SABL limits queried

THE national government needs to tell provinces whether the moratorium on special agriculture business lease (SABL) affects new development proposals and projects already under way, East New Britain administrator Akuila Tubal says.
Tubal said this in Lae last week at this year’s first quarter budget review of priority impact projects meeting for all provincial administrators and chief executive officers of commodity boards.
Tubal urged the government to reconsider and allow development that had been approved and those that were already in progress to continue.
He said a blanket moratorium would se­riously undermine the po­sitive and significant progress being made in true private-public partnership with developers, provincial governments and the local landowners through their landowner companies.
He said that in the province,  the public-private partnership was working well with deve­lopers of a number of integrated agricultural development projects not only to realise advancement in econo­mic and social infrastructure development but also drive the achievement of the ob­jectives of the recently-launched 10-year pro­vincial strategic deve­lopment plan.