Columbia U helps appropriate PNG customary land
Which ever way we look at it, Papua New Guinea landowners will be the loosers with carbon trading.
Prof Jeffrey Sach and his team at Columbia University, at best, are misguided. But that is charitable. These are people who believe in the whole neo-liberal project of so-called "globalisation" [giving big capital access to cheap labour, resources, raw materials, markets, and land], and export led development.
In a previous post, we see where that leads: Boliva. President forced to resign over peasant calls for the nationalisation of the gas industry; why are the peasants revolting? The USA told the Bolivians to shut down the major peasant crop: coca [the raw-material for the illicit-drug cocaine], with no replacement strategy. The prospect is that the country will slowly descend into civil war.
In Papua New Guinea the forests are the private property of customary landowners, and major resource upon which those communities are dependant for their livelihoods. They are the "supermarkets" of customary landowners.
1. But in order to get the level of security of tenure needed to give the certainty needed for carbon trading the foreign corporations and gobvernment will have to pass legislation that in effect will expropriate customary land.
2. For the passed 6 years or so, the big law firms and mercant bankers have been crawling over each over in order to get the business of setting up carbon trading in PNG. They are blinded by big bucks and the smell of dollars.
3. There has been no transparency, it was all hole-in-the-corner deals behind closed-doors. No wonder the Third World has a corruption problem!
4. Carbon trading depends upon putting a valuation on industrial pollution in the First World [USA] and trading that for a value put on the forests, which absorb carbon, in the Third World [PNG].
5. First problem is that the scheme actually depends upon pollution. By being able to, in effect, sell-off pollution, the big polluting USA will not actually reduce its pollution. It is merely a matter of creative accounting.
6. And this is the punch-line in Papua New Guinea: no one is saying how much the customary landowners who own the forests will get paid.
7. All the indications so far, is they will NOT get paid, or they will be cheated. Government has said it wants to do carbon trading so the GOVERNMENT will get the money. They are only talking about money going to Waigani!
8. The lawyers and merchant bankers are in it, because they will get their fees, their interest, and their charges. The government, the Waigani, and Port Moresby mafia's, are about to acquire control over customary land and pay less than an arms-length price for it!
9. the centralisation of powers in the hands of the Board of the PNG Forest Authority under proposals to amend the Forestry Act is part of this process. What these amendments do is decrease landowner and Provincial Government powers over the allocation of timber rights to private companies.
Prof Jeffrey Sach and his team at Columbia University, at best, are misguided. But that is charitable. These are people who believe in the whole neo-liberal project of so-called "globalisation" [giving big capital access to cheap labour, resources, raw materials, markets, and land], and export led development.
In a previous post, we see where that leads: Boliva. President forced to resign over peasant calls for the nationalisation of the gas industry; why are the peasants revolting? The USA told the Bolivians to shut down the major peasant crop: coca [the raw-material for the illicit-drug cocaine], with no replacement strategy. The prospect is that the country will slowly descend into civil war.
In Papua New Guinea the forests are the private property of customary landowners, and major resource upon which those communities are dependant for their livelihoods. They are the "supermarkets" of customary landowners.
1. But in order to get the level of security of tenure needed to give the certainty needed for carbon trading the foreign corporations and gobvernment will have to pass legislation that in effect will expropriate customary land.
2. For the passed 6 years or so, the big law firms and mercant bankers have been crawling over each over in order to get the business of setting up carbon trading in PNG. They are blinded by big bucks and the smell of dollars.
3. There has been no transparency, it was all hole-in-the-corner deals behind closed-doors. No wonder the Third World has a corruption problem!
4. Carbon trading depends upon putting a valuation on industrial pollution in the First World [USA] and trading that for a value put on the forests, which absorb carbon, in the Third World [PNG].
5. First problem is that the scheme actually depends upon pollution. By being able to, in effect, sell-off pollution, the big polluting USA will not actually reduce its pollution. It is merely a matter of creative accounting.
6. And this is the punch-line in Papua New Guinea: no one is saying how much the customary landowners who own the forests will get paid.
7. All the indications so far, is they will NOT get paid, or they will be cheated. Government has said it wants to do carbon trading so the GOVERNMENT will get the money. They are only talking about money going to Waigani!
8. The lawyers and merchant bankers are in it, because they will get their fees, their interest, and their charges. The government, the Waigani, and Port Moresby mafia's, are about to acquire control over customary land and pay less than an arms-length price for it!
9. the centralisation of powers in the hands of the Board of the PNG Forest Authority under proposals to amend the Forestry Act is part of this process. What these amendments do is decrease landowner and Provincial Government powers over the allocation of timber rights to private companies.
posted by ferdinand m at 11:22 am
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