Land access vital for production

ACCESS and availability to land is a major factor in the production of goods and services, Papua New Guinea National Research Institute (PNGNRI) acting director Dr Osborne Sanida says.
He said if the land was not accessible and put to good use, land owners would not be able to benefit from the resource and development would not take place.
Dr Sanida said this at the launch of the institute’s discussion paper No.188 – strategies to address challenges in customary land administration, governance and dispute resolution in Papua New Guinea.
He said land was the source of livelihood and landowners needed to make use of their land to better their lives.
The paper, launched on Thursday, was authored by Dr Flora Kwapena, managing director of Property PNG Ltd; Logea Nao, research fellow with the sustainable land development research programme at PNGNRI; and, former project officer Jerry Birop.
Nao, during a presentation on behalf of her co-authors, said that in Papua New Guinea, three per cent of the land was formally owned, either by the State or privately.
The rest (97 per cent) remained under customary tenure or owned by traditional landowners across the country.
She said unfortunately, the land under customary tenure lacked formal titles restricting economic development as most developers would only work with titled land.
“So, in order for any country (in this case, PNG) to move towards achieving sustainable economic development, we need that customary land to be released for development.”
Nao, however, said the challenge with accessing and promoting bankable customary land titles was associated with administration of customary land, land governance and land dispute resolution.
She said the study was focused on two main areas: to identify the challenges; and, to find potential strategies to address customary land reform issues, especially access, administration, governance and resolution of disputes of customary land.
Some potential strategies which need to be addressed were:

• TO ensure that there is capacity-building initiatives or training provided to all the agencies and the individual involved in the national land development planning;
• TO promote good governance, transparency and accountability, particularly, within the Department of Lands and Physical Planning;
• TO ensure security of land records from loss, destruction and fraud;
• PROMOTE and develop computerised workflow systems; these address concerns around accountability and transparency; and,
• TO ensure that survey and legal data that is recorded in the field is safe and secure with a GIS (geographic information system) spatial system so that records management and accessing records is more efficient.