Land Rights Under Threat

OP.ED

Papua New Guineans live with nature. The natural environment around them have influenced and shaped their characters and identities over time. And the environment is very much part of their lives today.

In the old days and in many parts of PNG today, people do not give up their land freely. If you want to take their land, you must kill them first and then take their land. That has been the unwritten law in PNG for generations.

Today, only three per cent of the total land mass in PNG is held by the State and the rest is in the hands of the customary owners, thus indicating the importance of land to Papua New Guineans. This customary land tenure system is recognised by the National Constitution and the Lands Act (1996) provides specific guidelines on how the State and customary land are managed and used. The lease leaseback scheme involving customary land is provided for in the Act.

At the Holiday Inn in Port Moresby, aggrieved landowners from Central, West New Britain and Gulf provinces had a meet and greet session with the media. The meeting was facilitated by lead Non-Governmental Organisations in the country. The meeting was to allow the media to talk to the landowners who are affected by the lease leaseback scheme involving customary land in PNG. The meeting was not attended by the Department of Lands, Environment and Conservation and Forestry, although invitations were sent out. If these departments had attended, their inputs would have helped in shaping the understanding of media personals involved in reporting this issue.

The lease leaseback scheme, as in the Act, is explicit in that the transaction is to enable the customary landowners to acquire credit funds and develop businesses on their own land.

We know now that 5.2 million hectares of customary land has been taken away the landowners under the lease leaseback scheme to date. That represents 10 per cent of the total land mass in PNG. It is now apparent that when the Special Agriculture and Business Lease (SABL) scheme was introduced, corruption crept into the system.

It is also clear that Port Moresby based landowners or educated elites, used the lease leaseback and the SABL schemes to their advantage and made off with money at the expense of their people at home. It also emerged that many developers took over the customary land under the pretext of developing agriculture projects.

Their real reason was to cut down the trees and ship the logs overseas. When all the trees were cut down, the companies packed up and left. There is real fear among landowners, supported by the NGOs that a lot of the companies that now have SABLs are only interested in logging and they too will leave after all the trees are felled.

The other concern for landowners is that the leases are for 99 years, which effectively stops them from all access to their land and the natural environment. That is hard for Papua New Guineans to accept. Who in his or her right mind would agree to sign their rights to their land away like this? We also find this hard to believe that village people whose livelihood depends on their land and the natural environment should willingly sign their rights away.

Sadly, the Department of Lands was facilitating these transactions, either knowingly or otherwise. And it continues to do so. Last year alone, 2.3 million hectares of customary land were taken over by the private developers, many of whom, we suspect, have no knowledge of oil palm or any other agricultural crop at all.

A team of highly qualified people must look into the issuance of SABLs and where laws have been broken, the leases must be forfeited and the land returned to the customary landowners. This is about protecting the rights of the people. The world is watching.