Following this trial period, the government launched the two-year project, Enhancing Forest Law Enforcement in Papua New Guinea alongside the PNGFA.
[8] An ongoing Commission of Inquiry into Special Agricultural and Business Leases (SABL) has highlighted that despite the appointment of Pouru as Managing Director in 2007, the level of illegal logging has continued to grow in Papua New Guinea.
[9] In 1989, an attempt was made to kill the Australian judge, Tos Barnett after his commission published findings of its inquiry into corruption in the Papua New Guinea forest industry.
[10] As the Chairman of the Commission of Inquiry, Barnett later went on to state that the “control of forestry operations was left to the decentralised, dismembered, disorganised and demoralised forestry service administrating the toothless and out-of-date Forestry Act.”[11] In 2008, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea quashed a decision to grant logging rights in the Kamula Doso forest area to Malaysian logging company Rimbunan Hijau, after the company admitted that earlier logging rights, previously granted to it, had been illegally obtained.
[14] In response to these reports, Timothy Bonga, the then Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee stated that “the whole functional system of the (Forest) Authority has collapsed”.