Transcript
RICK JACOBSEN: I think there's probably few places left in the world where communities are as dependent for their livelihoods, and cultures and ways of life, on land and healthy forests as in Papua New Guinea. So the impacts of completely removing these forests over the course of several years - and with it everything living in the forest that the community depends on, and in the process polluting waterways and taking away the land that people grow the food that they eat on in many cases - that is really having profound effects both on people's well-being, but also on their traditional way of life. So I think that really as a human rights crisis, the problem couldn't be any more severe.
JOHNNY BLADES: Since the SABLs got up and running, which I think is effectively is around 2009, the report says there have been logs worth over a billion US dollars exported from PNG under this SABL system. That's quite a lot of money being made from a fraudulent scheme.
RJ: Yeah that's right. And it's safe to safe that very little of that money is actually reaching the ground, reaching the communities whose land and forests it originally was. I should say that that number is based on the import value in China of that timber. So nearly all of the timber is ending up in China. From there it's being converted into all sorts of value-added products like furniture, flooring etc. So really, the timber from these SABLs is driving a globalised wood products industry. But the problem is that no one is really asking where the wood came from, and should it have been cut in the first place.
JB: Can you just talk us through the path that the logs typically take from PNG?
RJ: Sure. So the logs are usually loaded directly on to a cargo ship from the site where they're logged in PNG, taken out to the ship by barge. From there, they are shipped to China. Between 85 and 90 percent end up in China. At that point they enter into a very complicated supply chain in which there's a number of traders, intermediaries and manufacturers that lead you ultimately to an end product. In the case we're investigating that end product was hardwood flooring. We looked at hardwood flooring because the most common commercial species in PNG, a species called taun, is usually used for flooring, and a significant amount of that flooring is actually then exported to the US. So while most of the flooring stays in China, some of it goes to the US, and we were quite interested in following that global supply chain all the way to its conclusion.
JB: You've highlighted these retailers who sell the wood products in the US, and you got some mixed responses.
RJ: Yeah it's fair to say mixed results. The taun was being sold and distributed by a number of different actors in the US. We chose to write to ten of the more significant ones. Of those, half didn't respond to our letters. Of the ones that did respond, Home Depot of course is the most commonly known of the companies. And their response was encouraging in that they immediately stopped the sales of the taun that they had in stock. And they were willing to start discussing what steps could be taken to review and potentially improve their due diligence processes on their supply chain.
JB: You've also recommended that the Chinese government should put in place mandatory measures requiring all timber importers to carry out due diligence around the wood being imported. Do you have any realistic hope that would happen?
RJ: Well, we certainly have hope. We were recently engaging with the Japanese government around similar measures. And last year the government did pass a law - it wasn't everything we wanted - but it is intended to promote the trade in legal timber in Japan. So given now that the US, Europe and Japan all have measures in place that are meant to stop the trade in illegal timber, we think it's reasonable to ask China to do the same thing. And these are the four largest wood product importing markets in the world.
JB: And of course the report does make recommendations towards the US. But also the PNG government has been urged by Global Witness to follow through on its announcements that the SABLs have been cancelled. No one is holding their breath. But what must be done there?
RJ: Yeah well this isn't the first time that we've called on the PNG government to make good on its commitment and give some relief to the communities who are really being harmed by these leases. And we're hopeful that, if the international community responds and particularly the Chinese government and importers in that country respond by signalling that they're no longer willing to just buy any old timber, that they actually want to understand that the PNG government is following its own laws, especially these laws that are meant to protect the livelihoods and rights of their own people, we think that sends a signal to the PNG government that's much needed. So if the government isn't willing to respond to the pretty vocal cries of its own civil society and its own communities, maybe additional pressure from the international community can help.
JB: And of course the PNG Lands Minister said earlier this year that they had a great plan to convert the SABLs to customary leases. So that's also of great concern, I would guess, because this is just changing it in name but allowing them (SABLs) to proceed.
RJ: Yeah exactly. We saw last year that the government handed out a slew of new forest clearance permits. We haven't been able to find out - because the government rarely responds to us - under what legal mechanism the clearance permits are being handed out. But our concern is that we're really just going to see a repeat of the SABLs under a different name.
