A Beginner’s Guide to Land Grabbing in Port Moresby

Please note that this is a hybrid event. For online attendance please sign up to obtain the Zoom link. Access link will be delivered via email upon registration.

It is commonly asserted that 40 per cent of the land in PNG’s National Capital District is customary land. Like the assertion that 97 per cent of the land in PNG is still customary land, this is a ‘concrete factoid’, that is to say, a statement that is no longer true, and keeps getting less true, but is still bandied about because Papua New Guineans have an unshakeable belief that it ought to be true even if it isn’t. In this seminar, the speaker will examine the five legal avenues through which customary land in the NCD has been alienated since 1975, when the assertion probably was true. Under current legislation, these five avenues are: special agricultural and business leases, voluntary customary land registration, land tenure conversion orders, alienation by agreement with the minister and compulsory acquisition by the minister. The speaker will provide figures on the amount of land that has been alienated through one or more of these legal avenues, assess the extent to which the acts of alienation also count as acts of expropriation, and consider the ways in which the customary owners have or have not been able to resist the alienation of their land.

Speaker

Colin Filer has a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge. He has lived and worked in PNG for 20 years. He has been researching and writing about land and natural resource management issues in PNG for the past 40 years. He is currently an Honorary Professor in the Department of Pacific Affairs.