in PNG, and especially women for whom they have meant dramatic changes in their lives, work, safety and health (see WRM Bulletin Nº 120).

Extensive areas of PNG’s tropical forests have been cleared to give way to export-oriented oil palm plantations, which have been established under the “Nucleus Estate Smallholder Scheme”. This means that a central company having its own plantation also contracts small farmers to supply it with oil palm fruit. The structure of the Nucleus Estate Smallholder Scheme and the nature of oil palm itself are raising serious concerns amongst civil society.

PNG’s social, political and economic histories have been moulded by its tropical forests. Covering 60 per cent of the PNG land mass and largely impenetrable, the forests have limited trade, defined customary laws and delineated life and culture. When the world thinks of PNG, they see its forests. Now, the logging of these incomparable life systems is corroding PNG’s society and politics, with only trivial economic benefit, and with alarming flow-on effects in the region.

Papua New Guinea has a communal land system that has allowed most rural communities to make a decent living from the free and easy access to land, clean water and the abundance of natural resources. However, the introduction of cash crop plantations undermines their customary systems and structures bringing up negative environmental and social impacts.

The American based Rainforest Alliance is undermining the efforts of local conservation groups in Papua New Guinea struggling to combat widespread illegal and unsustainable logging.

When Australians took control, at the end of the first world war, of the German colony of New Guinea, under a mandate from the League of Nations to protect the native peoples, it was thought that New Guinea had only a sparse population, mostly along the coast. The mountainous interior, it was believed, was a virtually empty and impenetrable jumble of rain-soaked hills. However, it is now clear that the highland valleys of New Guinea have long been among the most densely settled agricultural areas in the world.

In Popondetta, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, representatives of all land owning communities from around the province gathered on 12th March 2004, in the first Oro landowners Forum on Land Rights and Community Based Natural Resource Management. They committed to ensuring sustainable resource management and to protect their rights as the rightful owners of those resources, declaring that:

Melanesia, which includes Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Kanaky (New Caledonia), Fiji, East Timor and West Papua (Indonesia), is unique in the world in that 95% of land is still under community ownership by the indigenous people. The forests they control are part of the largest remaining rainforest in the Asia Pacific region and the 3rd largest tropical forest on Earth after the Amazon and Congo. Illegal and destructive industrial logging is rampant, mainly by Malaysian companies who have moved from Sarawak and elsewhere in Asia as the forests were exhausted.

Forests are home to many peoples, including a substantial population of indigenous peoples. A 1992 European Union-funded study on the situation of indigenous peoples in the tropical rainforests estimated about 12 million of them or 3.5% of the total population of covered areas lived in the rainforest areas of the world. This was apart from those who lived in other types of forest areas.