Papua New Guinea

Violent corporate land grabbing is driven by logging corporations operating with little oversight in some of the world’s largest rainforests, all with the direct complicity of many politicians.

Papua New Guinea is the latest known victim in a modern era of land grabs orchestrated by foreign corporations according to an investigative report and a film.

On Our Land chronicles the experiences of rural communities in Papua New Guinea who are being dispossessed of their land and natural resources through illegal logging operations and exposes the resulting destruction to local communities and the environment.

Act Now! and Bismarck Ramu Group call on PM to cancel special agriculture and business leases, saying that already 5 million ha of lands in Papua New Guinea have been swallowed up by foreign companies.

Of the 42 Special Agricultural Business Leases examined only four secured consent of local landowners and had viable agricultural projects.

Foreign companies have gained rights to 5 million ha of customary land in Papua Guinea; one provincial governor's now declared a moratorium on new deals.

Your help is needed now for communities across Papua New Guinea who are still waiting for justice in one of our planets largest illegal land grabs.

Felda Global is planning a $13.7 million purchase of rubber, oil palm land in Indonesia and says it is closing in on land deals in Myanmar, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea.

"We have made some fundamental mistakes over the past few years," PNG's Prime Minister, Peter O'Neill, told ABC Radio Australia.

Logging companies in PNG are using special agricultural leases to clear vast tracts of rainforest timber, on the promise of roads and economic development for remote villages. Jemima Garrett investigates.

The Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development has published a special issue of its bulletin on landgrabbing, its impacts on women and their resistance, across the Asia Pacific region.

It is expected that the final report of the Commission of Inquiry into Special Agricultural and Business Leases (SABLs) will shortly be tabled in Papua New Guinea’s national parliament, but no one yet knows what it will recommend, let alone whether Peter O’Neill’s new government will act on those recommendations.