By IPS Correspondents
CANBERRA, Apr 1 2003 (IPS)

A leaked memo by the environmental group the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has revealed that it hoped to obtain – but not publicly disclose – World Bank funding for a high-level summit on forest conservation in the New Guinea islands.

In an eight-page proposal, WWF South Pacific estimated it would need to raise 109,000 U.S. dollars to organise a summit in 2004 aimed at attracting senior ministers, government officials and non-government groups from the New Guinea islands – the term WWF and others use to refer to Papua New Guinea, the adjoining Indonesian province of Papua and the Solomon Islands.

The memo proposed obtaining funding for the summit from the World Bank’s Forests of Life programme, which was jointly established with WWF five years ago. However, WWF proposed that the role of the World Bank, referred to by the acronym ‘WB’, should be invisible.

"The WB alliance logo or name be kept out completed (sic) from the communication and other media that is released by WWF offices both in Papua, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands," it stated.

The sensitivity over any association with the World Bank followed major protests in 2002 against land mobilisation policies that the PNG government was being pressed to adopt. In response to the protests, the PNG security forces went on a violent rampage that resulted in the deaths of five protesters.

Papua New Guinea contains the world’s third most extensive tracts of forests, nearly all of it held as customary land by the country’s five million people. Consequently, ‘land mobilisation’ policies are viewed as a major threat to the maintenance of culture and food security.

A major international seminar on ‘The Negative Impacts of World Bank Market Based Land Reform Policy’, held in Washington DC in April 2002, concluded that such policies resulted in a re-distribution of land in favour of the already wealthy.

"The privatisation of communal lands undercuts community strategies of survival, cultural cohesion and mechanisms of cooperation, leading to greater impoverishment," the seminar concluded.

Despite broad opposition to ‘land mobilisation’ proposals in PNG, WWF’s memo stated that "the issue and the purpose of the (land mobilisation) project was misinformed to the general public and so the whole project was taken out of context".

Dermot O’Gorman, the Suva-based regional representative for WWF South Pacific, confirmed that the World Bank had been approached, but had rejected a request to fund the summit.

O’Gorman defended the memo’s suggestion that any World Bank funding not be disclosed. "What the message (memo) was saying is that the summit is not a World Bank summit, it is a WWF and partners summit à putting the World Bank logo on it was not what it was about," he said. In February 2003, five PNG community groups – including the Centre for Environmental Law and Community Rights (CELCOR) and Christians for Environmental Stewardship – wrote to O’Gorman demanding that the summit proposal be abandoned and objecting to WWF’s support of ‘land mobilisation’.

The executive director of CELCOR, Damien Ase, believes that secrecy about any funding cannot be justified. "They should disclose it anyway. It is all about transparency we need to know what is going on," he said.

CELCOR and the other groups also objected to WWF’s labelling those that opposed ‘land mobilisation’ as ”misinformed”. "This statement is a slap in the face to all those organisations and people who have worked hard to protect the land-rights of the people of Papua New Guinea," they wrote.

"Some of those who were killed were not ‘misinformed’ as stated, but were very clear about the inevitable consequences of land mobilisation à Customary land ownership is fully related to the integrity of the ecosystems that you claim you want to protect," they wrote.

O’Gorman said that WWF had written to the groups and offered an apology stating that the proposal did not reflect WWF’s position on ‘land mobilisation’. "The language that was used was a bit unfortunate à we support the view of PNG communities (on land mobilisation) à We have apologised for what I think was sloppy wording on our behalf," he said.

WWF’s apology, however, was news to Ase. "I am one of the signatories and there has been no response à If they state that they don’t support the World Bank on land mobilisation then that is good, but I haven’t received a letter yet," he said.

The omission of any reference in the summit proposal to corruption in the forest industry also riled local groups. "The logging industry is without doubt both a primary cause of the corruption gripping our country and a major driver of environmental degradation and rural poverty," the groups argued.

The summit proposal is not the first time that WWF’s PNG activities have been embroiled in controversy.

In March 2001, a leaked internal WWF report revealed that what had been touted by the organisation as a model ecoforestry project had been buying timber illegally logged from mangroves.

In an effort to hose down the controversy, O’Gorman revealed he would be flying to the PNG capital Port Moresby to meet the critics of the summit proposal this week. This too was news to Ase, the lead signatory to the protest letter to WWF. "They were talking about meeting but no one has come around to meet us," he said.

The softspoken Ase said that if they do not get a response to their letter soon, they plan on taking the issue further. "We are thinking of doing another letter to their head in Switzerland," he said.

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