NGOs picket PNG forestry office
By Barry Healy
PNG NGOs including the Individual and Community Rights Advocacy Forum Inc, Conservation Melanesian, Melanesian Environment Foundation (MEF) and Greenpeace picketed PNGs National Forest Authority offices on July 7 to protest against environmental and legal irregularities in timber area allocation.
They demanded that the government investigate the timber industry in light of some 1 million hectares of lowland forests having recently been approved for industrial logging under questionable circumstances.
There are allegations of police pressure on landowners to sign, landowners signing papers they did not understand and allocations made for political gain prior to the elections.
Stanley Iko, spokesperson for MEF, told the media that the NGOs were calling on the new government to establish an inquiry.
"We believe certain policy legislation and environmental laws have been breached in the process of issuing and granting of logging concessions to areas considered high biodiversity areas", Iko said.
The environmentalists claim that recent actions are counterproductive to the spirit of new forest reforms, are setting bad precedents and are undermining the integrity of the forest authority.
The ability of the authority and the PNG government to implement forest legislation effectively is in doubt. Additionally, several of the new projects fall right on top of existing communities organising conservation and sustainable development projects.
The environmentalists say the government and multinationals are bent on logging anywhere they can. They demand that the government recognise local wishes not to pursue industrial forestry.
This means removing conservation, high biodiversity and small-scale development lands from potential production forest.