PNGFA holds workshop

By SAMUEL RAITANO
THE Papua New Guinea Forestry Authority is working with stakeholders to enforce policies, laws and regulations guarding the logging industry in the country.
Stakeholders, including landowners, PNGFA, developers and the non-government organizations attended a two-day workshop last week in Port Moresby.
One of the basic points raised involved “legal timber.”
This involved the imparting of criterion and analysis to verify and implement measures and ability to differentiate between legal and illegal timber.
The long-term goal of PNGFA is sustainable forest management.
Last week’s workshop zoomed on the identification of log quality and quantity.
It focused on the arrangements between landowners and the developing entities to secure different timber markets around the world, so that the quantity of timber exported were accounted for, with the landowners getting royalties on their log’s worth.
Some of the issues include :
l    Granting of and compliance with rights to harvest timber within legally gazetted boundaries;
l    Compliance with requirements regarding forest management, including compliance with relevant environmental, labour and community welfare legislation;
l    Compliance with requirements concerning taxes, import and export duties, royalties and fees directly related to timber harvest and trade;
l    Respect for tenure or use rights to land and resources that may be affected by timber harvest rights, where such rights exist; and
l    Compliance with requirements for trade and export procedures.
The purpose of the workshop was to have a legality assurance system to underpin a trade agreement, which must be endorsed by the country’s government.