Land reforms aim to end stalled development in Papua New Guinea

RNZ News

6 days ago

Rosso says the changes are essential to securing the country's future and safeguarding the rights of landowners
Photo:
RNZ / Johnny Blades
Reforms to land laws in Papua New Guinea should ensure that landowners have more control over their land.
New legislation introduced by the country's Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso would reform six land-related laws.
Rosso says the changes are essential to securing the country's future and safeguarding the rights of landowners.
Prime Minister James Marape
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Rosso for spearheading the reforms.
"Land is our people's greatest inheritance-our playground, our home, our heritage. Every Papua New Guinean is connected to a piece of land somewhere in this country. We must protect it," Marape told parliament.
RNZ Pacific spoke with its PNG correspondent Scott Waide about the government's motivations for the changes.
(This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Scott Waide:
The Lands Department has been, for want of a better word, terminally ill, for many years. It has had legislation that dates back to the colonial era.
Papua New Guinea has moved on [and] moved forward with a lot of things. But the [land] legislations have been a hindering mechanism for any form of large scale development, like farming [and] real estate development. Those laws have been a hindrance to much of that development, and also the mobilisation of customary land.
Previously, with the old laws, customary landowners could not adequately mobilise and get loans to develop their land, because the laws [and banks] did not recognise customary land ownership, and the accompanying attempts to allow for that development of customary land.
It has posed a lot of complications in terms of mining development, logging [and] farming. The changes that have been introduced allow for both protection of customary landowners and the possibility of them venturing into large scale businesses.
Don Wiseman: It has being brought in by the Deputy Prime Minister John Rosso. What specifically is he going to do? You have outlined the issues that have existed over land for a long time, but are they going to be overcome with this new legislation?
SW:
Yes, many of the problems that have existed for many, many years - from a very, very old system, a manual system, when the rest of the world is operating digitally.
We have had instances where they have been dual titles issued, issued titles over land that have gone missing, because people are reproducing those titles manually.
There is an electronic system that has been introduced as well within the Lands Department, and that is meant to reduce the instances of corruption that have long existed.
A lot of the reforms have happened very quietly within the Lands Department. The other reforms that complement the development of housing, which is a big need in Papua New Guinea, support the development of customary land as well.
So customary land owners can partner with government or with private organisations and develop housing, cheap housing for other Papua New Guineans.
DW: Prime Minister James Marape says this will save the land that is still held, but it is clearly not going to undo a lot of the mistakes from the past, and they have been so many of those, particularly to do with the forestry and so on.
SW:
Yes, that is a an issue that I have spoken to a few land experts as well around. And that is going to be a huge challenge to undo all of that.
The other side to it is that there are customary landowners who also sell their own land for cash. The legislations that have been put in place, in the some of the policies have actually banned the sale of customary land to individual parties as well. So, it offers some level of protection for customary land owners.
There needs to be a lot of awareness as well for customary landowners to understand how the law benefits them, and that is going to also take a while.