Papua New Guinea - Fern

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World Bank & PNG Rainforest Policy: Good Conservation Actor or Hidden Agenda? The World Bank heralds its Papua New Guinea program as innovative in terms of contributing to rainforest conservation. It is true that over the past decade and a half, the World Bank has successfully used its leverage to stop the most flagrant timber industry abuses. PNG has been a test case of sorts, one of the first countries where forest management issues have been raised by a multi-lateral lender as conditionality for economic loan packages. In addition to structural adjustment lending, the World Bank has been involved in PNG rainforest conservation policymaking through implementation of the national Tropical Forest Action Plan program, formulation of a Forestry and Conservation project which is soon to launch, and as the implementing agency for the Biodiversity Enabling Activities. The linking of forest management conditions to finance has been critical – as the Bank has successfully used its economic leverage to slow down what otherwise may have been even higher rates of rainforest diminishment and loss. Yet, these advances have come at a price. The Bank’s establishment of forestry legislation, monitoring of logging operations, setting of taxation rates, and other reforms are subsidies that legitimize and extend the life of widespread, highly intensive industrial logging. As they continue to subsidize industrial log exports, they have failed to promote other more ecologically sustainable forest conservation policies and management options. Indeed, they and the government actively obstruct pursuit of community-based ecologically sustainable development options that would much more effectively conserve biodiversity. It is not clear whether the Bank can perform the role of biodiversity protector, timber industry reformer, and loan maker simultaneously; and in a manner that reflects the interests of PNG’s rainforest and biodiversity conservation. The World Bank, the organization tasked with assisting Papua New Guinea to implement its obligations under the CBD, also has other agendas. The World Bank’s program of economic assistance requires opening of markets, reductions in subsidies and pruning of government bureaucracy. The Bank’s interest in the export of forest products for economic growth is divergent and contradicts requirements for ecologically, socially and economically rigorous sustainable forest management and biodiversity conservation. Increasingly, the Bank reform efforts are propping up a failed forest sector rather than substantively contributing to rainforest conservation. Recent Bank and government backsliding on commitments to PNG rainforest and biodiversity conservation are best illustrated by the failed logging moratorium. In 1999, the PNG government, World Bank and Australian government (PNG’s major donor) committed to a moratorium on new logging operations as a requirement for a new loan program. The moratorium was to stay in place until there had been independent reviews of proposed and existing timber operations, and the review findings and recommendations were implemented in new policy and legislation. With thirty new logging concessions waiting to be granted and plans for a total of over perhaps as many as one hundred, the moratorium was to provide crucial breathing space for meaningful reform of the country’s rainforest management. The moratorium presented perhaps the last chance to rationalize forest management in a manner that reduced environmental costs while enabling pursuit of a greater variety of alternative forest management options. 12
During the course of the moratorium, the government allowed several new projects to commence, violating the loan conditionality and providing justification for the Bank to withhold funding. Landowners in the Kiunga-Aiambak area of Western Province, Papua New Guinea, have lodged a claim with the World Bank Inspection Panel regarding the Bank's failure to adhere to policy and commitments regarding rainforest conservation. Landowners claim that they have suffered economic, social, environmental and cultural loss as a result of the illegal logging on their land during the period of the moratorium. This project falls in PNG’s largest and most important rainforest wilderness. Despite having been brought to the attention of the government and the World Bank, nothing has been done to stop illegal logging operations. The government of PNG, World Bank and Australia are guilty of frittering away the opportunity offered by the moratorium. When loan conditions were violated and new illegal logging operations started during the moratorium, the Bank refused to take putative actions allowed under the loan agreement. Indeed, despite strong public pressure, the World Bank refused to hold the PNG government to its loan commitments. The moratorium on logging was allowed to lapse, final loan payments were authorized and business as usual overly intensive and highly environmentally damaging industrial forestry recommenced. The World Bank has not followed its policies nor held the government of PNG accountable for meeting its forest conservation commitments under the loan. This moratorium was a failure from which little good has come. Failed forest sector reform in PNG is occurring within the context of the World Bank loosening its restrictions on investments in rainforest logging. Turning the Bank loose to, in their own words, "integrate forests into sustainable economic development", will guarantee the demise of PNG’s remaining large, contiguous and natural old-growth primary forests. It is becoming abundantly apparent that the intent of the Bank's efforts to reform its forest policy is to be allowed to finance commercialization of PNG’s and the World's remaining forest wildlands. The World Bank is yet to present any scientific, peer-reviewed evidence that large-scale commercial logging can be practiced in an ecologically sustainable or socially responsible manner in the tropics or elsewhere. The Bank routinely uses "sustainable forest management" to refer to the extensive and intensive, ecologically diminishing and predatory industrial forest management occurring in PNG and most other tropical rainforests. What is being sustained is foreign exchange revenues and timber yields (at least for awhile longer than completely unregulated logging). The Bank has spearheaded failed tropical timber industry reform efforts worldwide for over a decade. The Bank's effort to bring Papua New Guinea’s rainforests into the global economic system cannot be reconciled with ecological requirements for national rainforest and biodiversity sustainability. Efforts to "integrate forests into sustainable economic development" appear to primarily be driven by principles of trade liberalization and export growth for poverty alleviation (for some anyway), rather than any deep-rooted concern for forest conservation and global ecological sustainability. The World Bank’s entire PNG rainforest policy is based on the false premise that commercial logging in primary forests is ecologically sustainable and represents a biodiversity conservation strategy. This is patently false. 13
Page 1 and 2: Status of Implementation of Forest-
Page 3 and 4: This report is part of a series of
Page 5 and 6: elieved only a small proportion of
Page 7 and 8: Questionnaire Results Reporting The
Page 9 and 10: maintain, accelerate and subsidize
Page 11: Logging Boom Threatens Biodiversity
Page 15 and 16: ecommends that government revise th

Papua New Guinea - Fern

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