ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that Papua New Guinea (PNG) experienced a land grab of some sort between July 2003 and April 2011. During that period, more than five million hectares of customary land (11 percent of PNG’s total land area) passed into the hands of national and foreign corporate entities through a legal mechanism known as the ‘lease-leaseback scheme’. This peculiar scheme was originally devised in 1979, four years after PNG achieved its independence from Australia, as a stop-gap measure to compensate for the absence of any effective legal mechanism for the registration of customary land titles. It was later incorporated into PNG’s Land Act in the form of specific provisions that 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 of which they approve, for periods of up to 99 years. The Act says that ‘an instrument of lease in the approved form, executed by or on behalf of the customary landowners, is conclusive evidence that the State has a good title to the lease and that all customary rights in the land, except those which are
The author thanks Brian Aldrich (AKT Associates Ltd), Goodwill Amos (PNG Forest Authority), Damien Ase (PNG Centre for Environmental Law and Community Rights), Arthur Ganubella (PNG Department of Environment and Conservation), Moon Hong (former student at the Australian National University), Ian Orrell (PNG Palm Oil Council), Bob Tate (PNG Forest Industries Association), Ambupad Thakur (Changhae Tapioka [PNG] Ltd) and Michael Wood (James Cook University) for their contributions to the information contained in this paper, and two anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the argument.
specifically reserved in the lease, are suspended for the period of the lease to the State’.
