Some donors support activists, forester says

 SOME foreign aid donors seem more interested in supporting activist groups from wealthy countries like Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Transparency International to halt forestry in the country rather than raising living standards, PNG Forest Industries Association executive officer, Bob Tate says.

Tate was commenting on the release of another anti-forestry report, this time by the US-based Oakland Institute, in collaboration with Greenpeace, which wrongly sought to attribute mismanagement in PNG in the allocation of Special Agricultural Leases (SABLs).

Tate said this was just another opportunistic effort by Greenpeace to advance its long-standing global campaign to halt commercial forestry in PNG. It had been trying for at least a decade-and-a-half and had failed.

Its only result was to contribute to misdirection of aid money, Tate said.

The European Union, British, American and even Australian Labor governments had wasted millions of dollars promoting systems purportedly to halt illegal forestry and reduce greenhouse gas emissions when forestry was legal and emissions were small.

Several years ago the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) reviewed PNG’s system of monitoring and approval of log exports and found it superior to those in most developing countries, Tate said.

International auditors SGS verified the legality of every export.Yet this was consistently ignored, he said.