PNGFIA executive officer Bob Tate said this following the award of the first certificate of independent verification of the legality of timber products to Saban Enterprises Limited by independent inspection and verification company, Societe Generale de Surveillance.
“We can now close the book on false allegations by Greenpeace and other NGOs that have run an on-going smear campaign against the forestry industry in PNG,” Tate said.
He noted that introduction of third party legal verification had been pioneered by Rimbunan Hijau (PNG) Group, the parent company of SEL.
“Rimbunan Hijau is to be congratulated. The company has gone out of its way to initiate and complete this pilot project. It shows that RH is a transparent company with nothing to hide,” Tate said.
He said this initiative would be followed by the application of the same system of timber legality verification by other PNGFIA members.
Tate said Western and local NGOs had run a shallow and misleading campaign against the forest industry in PNG for a number of years.
“The shallowness of their claims was demonstrated in September this year when Greenpeace illegally seized a ship carrying legally produced timber. Greenpeace claimed the timber was illegal and belonged to RH,” Tate said.
“When it was publicly demonstrated that neither the timber nor the ship were Rimbuan Hijau’s, Greenpeace continued to claim falsely it was. After practicing piracy, it then falsely accused the company of underpaying its workers when it has always paid its workers well above the PNG minimum wage.”
Tate said anti-forestry NGOs and donors from Western countries seem to think it was reasonable to make false claims and behave badly in PNG.
He also pointed to a report last year by the Australian Conservation Foundation which prepared it with PNG-based NGO CELCO.
“The report claimed the forest industry was responsible for gun running and people trafficking, yet there was no credible evidence to support the claims,” Tate said.
“In the same report, ACF and CELCO also accused RH of bringing police to a village to harass people when the villagers in fact called the police in to apprehend a fugitive from justice who had been charged with murder in Port Moresby,” he said.
“Further, the report claimed without any substantiation that forest company staff had sexually abused female workers and practiced child abuse, without substantiation,” he added.
“This week, Greenpeace is claiming at the United Nations Climate Change conference that forestry in PNG is a leading contributor to climate change. But even the U.N. itself acknowledges that implementing sustainable logging is the most cost-effective means of increasing carbon sinks in developing countries,” Tate said.
It was shocking, he added, that wealthy NGOs like ACF believed it was acceptable to engage in such activity in developing countries when they would draw censure if they behaved the same way in their own countries.
