The ugly side of Special Agricultural & Business Leases

Letters

LAND legislation history in PNG contains a number of legal innovations which failed to achieve their intended aims yet were later used in ways that were not anticipated.
The ‘lease-leaseback scheme’ that facilitates SABLs, is one such case. It was originally devised in 1979 as a stop-gap measure to compensate for the absence of any effective legal mechanism for the registration of customary land titles in a situation where land titles were seen as an essential precondition for commercial agriculture development.
The scheme was incorporated into PNG’s Land Act in the form of specific provisions which enable the State to lease customary land from the customary landowners and then lease it back to these same landowners, or to other persons or organizations that they engage, for periods of up to 99 years.
This mechanism was utilised to optimal heights in the 10 years after 2000, aggregating alienated land with those acquired and converted since 1979.
The total hectares of customary land acquired under SABL during the 10 years reached astronomical heights, aggregating to 5.2 million hectares of alienated land across PNG that effectively placed state land at 15 per cent and customary land at 85 per cent.
All these lands were acquired on the ignorance and gullibility of the customary landowners and without their free, prior, and informed consent.
Alienation of customary lands in the context of SABLs has seen customary landowners go through excruciatingly painful experiences of bullish tactics by developers after SABLs are signed, usually by less educated opportunists from amongst themselves. These SABLs enable the developer to claim ownership of the land under the lease when landowners raise environmental concerns.
The crux of the issue is that the landowners have, for generations, lived within their environment and surroundings freely and with uncontrolled access. All it took was a few papers signed within a few minutes and their land is taken away from them.
They lose control of their land and surroundings. They now live on somebody else’s land. Their dead, cultural sites, their buai, and entirely all the things they subsist on are, legally as per the lease, grown, maintained, and revered on land that no longer belongs to them.
Their rights, their freedom, their cultures, their attachments, their livelihoods, and their ability to express themselves as social beings, effectively, are restrained or taken away completely.
Their trees for timber no longer belong to them. They are now landless and without identity, for 99 years, after which time, they may get back their land which could be barren by then.
However, by then, their identity will have been lost forever and a new generation of impoverished people without any forests, cultural attachment and history, exists.
And if the developer is leasing the land for oil palm development, the landowners will only receive a lousy 30 per cent of FFB harvested and processed because all the developments on the land belong to the developer.
So the LOs lose everything for 30 per cent of the revenue and their employment as labourers with impoverished conditions on their own land. This is outrageous!! This is totally outside the perimeter of living within the economic realities for PNG landowning communities.
If our land, cultures, and identity are going to be part of the opportunity cost of economic growth, then, may God help this country.

Alois Balar
Bainings, ENB