Indonesia’s plan to convert over 2 million ha of conservation and indigenous lands into agriculture will cause long-term damage to the environment, create conflict and add to greenhouse gas emissions, according to a feasibility study document for the Papua region mega-project.

The 96-page presentation reviewed by Radio Free Asia was drawn up by Sucofindo, the Indonesian government’s inspection and land surveying company.

Dated July 4, it analyses the risks and benefits of the sugar cane and rice estate in Merauke regency on Indonesia’s border with Papua New Guinea and outlines a feasibility study that was to have been completed by mid-August.

• READ MORE: Plea to bar Prabowo from UK as Indonesian security forces crack down on Papuan rally
• Other COP29 climate reports

Though replete with warnings that “comprehensive” environmental impact assessments should take place before any land is cleared, the feasibility process appears to have been a box-ticking exercise. Sucofindo did not respond to questions from RFA, a news service affiliated with BenarNews, about the document.

Even before the study was completed, then-President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo participated in a ceremony in Merauke on July 23 that marked the first sugar cane planting on land cleared of forest for the food estate, the government said in a statement.

Jokowi’s decade-long presidency ended last month.

Excavators destroy villages
In late July, dozens of excavators shipped by boat were unloaded in the Ilyawab district of Merauke where they destroyed villages and cleared forests and wetlands for rice fields, according to a report by civil society organisation Pusaka

Hipolitus Wangge, an Indonesian politics researcher at Australian National University, told RFA the feasibility study document does not provide new information about the agricultural plans.

But it makes it clear, he said, that in government there is “no specific response on how the state deals with indigenous concerns” and their consequences.

The plan to convert as much as 2.3 million ha of forest, wetland and savannah into rice farms, sugarcane plantations and related infrastructure in the conflict-prone Papua region is part of the government’s ambitions to achieve food and energy self-sufficiency.

Previous efforts in the nation of 270 million people have fallen short of expectations.

Echoing government and military statements, Sucofindo said increasingly extreme climate change and the risk of international conflict are reasons why Indonesia should reduce reliance on food imports.

Taken together, the sugarcane and rice projects represent at least a fifth of a 10,000 square km lowland area known as the TransFly that spans Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and which conservationists say is an already under-threat conservation treasure.

Military leading role
Indonesia’s military has a leading role in the 1.9 million ha rice plan while the government has courted investors for the sugar cane and related bioethanol projects.

The likelihood of conflict with indigenous Papuans or of significant and long-term environmental damage applies in about 80 percent of the area targeted for development, according to Sucofindo’s analysis.

The project’s “issues and challenges,” Sucofindo said, include “deforestation and biodiversity loss, destruction of flora and fauna habitats and loss of species”.

It warns of long-term land degradation and erosion as well as water pollution and reduced water availability during the dry season caused by deforestation.

Sucofindo said indigenous communities in Merauke rely on forests for livelihoods and land conversion will threaten their cultural survival. It repeatedly warns of the risk of conflict, which it says could stem from evictions and relocation.

“Evictions have the potential to destabilize social and economic conditions,” Sucofindo said in its presentation.

If the entire area planned for development is cleared, it would add about 392 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere in net terms, according to Sucofindo.

That is about equal to half of the additional carbon emitted by Indonesia’s fire catastrophe in 2015 when hundreds of thousands of acres of peatlands drained for pulpwood and oil palm plantations burned for months.

Indonesia’s contribution to emissions that raise the average global temperature is significantly worsened by a combination of peatland fires and deforestation. Carbon stored in its globally important tropical forests is released when cut down for palm oil, pulpwood and other plantations.

In a speech last week to the annual United Nations climate conference COP29, Indonesia’s climate envoy, a brother of recently inaugurated president Prabowo Subianto, said the new administration has a long-term goal to restore forests to 31.3 million acres severely degraded by fires in 2015 and earlier massive burnings in the 1980s and 1990s.

Indonesia’s government has made the same promise in previous years including in its official progress report on its national contribution to achieving the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the rise in average global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius.

“President Prabowo has approved in principle a program of massive reforestation to these 12.7 million hectares in a biodiverse manner,” envoy Hashim Djojohadikusumo said during the livestreamed speech from Baku, Azerbaijan.

“We will soon embark on this programme.”

Prabowo’s government has announced plans to encourage outsiders to migrate to Merauke and other parts of Indonesia’s easternmost region, state media reported this month.

Critics said such large-scale movements of people would further marginalise indigenous Papuans in their own lands and exacerbate conflict that has simmered since Indonesia took control of the region in the late 1960s.

Republished from BenarNews with permission.

While Japan’s discharge of nuclear waste waters into the Pacific from its Fukushima nuclear plant has been drawing flak across the Pacific, a high-powered delegation of Chinese ocean and marine scientists and Asia-Pacific scholars from Shandong Province visited Fiji to promote South-South cooperation to mitigate climate change — the Pacific island nations’ biggest security threat.

Facilitated by the Chinese Embassy in Suva, Shandong Province and Fiji signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to exchange scholars and experts from the provincial institution to assist the Pacific Island nation in the agriculture sector.

At the signing event, Agriculture Minister Vatimi Rayalu said Fiji and China had a successful history of cooperating in agriculture.

• READ MORE: China in the Pacific

He told the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation that this initiative was critical to agricultural production to promote heightened collaboration among key stakeholders and help Fiji connect to the vast Chinese market.

Shandong Province has a 3000 km coastline with a population of 100 million. It is China’s third largest provincial economy, with a GDP of CNY 8.3 trillion (US$1.3 trillion) in 2021—equivalent to Mexico’s GDP.

The province has also played a major role in Chinese civilisation and is a cultural center for Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism.

On August 30, during a day-long conference at the University of the South Pacific under the theme of sustainable development of small island states, scholars from Shandong Province and the Pacific exchanged ideas on cooperation in the sphere of the ocean and marine sciences, and education, development and cultural areas.

Chinese assistance welcomed
In a keynote address to the conference, Fiji’s Education Minister Aseri Radrodro welcomed China’s assistance to foster a scholars exchange programme and share best practices for improved teaching and learning processes.

He said: “We are restrategising our diplomatic relations via education platforms disturbed by the pandemic.”

Emphasising that respect is an essential ingredient of Pacific cultures, he welcomed Chinese interest in Pacific cultures.

Also, he invited China to assist Fiji and the region in areas such as marine sciences, counselling, medical services, IT, human resource management, and education policies and management.

“Overall, sustainable development for Small Island States requires a realistic approach that integrates social, economic, and environmental considerations and collaborations among governments, civil society, international organisations, and the private sector that is essential for achieving sustainable development goals,” he told delegates.

Radrodro invited more Chinese scholars to visit the Pacific to increase cultural understanding between the regions and suggested developing a school exchange programme between Fiji and China for young people to understand each other.

The Chinese ambassador to Fiji, Zhou Jian, pointed out that China and the Pacific Island Countries (PICs), were connected by the Pacific Ocean and in a spirit of South-South cooperation, China already had more than 20 development cooperation projects in the region (he listed them) and 10 sister city arrangements across the region.

Building a human community
Pointing out that his province’s institutions have some of the prominent scholars in the world on climatic change action and marine technology, the Vice-Chairman of Shandong Provincial Committee, Wang Shujian, said he hoped that these institutions would help to build a human community with a shared future in the Pacific.

Many Chinese speakers reflected in their presentations that their cooperative ventures would be in line with the Chinese government’s current international collaboration push known as the “Global Development Initiative”.

This initiative has eight priority areas: poverty alleviation, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, financing for development, climate change and green development, industrialisation, digital economy, and connectivity in the digital era.

Jope Koroisavou of the Ministry of iTaukei (indigenous) affairs explained that the “Blue Pacific” leaders in the region talk about is a way of life that “bridges our past with our future,” and it was important to re-establish the balance between taking and giving to nature.

He listed three takeaways in this respect: cultural resilience and preservation, eco-system stewardship and conservation, and community component and inclusive decision-making.

Professor Yang Jingpeng from the Centre for South Pacific Studies at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications acknowledged that they needed to learn from indigenous knowledge, where indigenous people were closely connected to the environment.

Bio-diversity, climate action, South-South cooperation
“They play an important role in protecting biodiversity,” he noted. “Their knowledge of nature will be greatly beneficial to address climatic change”.

He expressed the wish that under South-South cooperation, their centre would be able to work with this knowledge and scientific methodologies to mitigate climatic change.

Mesake Koroi of the FBC noted that Pacific Islanders needed to get over the idea that because indigenous villagers practice subsistence farming, they were poor when, in fact, they were rich in traditional knowledge, which was important to address the development and environmental challenges of today.

“Using this traditional knowledge, people don’t go out fishing when the winds are blowing in the wrong direction or the moon is not in the correct place”, he noted.

“In my village, 10,000 trees will be planted this year to confront climatic change.”

On an angry note, he referred to Japan’s dumping of nuclear-contaminated water to the Pacific Ocean using a purely “scientific” argument, which he described as “inexcusable vulgar, crude and irresponsible”.

He asked if science said was so safe, why did they not use it for irrigation in Japan?

Nuclear tests suffering
Koroi lamented that historically, major powers had used the Pacific for nuclear testing without respect for the islanders’ welfare — who had to suffer from nuclear fallouts.

“The British, French, and Americans are all guilty of these atrocities, and now the Japanese”, noted Koroi.

Since China was coming to the Pacific without this baggage, he hoped this would transform into a desire to work with the people of the Pacific for their welfare.

Professor He Baogang, of Deaking University in Australia, noted that though the Chinese mindset acknowledged that dealing with climate change was a human right (health right) issue, it still needed to be central to their approach to the problem.

“This should be laid down as important, ” he argued, and suggested that this could be demonstrated by working on areas such as putting green shipping corridors into action.

“China and Pacific Island countries need to look at an agreement to decarbonise the shipping industry,” he argued. “This conference needs to address how to proceed (in that direction)”.

Pointing out that there was a long history — going back to more than 8000 years — of Chinese ancestry among some Pacific people, pointing out that some Māori traditional tattoos were similar to the Chinese tattoos, Professor Chen Xiaochen, executive deputy director, Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies, East China Normal University, noted “now we are looking for common ground for Pacific development needs”.

Knowing each other better
In an informal conversation with IDN, one of the professors from China said that the time had come for the people of China and the Pacific to come to know each other better.

“Chinese students hardly know about Pacific cultures and the people,” he told IDN, adding, “I suppose the Pacific people don’t know much of our cultures as well.”

He believes closer collaboration with universities in Shandong Provincial would be ideal “because it is a centre of Chinese civilisation”.

“Now the Pacific is looking north,” noted Professor Xiaochen, adding, “my flight from Hong Kong was full of Chinese tourists coming South to Fiji”.

Kalinga Seneviratne is a visiting consultant with the University of the South Pacific journalism programme. IDN-InDepthNews is the flagship news service of the nonprofit Inter Press Syndicate. Republished in collaboration with Asia Pacific Report.

Papua New Guinea’s Trade Minister Richard Maru has complained that his country’s trade deal with Australia has been skewed in Canberra’s favour for decades, and suggests the country will trade more with China.

Minister Maru said Beijing should be PNG’s focus for trade and investment opportunities because not enough was being done to assist PNG’s agriculture exports to Australia.

Maru is particularly unhappy with agriculture exports, which account for less than two percent of PNG’s exports to Australia, while minerals dominate.

• READ MORE: Other PNG trade reports

“Enough is enough,” he said. “Starting this year, we are moving on. We will partner with whatever country that will help us achieve that.

“We are friends to all and enemies to none. We are not interested in geopolitics.

“Our main priority is securing the future of our people.”

Australia is supporting bolstering PNG’s agriculture exports, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese earlier this year promising assistance to improve the biosecurity regime that would enable farmers and producers to access international markets.

To deepen trade with China, a feasibility study is underway to assess the possibility of a free trade agreement (FTA).

While Australia is PNG’s largest trade partner, China is a close second, coupled with PNG enjoying the largest trade surplus of any of its other trade partners.

Australia is also pursuing an FTA with Port Moresby, with its own feasibility study to be concluded this month.

Bougainville flexes legal muscles
Meanwhile, the President of the autonomous Papua New Guinea region of Bougainville says his government will not allow foreign investors to breach its laws to exploit its people and resources.

President Ishmael Toroama made the statement as the Bougainville Executive Council refused to grant a mining licence application for a joint-venture involving Wyndale Holdings and its local partners.

The joint venture wanted to mine in the Eivo/Torau areas as well as the Jaba River middle to lower tailings areas.

The Bougainville government said in a statement that Wyndale was a private Australian company with links to Australian Nic Zuks which, it said, claimed to have been issued mining licences by the autonomous government.

President Toroama said the applicants failed to meet the requirements provided by the Bougainville Mining Act 2015.

He said the ABG would not entertain companies and individuals which used “duplicitous means” to exploit Bougainville’s mineral resources.

The President also cautioned investors to be wary of being misled and that the ABG would not be held liable for losses incurred as a result of fraudulent misrepresentations.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Only people power can ensure genuine enduring progress on climate and people need to know the truth if they are to act on it. For that reason greenwashing is the enemy of progress on climate and where you stand on greenwashing is the Rubicon of our times.

I have spent decades of my life as a climate activist fighting various deliberate forms of climate science denial propagated by climate polluting companies and their allied political parties, politicians, lobby groups and commentators.

The good news is that we have mostly won that battle. The bad news is that they have a new tactic, greenwashing, which is now a major obstacle to progress on climate change. Greenwashing is when businesses or politicians give a false impression, or spin, on their products or policies to give the impression that they have a positive impact on the environment when they don’t.

We now face a new landscape in which even oil companies claim to be doing their bit for the climate with “carbon offsets” and “2050 net zero goals”. Their aim is to stop real action on climate by making people think it is all under control.

One of the jobs of the government is to sort out the real climate actions from the greenwashing, to hold industry to account. And of course, one of the jobs of the government is to not engage in greenwashing themselves.

The problem with some of the actions of the current Aotearoa New Zealand government is that rather than holding business to account for its greenwashing, on some vital climate issues the government is actually a proponent of greenwashing.

This greenwashing is closely linked to a wrong-headed theory of change which we hear repeatedly from this government — the idea that climate issues can only be solved through consensus, especially consensus with the polluters and their representatives. The idea that we can’t make real policy to cut climate pollution without the consent of the polluters and their representatives is dangerous and inconsistent with the history of making change.

There are fundamental conflicts in the climate policy space — some industries will not accept that they need to cut emissions. The attempt to gloss over these conflicts and seek consensus means the government adopts policies that the polluters will accept, and which consequently do not cut emissions. This policy outcome is then sold to the public as a great victory when in truth it is a defeat — it is greenwashed.

Before getting into the specifics of the problems I want to acknowledge that this government has done some good things on climate. The ban on new oil and gas exploration permits was a win, even though it excluded onshore Taranaki and allowed existing permits to be extended.

The cap on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser was a win, even though it is a very high cap which has yet to be enforced. Greenpeace publicly celebrated these wins and congratulated the government on making these decisions, even while pointing out their limitations.

I tried to provide a transparent assessment of the environmental performance of the Ardern government back in 2020. I spent a decade as Green Party co-leader and I know there are wins and losses in politics and that compromise is a reality of politics in a healthy democracy.

But honestly admitted compromise is one thing, and greenwashing is another.

There will always be arguments as to what is an acceptable political compromise. We need to separate the issue of what is an acceptable compromise to enter government from the issue of greenwashing. Determining what is an acceptable compromise for the Greens to join the Labour government is formally a matter of decision for the Green Party and the Labour Party rather than the climate movement.

People like me are entitled to our views of the compromise, but it is the Green Party and the Labour Party that have to decide if it’s worth it. I am not a member of the Green Party or the Labour Party.

The issue of greenwashing, however, is an issue which is of direct and immediate concern for the wider climate movement. This is because when the government sells their policies as great climate advances, when in reality they are not, it misleads the wider public and the climate movement.

People can think they don’t need to push hard on climate because it is under control, when it is not. We then need to spend our time highlighting and explaining why the claimed win is actually spin, rather than campaigning for meaningful action.

This undermines our ability to get more significant progress on climate policy because the power and leadership to get progress on climate (like all other progressive issues) comes from civil society and if civil society is disarmed by greenwashing then climate policy follows dead end paths, stalls or  stops.

But why is greenwashing the biggest challenge the climate movement faces at the moment. How did we get here?

Goals remain unchanged, but tactics evolve
As I mentioned above, the first thing to understand is that climate policy is unavoidably and irrevocably conflictual, and hence political. That is because on the one hand the enduring overarching goal of big climate polluters in the fossil fuel business and industrial agribusiness is to prevent government regulations that will force them to cut their climate emissions.

While on the other hand the climate movement aims for emission cuts to achieve a stable climate.

This is a fundamental conflict globally, and in Aotearoa, and no amount of pseudo consensus can wish this conflict away.

Big climate polluters believe, rightly, that government regulation and pricing to drive emissions reductions threatens their business models and profitability. Other sectors of the economy, such as IT, can more easily adapt to a low carbon future, but those businesses in the industries like coal and synthetic fertiliser can’t adapt, and they intend to fight efforts to cut emissions all the way.

While their goal of preventing government regulation to force reductions in emissions has remained consistent, their tactics to achieve this goal have changed. And it is understanding the way their tactics have evolved that it becomes clear just how problematic the current government’s climate policies have become.

At the beginning the tactic they used was to deny the compelling weight of scientific evidence supporting the theory of human induced climate change. Climate denial was stock in trade for many right wing parties and agribusiness and oil industry lobby groups from the 1990s through to the 2010s.

But after a while that stopped working so they changed tactics to stressing uncertainty especially in the 2000s. They said climate change might be a thing, but there is so much uncertainty so we shouldn’t do anything about it. They played up the nature of scientific inquiry — that theories are not beyond questioning because they are not religious texts — to emphasise uncertainty and the need for delay. It was really just another form of climate denialism.

Billions spent on climate denialism
The polluting industries spent billions promoting climate denialism and uncertainty in order to block government regulation to cut emissions. They bought politicians, public relations firms and sadly some scientists to promote these ideas to delay action on climate. Their ideas were reproduced widely by the conservative commentariat, and many still are.

I spent many years of my life fighting climate denialism and eventually through the efforts of millions of climate activists we (mostly) won the battle against climate denialism. There are now few major governments or corporations or industry lobby groups that rely on climate denialist arguments to block government regulation to cut emissions.

Straight out climate science deniers have been pushed to the margins like Groundswell or the Act Party.

But the goal of the fossil fuel and agribusiness polluters remains consistent — they still want to stop government regulation to cut emissions — so they need a new tactic. And that tactic is greenwashing.

These days the polluters and their representatives say, “yes climate change is a thing” and “yes we should do something about it and you will be happy to know that we are doing something about it.”

Hence, they argue, there is no need for government regulation. Even though they spent the last 30 years blocking every attempt to reduce emissions and even denying climate science, they argue that they now take it seriously and there is absolutely no need for the government to do anything.

And what they are doing is often nonsense like net carbon zero targets in 2050 or buying offshore carbon credits or an industry controlled pricing mechanism like He Waka Eke Noa, or nitrification inhibitors etc. They don’t actually cut emissions in any significant way.

The purpose of greenwashing may seem relatively retail when it is done by a single company to sell stuff to consumers, but at a systemic level the purpose of greenwashing is to head off government attempts to introduce regulations and pricing that will force emission reductions.

There are of course some corporations and governments taking significant actions to cut emissions, but there are also many corporate and government actions that are just greenwashing.

Separating out the genuine climate actions from greenwashing is something that defines the climate politics of our time. And this is why the approach taken by the New Zealand government is so very problematic. People assume that the Climate Minister, especially a Green Party Climate Minister, will not perpetuate greenwashing, and will call it out, but it has not always been the case with James Shaw, and that makes it all the more insidious.

Government greenwashes the biggest polluter: Agribusiness
Which brings us to the problem with the current New Zealand government climate policy. Climate policy in this country mostly boils down to what you are doing about agribusiness emissions (biogenic agriculture emissions alone are about 50 percent of emissions) and transport (20 percent). The rest matters too but if you aren’t tackling these two then you aren’t tackling climate change.

Transport policy has not been great from a climate perspective but here I want to focus on the bigger problem — agribusiness — particularly intensive dairy.

We have had the same Prime Minister and the same Climate Minister for the nearly five years of this government. There have been a plethora of nice sounding climate announcements — the PM said that climate was her generation’s “nuclear free moment”, we’ve had the so-called Zero Carbon Act, a climate emergency declaration, an independent climate commission established, emissions reductions plans, improved nationally determined targets for reduction, signed the global methane pledge etc.

But there is still no effective government policy to cut emissions from agribusiness, by far the biggest polluter.

The problem is not just that the government is doing virtually nothing to cut emissions from agribusiness, the problem is that it is saying that it is taking climate change seriously.

It is equivalent to the Australian government doing nothing about coal or the Canadian government doing nothing about tar sands oil — all while telling us how seriously they take climate change. This is greenwashing and it is dangerous because many people think climate action is happening.

When the claims of meaningful action are fronted by a “nuclear free-moment” Prime Minister and a Green Party Climate Minister – the general observer could be forgiven for trusting that those claims are true.

The evidence that this government has done very little to cut agribusiness emissions is bountiful but let me focus on just one central area — agriculture and the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).

Taking government at its word
The government repeatedly tells us that the Emissions Trading Scheme is the most important tool to cut emissions. This is debatable but let us take them at their word.

If it is so important then why, 14 years after the ETS began in 2008, is the biggest polluting sector, agribusiness, still exempt from the ETS? For 14 years agribusiness lobbyists and industry groups such as Federated Farmers and Dairy NZ have successfully fought a battle of predatory delay to stop their sector facing a price on emissions, apparently the most important climate tool.

And every government (Clark, Key, Ardern) has given them exactly what they want — perpetual delay.

When the ETS was passed into law in 2008, the Labour government of the day delayed agriculture’s entry until 2013. A bad start.

At the time, myself and many others argued against the delay but the Clark government wouldn’t budge. The John Key-Bill English National government (2008-2017) that followed, delayed agriculture’s entry indefinitely. From the perspective of agribusiness, delaying is winning, and they were winning.

For a moment in 2017/2018 it looked like the newly elected Ardern government might have the courage of its convictions and that the agribusiness lobby would finally lose its battle to stop climate action.

The Labour-NZ First coalition agreement explicitly committed them to support agriculture’s entry into the ETS at 5 percent of its obligations. With NZ First’s vote secured, there was a Parliamentary majority to bring agriculture into the ETS. Finally.

Backed down under pressure
But then in 2019 the Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw backed down to agribusiness pressure and instead of agriculture facing a price on its emissions they adopted an industry proposal — He Waka Eke Noa.

He Waka Eke Noa was a proposal from agribusiness for a joint government-agribusiness initiative looking at pricing agribusiness climate pollution. In effect He Waka Eke Noa handed over to industry the design of the system to price their own pollution. New Zealand agribusiness was beside themselves with joy.

In time it would become clear that it was not just that industry would design the system, but they would design a system that they would control going forward.

And, the target date for starting pricing was 2025. That was two elections away — 2020 and 2023 —  and the chances of the current ministers still being there was remote. And if they did manage to win in 2020 and 2023, it was almost unheard of for a government to win a fourth term in 2026 so anything implemented in 2025 could be easily undone.

He Waka Eke Noa’s timelines left the industry partying. And as for the politicians, none of them were likely to be around to get the blame when nothing happened either.

In one of the defining moments of this government’s climate inaction, Jacinda Ardern and James Shaw stood next to Dairy NZ and Federated Farmers to launch the five year He Waka Eke Noa project, instead of implementing their own policy of immediately putting agriculture into the ETS.

James Shaw celebrated He Waka Eke Noa and went so far as to say “nothing about us without us” —  that is he used the slogan of the disability advocacy movement to infer that the agribusiness sector shouldn’t be regulated without their consent and agreement. That was a real low point I must say.

Predictably, three years of delay later, in 2022, the final report from He Waka Eke Noa was released detailing a complicated system that would cut agribusiness emissions by less than 1 percent. The headline reduction was higher but that is because it included the reductions that are supposed to come from technologies that don’t currently exist (magic bullets), the reductions that result from the unrelated freshwater regulations, and the reductions that come out of the waste sector.

Incidentally agribusiness has been saying those same magic bullets have been just around the corner for the last 20 years. If you strip out reductions projected to come from magic bullets, freshwater regulations and waste, the emissions reductions from the He Waka Eke Noa pricing mechanism are less than 1 percent. In addition, under the proposal industry would control the mechanism for regulating their own pollution — classic industry capture.

From the industry perspective He Waka Eke Noa was designed to stop government regulation i.e. stop agribusiness going into the ETS. Under criticism from Groundswell, both Federated Farmers and DairyNZ touted their achievement in keeping their industry out of the ETS.

The National Party also voiced its support for the final report. The Climate Minister was a little more muted.

Most people listening to the government talk about He Waka Eke Noa would think that it has been a tremendous success — after all doesn’t the government always say it wants consensus on climate? Whereas in fact its sole success has been to delay government regulation of agribusiness climate pollution — by three years so far — and, even if it were implemented, by its own calculations emissions would be reduced by less than 1 percent.

That is what consensus with polluters looks like and that is the corner that Ardern and Shaw have painted themselves into.

The purpose of greenwashing is to make us think industry is finally taking climate seriously and hence there is no need for government regulation, while in reality very little is happening to cut emissions.

He Waka Eke Noa is a perfect example of greenwashing:

• It looks like industry is taking climate change seriously with media coverage of all their hard work;
• The new scheme, if it is implemented, is controlled by industry, so full industry capture;
• The scheme has almost no impact on actually reducing emissions; and
• Even if, god forbid, the government were to reject He Waka Eke Noa and instead revert to putting agribusiness into the ETS when it makes a decision in late 2022, it is too late for that decision to be fully institutionalised before the next election, so it will be easily removed if there is a change of government in 2023 and not so hard even after the 2026 election. Predatory delay has been such a successful tactic so far for the industry, why change now?

The Glasgow target
The decisions by this government not to cut agribusiness emissions created cascading international problems of perception for the New Zealand government when it was required to offer a new target for emissions reductions at the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021.

The government wanted to look good with an ambitious target (known as a Nationally Determined Contribution) but had few policies to actually cut emissions. Other countries were raising doubts about the government’s climate commitment. The ETS was supposed to do the heavy lifting but, as the Climate Commission admitted recently, under current settings the “NZ ETS is likely to deliver mostly new plantation forestry rather than gross emission reductions”.

The answer was to use the potential future purchase of overseas carbon offsets to present a net target that looked ambitious.

The Climate Minister announced with great fanfare that New Zealand would commit to a 50 percent cut in net emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. NZ paraded its 50 percent target around the Glasgow climate conference. It sounds good until you realise not only does the target use tricky accounting to make it look much larger than it is, but that TWO THIRDS of the emissions reductions would come from buying offshore carbon offsets.

Sorry about the shouty capitals but nothing yells “greenwashing” quite like offshore carbon offsetting. Carbon offsets are notoriously corrupt, open to double counting, and are the carbon equivalent of papal indulgences. They are what you do when you don’t have policy to cut emissions but want to look good.

Yet this is the government’s plan to reach our international climate target — greenwashing. The Climate Commission has urged the government to contract the offsets fast: “It is essential that the government secure access to sources of offshore mitigation as soon as possible”. Instead of, you know, actually cutting emissions.

And just to show the government is not without a sense of humour they signed up to the global methane pledge to cut methane emissions — without a plan to cut methane emissions! In fact, in case industry was worried, when Shaw returned from Glasgow he confirmed that the government would not introduce any new policies to cut methane. Moooo.

But what about the giant climate bureaucratic superstructure?
Faced with this evidence of greenwashing on agribusiness and the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) some people say “what about the Zero Carbon Act”? That proves they are serious doesn’t it? I think that we do need institutional reform to deal with climate, and I’ve pointed to what we need and some of the problems of the Zero Carbon Act before, but it should not be at the expense of immediate climate action.

Much of the government’s climate policy focus in the last five years has been on building an elaborate climate bureaucratic structure. This began with the years-long process to get cross-party support for the Zero Carbon Act, the years-long process to establish the Climate Commission, then there was the years-long processes to build the carbon budgets and the Emissions Reduction Plan.

These structures and processes do look good but they don’t cut emissions – only regulations and policies that cut emissions actually cut emissions. Now you might argue that over time this bureaucratic superstructure will lead to significant emission reductions, and maybe they will, and maybe they won’t, and maybe they can be improved.

The problem is we don’t have years to wonder and hope. We need to have been tangibly cutting actual emissions for the last five years, and cutting them harder over the next five, if we are to play any part in stalling global climate catastrophe.

Spending five years on not implementing much policy to cut emissions, in order to implement a bureaucratic superstructure that might result in emissions cuts down the road if a future government has the courage to use the climate superstructure to implement the policies that this one has not, is plainly not a serious policy to cut emissions. Just implement the policies.

However, in agriculture, our biggest polluter, there is no ambiguity that this climate policy structure has delivered nothing. The Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) has almost nothing to offer except magical technologies that don’t currently exist. The government’s excuse for offering no serious policy on cutting agribusiness emissions in the ERP is, you guessed it, He Waka Eke Noa. Predictably Federated Farmers really liked the Emission Reduction Plan, because it, you know, didn’t reduce agribusiness emissions!

The 2022-23 Budget that followed the ERP allocated $710 million over four years to agribusiness climate initiatives, but it turns out the money is to look for magic bullets to cut emissions. And some of these magic bullets might be worse — recently $11 million was given to research nitrification inhibitors that kill soil biology in order to cut nitrous oxide emissions following the application of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.

Killing our soils is the exact opposite of what we need to do. The money in the ERP comes from ETS revenue paid by others, because agribusiness is not required to pay into the Emissions Trading Scheme. It is a giant subsidy from everyone else to agribusiness to maintain the pretence of climate action.

It seems a big price to pay to maintain the pretence — it would be a lot cheaper just to paint the cows green.

Some might argue that the climate bureaucratic superstructure may not achieve much in reality, but it is not actually harmful. Sure, the argument goes, this elaborate policy superstructure has wasted lots of time and energy which could have gone into policies that would actually cut emissions, but it is harmless enough.

Well, maybe you’d only think that if you haven’t been following the litigation. Crown Law, the government’s lawyers, are using the Zero Carbon Act etc to actually block climate action in the courts. Here are two quick examples.

In the most recent case against the Energy Minister’s decision to issue more onshore oil and gas exploration permits, the Minister’s lawyers argued that the Zero Carbon Act allowed for more oil and gas exploration and so it was fine. This is in spite of the fact that the world already has more oil and gas reserves than can be burnt to stay under the 1.5 degree guidance that is in the Zero Carbon Act.

Previously climate lawyers have been able to argue that the global situation for oil and gas must be taken into account but now, significantly, under the Zero Carbon Act, the Crown argues you can only consider the New Zealand situation. So the Zero Carbon Act is being used to justify oil exploration and protect it from legal attack by climate activists.

And in a previous case against the Climate Commission, James Shaw’s lawyers argued that the 1.5 degree target in the Zero Carbon Act was only “aspirational” and not binding on the government.

Marc Daalder reported it thus:

“Crown Law counsel Polly Higbee told the High Court references to 1.5 degrees [in the Zero Carbon Act] used “broad, aspirational language” and it would be “too prescriptive” to argue that the purpose section placed any actual duty on the Government.”

No actual duty on the government from the 1.5 degree target in the Zero Carbon Act is what Shaw’s lawyers told the court. Outside the court, when speaking to climate activists, Shaw says that the 1.5 degrees target is binding, but in court, where it matters, his lawyers argue it is not.

It’s hard to think of a clearer example of greenwashing. There were many people in the climate movement who worked hard to deliver the Zero Carbon Act and honestly believed it would be a significant tool to cut emissions, rather than defend oil exploration against legal attack.

The final argument for these bland instruments like the Zero Carbon Act is that we need to get broad political elite consensus on climate to get change. History tells us the opposite. To choose just one example which is close to the PM’s heart — nuclear free.

Nuclear free New Zealand was not a result of a consensus process. It was vociferously opposed by the National Party and its many allies — they voted against the legislation and spoke out against it. Nuclear free NZ was not won by reducing our ambitions to what was acceptable to the National Party and the US State Department.

Thousands of peace and environment activists campaigned for it and the Labour government eventually came round to their position, and stood up to provide leadership. There was no political elite consensus. The reason that the National Party never repealed the nuclear free legislation when they returned to government in 1990 was because of its broad support from civil society, support that resulted from civil society campaigners and a Prime Minister willing to fight for the policy (once he finally came round to it).

Introducing vacuous climate legislation that achieves little, in order to get the National Party to vote for it, is pointless, or worse.

Winning the debate on real climate action is the only way to ensure it sticks, and greenwashing undermines that public campaigning.

Conclusion
During the 2017 election campaign I bumped into Jacinda Ardern in Wellington airport and she told me my job at Greenpeace was to hold her government accountable. I respected her for saying that and I agreed with it, and still do. And so that is what I’m doing.

The government has done some good stuff on climate, but on the really big and difficult climate policy issues they are greenwashing. And the greenwashing has disoriented and weakened the climate movement and meant that we are getting much weaker climate policy out of this government than we would otherwise.

And I refer to Ardern rather than Shaw deliberately because there is an uncomfortable political reality that sits behind all this: Jacinda Ardern makes the climate policy in this government and James Shaw presents it. The first rule of politics is to learn how to count — look at the numbers and you will understand this government — Labour has a simple majority and Shaw isn’t even in Cabinet.

James Shaw may like the climate policy, he may not, I don’t know. He may be the architect of crucial bits of it, or not, I don’t know. He is allowed to say he would like to improve the climate policy, but he cannot speak out against it and keep his job. And once you dwell on that hard political truth, all this makes a lot more sense.

It’s not my job or Greenpeace’s job to say whether that is an acceptable position for the Green Party to find itself in, but it is our job to call out greenwash when we see it. We believe that only people power can ensure genuine enduring progress on climate and people need to know the truth if they are to act on it.

For that reason greenwashing is the enemy of progress on climate and where you stand on greenwashing is the Rubicon of our times.

Dr Russel Norman is executive director of Greenpeace Aotearoa and was co-leader of the Green Party for nine years. He resigned from Parliament as an MP in 2015 to take up the Greenpeace position.

• Petition: Ban synthetic nitrogen fertiliser

Major hardware companies in the US and China have been forced to halt sales of exotic wood flooring and review supply chains after a report has revealed potential links to the devastating and illegal logging trade in Papua New Guinea.

This follows a three-year investigation by international NGO Global Witness into the land theft and deforestation at the heart of Papua New Guinea’s controversial land leases.

Their new report, ‘Stained Trade’, reveals how a third of the country’s timber has been illegally obtained by clear-cutting rainforests on land owned by local communities.

US hardware giant Home Depot and its supplier, Home Legend, along with China’s largest flooring seller, Nature Home, are allegedly involved in this trade worth US$15 billion (NZD$20 billion) a year.

Home Depot and Home Legend have stated they have taken all necessary steps and complied with the Lacey Act, a US law which bans the import of illegal wood, but Global Witness claims wood from Papua New Guinea is readily available on US markets in the form of flooring manufactured in China.

“Papua New Guinea’s government has illegally handed over vast tracts of indigenous land to logging companies who are gutting virgin rainforests at breakneck speed. Responsible logging companies should not be dealing in this wood,” Rick Jacobsen of Global Witness said.

“Tens of thousands of people have been affected. Many who tried to speak out have been threatened, arrested or beaten up by police on the payroll of logging companies.”

Land given away
One of those people is landowner-turned-activist Paul Pavol.

Pavol believes the lease the government used to “give away” his land to logging and palm oil interests involved fraud and forgery.

Despite challenging the move in court, he faces an uphill battle in the face of police intimidation, legal harassment, and a better-funded opponent, Global Witness stated.

“These people say they own the land now, and they do whatever they want. Police came to our community at night. People were scared that they might burn down our houses. That’s the reason we raise our voices. Something’s got to be done to save our forest,” Pavol said.

Global Witness has also called out recently re-elected prime minister, Peter O’Neill, for his involvement in such issues.

“Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has been promising for years to cancel illegal leases, but has failed to follow through. Clear-cutting of forests under the leases is destroying sources of food, water and medicine on which indigenous communities rely.”

Apparent widespread abuse of the land leasing scheme – Special Agriculture and Business Leases – has seen 12 per cent of Papua New Guinea given away to foreign interests for up to 99 years, Global Witness said.

End complicity calls
The NGO has therefore called on US companies selling flooring potentially made from Papua New Guinea’s wood to end their complicity in fueling the theft of indigenous land and deforestation.

“US companies need to take steps to ensure wood products they buy from China are not linked to the abuses of the kind we’re seeing in Papua New Guinea,” Jacobsen said.

According to Global Witness, only half of the ten companies contacted about their potential involvement have responded.

• Read the full ‘Stained Trade’ Global Witness report

Vanuatu is the latest Melanesian state to express reservations on the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic Relations (PACER) agreement between members of the Pacific Islands Forum (the Forum Island Countries plus Australia and New Zealand), PACER-Plus.

The Vanuatu government announced last week that it will not sign the PACER Plus agreement and has decided to pull out of the signing tomorrow after its Council of Ministers’ called for more time to assess the benefits of the regional agreement for Vanuatu.

The decision by Vanuatu comes as no surprise as other Melanesian states, including Papua New Guinea, decided last year that it would not be taking part in the PACER-Plus negotiations, nor would it sign the finalised instruments.

Fiji later followed with threats that it would not sign the agreement as there was lack of flexibility from Australia and New Zealand.

Vanuatu shares similar concerns with both PNG and Fiji on possible loss from such an agreement, the need for an impact assessment, and the protection of infant industries.

PNG walks out early
When PNG sent warning bells in March last year that the PACER-Plus negotiations looked shaky and needed more time for consultation, it had a list of concerns and was ready to talk with both Australia and New Zealand.

But it was during that time that PNG had reached a resolution to withdraw from PACER-Plus.

In August, Prime Minister Peter O’Neill announced the country would disengage with regional negotiations, stressing that based on assessments PACER-Plus would be a disadvantage for its economy.

With attempts by Australia and New Zealand to persuade PNG to return to the regional trade talks, O’Neill stood firm on the country’s assessments, saying, “PNG will not be signing as it would be a net-loss to the PNG economy.”

PNG’s Trade Minister Richard Maru nailed the country’s position when pressured at bilateral meetings, adding that any trade agreement with Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific Islands, that reduced employment, and “killed” the manufacturing industry by removing tariffs and duty would not be acceptable in PNG.

“How many times will I make it clear to Australia and New Zealand that Papua New Guinea will not sign the Pacer-Plus agreement that seeks to advance Australia and New Zealand’s commercial interest at the expense of our national interest” Maru said.

“We are not signing PACER-Plus in its current form because the move to remove tariff and duty will kill our manufacturing sector.”

The furious Maru later called out the Australian government, saying “we will not sign and we will not listen to anyone. I’ve made that very clear … my message to Australia is stop sending any of your agents to PNG and start talking about a comprehensive partnership agreement with us.”

Fiji left unhappy
Last September, Fiji threatened to walk away from the regional trade agreement negotiation after its concerns were not addressed.

The country’s Trade Minister, Faiyaz Koya, said there was a lack of flexibility from Australia and New Zealand on Fiji and Pacific Islands key concerns.

During a RNZ international interview, Minister Koya emphasised that Fiji wanted further negotiations on two very critical issues, on infant industry protection and the “most-favoured-nation” clause that would have an implication for Fiji’s development aspirations.

Fiji’s call for more time to negotiate its concerns was ignored when the Office of the Chief Trade Advisor (OCTA) hastened the process and concluded negotiations in April  in Australia, thus leaving Fiji out of the final talks.

The April conclusion also ignored Fiji’s appeal for a deferral due to conflicting schedules.

“Fiji hadn’t opted out of PACER-Plus, we remain committed … but we were excluded from the Brisbane meeting,” said Minister Koya.

Final negotiations criticised
After eight years of negotiations, PACER-Plus was concluded in Australia in April this year. This regional trade agreement is said to enhance the economic development of Pacific island countries through greater regional trade and economic integration with Australia and New Zealand.

But it has been severely criticised as burdensome on Pacific bureaucracies and undermining Pacific Island countries’ ability to support their local economies.

This week the 13 countries participating will sign the agreement in Nuku’alofa, Tonga.

The fear is that 11 island states will agree and sign a poorly designed agreement locking in Australia and New Zealand as winners.

What has been concluded is a deal with no guaranties of benefits from labour mobility and only a promise of 5 years of aid money, but undermines the ability of the Pacific to determine for themselves what development is and the tools to pursue Pacific development aspirations.

The 13 countries participating in PACER-Plus are Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Tuvalu.

Realities for Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands has a choice to decide whether or not it will sign on to PACER-Plus.

It would have similar concerns expressed by its fellow Melanesian comrades. But it is a choice between letting Australia and New Zealand impose their development vision via PACER-Plus or the opportunity to have a development that reflects the reality and possibilities in the Solomon Islands.

A report by Solomon Islands to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in November last year summed up the economic impact under PACER-Plus as “increased imports from developed country partners are likely to exceed the modest increase in Solomon Islands’ exports, due to the extent of liberalisation demanded by the aforementioned parties and limited productive capacity in the domestic economy. The short term adjustment and implementation costs are likely to impose significant economic and political pressures.”

Australia is currently the number one source of imports for the Solomon Islands, a situation that will be further entrenched under PACER-Plus. The increase in imports from Australia and New Zealand will really be felt when Solomon Islands is set to reduce import taxes on at least 80 percent of imports from these countries.

While this won’t come into effect until the Solomon Islands graduates from Least-Developed Country status – if it passes the 2018 evaluation then graduation will be likely in 2021 – resulting in a loss of US$11million from government revenue.

Solomon Islands had recommended to the WTO that it saw itself aligning with the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in preference to Australia and New Zealand in the future, and PACER-Plus could have them on the wrong path if they sign up.

PACER-Plus will have a serious impact on the ability for Solomon Islanders to determine for themselves their own development future.

Joey Tau is media and campaigns officer of the Suva-based Pacific Network on Globalisation.

• Vanuatu will not sign PACER-Plus

Farmers from several villages in Central Java province’s Rembang district, who started their protest last week by having their feet encased in concrete, were joined by environmentalists on March 20. The church also offered a message of support.

“This protest symbolises our life which will be shackled by the factory,” said Joko Prianto, coordinator of the protest.

He said the factory would ruin the quality of groundwater in the Kendeng karst mountain range.

“The groundwater basin must be protected. If not, we will face drought during the dry season and floods during the rainy season,” he said.

The construction of the PT Semen Indonesia factory began in 2014 but protesters have doggedly delayed it. It was due to begin operating in April but the launch has been delayed, according to local news reports.

Responding to the farmers’ protest, PT Semen Indonesia Corporate Secretary Agung Wiharto said the company had offered a number of solutions, including employing a so-called block mining system to prevent water pollution.

Support for farmers
Father Aloysius Budi Purnomo, chairman of the Commission for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs of Semarang Archdiocese, supported the farmers.

“They fight because they see nature being damaged due to the exploitation of natural resources. This is exactly what Pope Francis spoke about in his encyclical Laudato si,” he said.

“The papal encyclical encourages the church to support those fighting for the integrity of creation,” he added.

Similar support came from Muhammad Nurkhoiron from the National Commission on Human Rights.

“One of our commission’s efforts is to protect the karst mountains’ ecology for the sake of all people. The right to water is part of human rights,” he said.

In April 2016, a similar rally ran for two days until presidential staff promised to schedule a meeting between the protesters and president. In August, they met with the president who said no permit would be issued until an environmental assessment was complete.

Experts involved in the assessment reportedly said that the factory’s activities were feasible. On February 23, Governor Ganjar Pranowo issued a permit but the farmers do not accept the finding.

Palm oil is an important commodity for Indonesia’s economy, contributing US$17.8 billion, or about 12 percent, to its export revenue.

While this year the production of crude palm oil is likely to increase 16 percent, to up to
33 million tons, with expected conducive weather conditions, environmental issues and social conflicts continue to overshadow the sector’s future in the world’s biggest palm-oil producing country.

Just earlier this month, the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) approved a set of recommendations to the European Commission, which will phase out the use of palm oil as a component of biodiesel by 2020 and require exporters to prove responsible cultivation practices on their plantations.

A report prepared by the European Commission says that as the demand for palm oil is estimated to double by 2050, it poses severe environmental damages to oil-producing countries such Indonesia, Malaysia and others in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Palm oil industry has been accused of causing deforestation, environmental degradation, and human rights violations ranging from land disputes to child labor.

The report is due for a vote in the European Parliament on April 3-6.

In response to the report, Indonesian experts, executives of an organization seeking to promote sustainable development, and a former government official, have started to defend the industry that employs millions.

Black campaign
“This is a real black campaign, involving conflicts of interests, and deriving from trade competitors,” said Bayu Krisnamurthi, former Deputy Minister of Trade and Agriculture in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s cabinet.

Bayu is now the chairman of the Indonesian Society of Agricultural Economics, which provides expertise to the agricultural sector.

In November 2013, the EU set duties of 8.8 percent to 20.5 percent for Indonesian palm oil producers to apply for five years. It argued that by imposing duty on the raw products, an advantage will be given to domestic producers.

The Indonesian government’s is going to file a complaint to the World Trade Organisation against the duties.

Petrus Gunarso, a member of the Indonesian Forestry Scholars Association (Persaki), rebutted the claim that Indonesia’s palm oil industry is the main contributor to the country’s deforestation, claiming that most of the palm oil plantations, which currently cover about 11 million hectares, were previously rubber plantations.

Petrus said that many farmers had converted their plantations as the price of rubber has been declining and palm oil cultivation is more profitable.

“That’s why the sizes of our rubber plantations have shrunk,” he said, adding that plantations are also established on degraded forests, which the government classifies as non-forest estates.

‘Not deforestation’
“By Indonesian law, that’s not deforestation,” Petrus said.

While palm oil producers may need to work more on convincing Europeans to buy their products, at home they have to deal with social conflicts, especially regarding land disputes.

The Indonesia Business Council for Sustainable Development, IBCSD, has commissioned a team to study the costs of these conflicts.

Using 2016 data from five plantations in Kalimantan and Sumatra, the team concluded, in a report titled “The Cost of Conflict in Oil Palm in Indonesia,” that the tangible costs of social conflicts ranged from $70,000 to $2.5 million. The biggest direct costs were income losses due to disrupted operations.

The intangible costs, according to the report, ranged from $600,000 to $9 million, and were due to reputational losses, casualties and property damage.

The reputational losses, according to the study, affect the companies’ ability to obtain loans, decrease the demand for their products and their stock market value.

“Conflicts are going to exist in all industries, it’s our homework now to find the most feasible solutions for the companies and communities,” said Aisyah Sileuw, president director of consulting firm Daemeter, which published the report.

As the infamous commodity makes the industry the most favorite one to bash on, Aisyah believes it is “impossible to get rid of it,” not only because of the huge export revenue it generates, but also since 40 percent of the country’s smallholders depend on palm oil.

Niuean taro has made a return to the shelves and the stomachs of many in New Zealand — but the humble vegetable has come at a cost.

The Niuean taro is being sold at the Mangere Food Market for $12.99 a kg – more than twice the price of the Fijian and Samoan equivalent.

Managing director for the Mangere Food Market, Vutha Hang says transport costs are to blame.

“Reason why it’s more expensive is because they send it via plane, if they send it via boat then it’ll be cheaper,” he says.

Hang was approached by Shopexports and Freight Ltd to sell the product. Others had declined the offer, he said.

“For me I’ll try, if the people buy it then I’ll carry on and sell it, but if people don’t buy it then I have to stop.”

Shopexports and Freight Ltd, which imports the taro for Mangere Food Market, claims on its Facebook page that the produce supports growers in Niue.

Niuean expats claim their country’s product is of a superior quality than other Pacific varieties.

Fotu Jackson, a Pacific engagement manager at AUT University, says from her extensive knowledge of the Pacific she believes Niuean taro is one of the best.

“I think Niuean taro has a lot more taste, the texture is different than other taro from the Pacific – and I say that as a Samoan,” she says.

Jackson says the soil in Niue is very rich, and she believes this contributes to the uniqueness of the Niuean variety.

Hang says a lot of customers come into his store and look for the taro but only a few actually buy it.

Jackson says despite the price of the Niuean taro, it is worth it.

“I was actually one of the people who drove to buy the taro.”

Jackson says there are not many places you can buy Niuean taro, whereas the Fijian and Samoan variety is readily available throughout the country.

“When it comes to New Zealand it’s really popular, it’s in high demand.”

Repeated efforts to get comment from Shopexports and Freight Ltd were not been successful.

Brandon Ulfsby is a student journalist with Auckland University of Technology’s traning newspaper Te Waha Nui.

Kava export returns in 2015 after Tropical Cyclone Pam devastated parts of Vanuatu as it trekked through the country on March 12-14 reached Vt180 million (NZ$2.4 million).

One year later — in 2016 — the figure jumped to Vt800 million (NZ$10.4 million), according to the Director of Biosecurity Vanuatu, Timothy Tumukon.

Responding to questions from Kizzy Kalsakau host of 96 BuzzFM’s Vanuatu Nightly News programme if government was helping farmers grow more kava after Cyclone Pam, Tumukon responded: “Most definitely.”

Tumukon added: “In 2015, when the cyclone struck us 2 years ago exactly [Monday] you’re exactly right, our export data was that Vanuatu then earned Vt180 million from its export after Cyclone Pam destroyed most of our kava.

“Last year’s figures stood at Vt800 million that was earned from kava.

“Now that gives us a lot of comfort that kava has recovered since Cyclone Pam,” he said.

Tumukon said that to maintain the momentum, the government right now was looking at strengthening its assistance to rural communities along with the PHAMA programme to establish testing facilities and also to establish kava nurseries so that it can distribute planting material to areas where you don’t have enough planting materials for farmers to plant.

Tumukon said government was discussing this with the Department of Agriculture for the Government to provide additional funding to establish nurseries on islands where farmers would like to increase their production of kava.

There were also awareness materials being sent out to farmers about what kava varieties they should be planting, and also how they should be preparing their products for their market.

Jonas Cullwick, former general manager of the Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Corporation (VBTC), is now a senior journalist with the Daily Post.

The Vanuatu government’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Committee is confident that the submission of some 31 Bills to Parliament last year should improve Vanuatu’s position on the international reviewers’ “grey list”.

Some three major review groups are involved. The legislative requirements were made on time.

Vanuatu was congratulated by the international examiners during a recent review of Vanuatu’s progress, the Daily Post reports.

The government intends to introduce a Transport Infrastructure Maintenance Fund, reports Radio Vanuatu. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Utilities has been meeting with stakeholders in the transport industry from the road, maritime and aviation sectors. The roles and objectives of the fund have been explained to the stakeholders, but not, it would seem, with the media.

The question raised in yesterday’s Daily Post about who is funding the planned luxury Bauerfield air terminal seems to be answered. The MG Group Hotel project from Hong Kong, involved with government and CCECC in airport discussions and agreements, is the backer. And this despite their plans to steal the view of a Ni-Vanuatu hotelier with a magnificent 3-storey view on a hilltop overlooking Daily Post.

MG’s harbour views will block those of Vila Rose Hotel just as it is starting in business.

Japanese tourists will begin arriving in Port Vila in April, on flights from Tokyo’s Narita airport via Port Moresby, PNG. Air Niugini is arranging the flights. A special night trip to Tanna has sold out already.

Mismanagement claimed
Radio Vanuatu reports the Opposition is claiming mismanagement of the Seaside Sanitation Project to assist the Seaside Paama, Tongoa and Futuna communities. The Opposition claims it has received many complaints concerning the quality of the local work. MIPU has dismissed all of the allegations saying the tender is being properly managed. A supervisory committee continues at work.

The Agriculture Department will be offering planting material, especially many varieties of manioc and kumala, tomorrow at Tagabe Ag Station in an effort to improve access to local and more nutritious  kaikai. Farmers and the general public will be able to meet together and discuss garden issues along with food production and security. There is a day-long programme starting at 7:30am.

The Media Association of Vanuatu is planning to become a full member of the International Federation of Journalists. Until now MAV has only been an associate member.

Re-elected MAV president Evelyne Toa saw the move as able to assist local journalists as regards their rights and freedoms.

Bob Makin writes for the Vanuatu Daily Digest

There have been a couple of stories recently in Vanuatu about kava exports and one of the questions that comes up is monitoring exports to make sure that the material that is leaving the country is of the right standard. The following extract from one such story stood up and waved a big red flag in my face:

“While the existing law already provides us with legal power, we need the extra legal backing to put stricter control measures against farmers and exporters and other people for that matter, in particular owners of kava bars who sell ‘makas’ to the exporters.”

This is a quote from the Director of Biosecurity and the “extra legal backing” he is talking about is a 2015 amendment to the Kava Act that has yet to be gazetted. I have no doubt that the amendments to the Kava Act are relevant and important, especially in light of renewed interest in the product overseas.

What I am concerned about is referring to a delay in the availability of new powers as some sort of excuse for enforcing ones that already exist.

I am a lawyer by training and so people often look quite surprised when I answer the question “do you think we need a law to deal with that?” with something along the lines of “probably not”.

Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely areas of the law that need to be revised, to make them more appropriate to modern day circumstances. But in most cases we don’t need a new law or new powers; what we need is to enforce the ones we already have.

It’s quite simple: if you do not have enforcement, you will not develop a culture of compliance. Sure, some people will comply with the law because that is their nature, or it reflects how they have been brought up and educated.

Complying with laws
Some people will take care to comply with laws because if they don’t they may be deported.

But for most of us, knowing that those with power (police officers, customs officials, biosecurity staff etc.) will exercise it and if they do, it will likely result in something we won’t like, is a key driver of making sure we are doing the right thing.

Law enforcement serves several purposes, one of which is deterrence. Enforcement by those in authority deters people from breaking the law. Making enforcement visible is one of the best forms of “awareness raising” there is.

The French have a term for it “pour encourager les autres” – when people around me see the law enforced against me, they check their own behaviour to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to them.

A particular subset of this topic is around collection of fees, taxes or fines. If a state authority, such as a ministry, is putting forward increasing a fee or a tax, we need to look beyond the headline. If enforcement is weak, an increase of this type means that those of us who comply with the law are being penalised and are in effect subsidising those who don’t pay and are not made to do so by those in authority.

Again, if you want a culture of compliance you need to develop a culture of enforcement.

In late 2015, we saw the successful prosecution of 15 MPs for bribery and they were subsequently found guilty of breaching the Leadership Code. It was a landmark for good governance in Vanuatu, and throughout the region.

Enforcement needed
It did not require the creation of any new laws. What it took was for all the relevant players (police, prosecutors, courts) to enforce laws that have been around for quite some time.

Over the last few years, we have seen the amount of VAT collected rise significantly. That is not because the law has been changed, but because the VAT Office has worked to improve its enforcement procedures. They are now looking to do something similar in relation to collection of import duties. The law hasn’t changed, the culture of the organisation has.

So, next time you hear someone such as a politician or a bureaucrat or (my particular favourite) a “technical adviser” say that what is needed is a new law or a new power or an increase in a fee or penalty, it should prompt you to ask some questions.

What laws or powers already exist to deal with this issue? Are they enforced properly? Will these new measures be any use if no one enforces them? And maybe if you start asking these questions, others will be encouraged to do so as well.

Tess Newton Cain, is the principal of TNC Pacific Consulting. This commentary was first published in the Vanuatu Daily Post.

By Glenda Willie in Port Vila

Vanuatu kava farmers on Espiritu Santo have expressed great fear of losing their production businesses in the wake of reports alleging that investors will be engaging in mass kava production on their land.

In a press statement, the kava farmers and suppliers said if the investors engaged in kava production on a larger commercial scale, they would outnumber the hard-working local farmers and dominate kava outlets with their production.

Describing this as a “silent killer” for their small-scale kava businesses, the concerned farmers called on the government through the minister responsible for labour to reconsider the working permits for those investors.

The local farmers are worried that their years of hard work would be in vain if this issue is not addressed immediately.

They claim that they will not be able to compete with the investors in terms of kava quantity.

“Kava is considered a traditional drink therefore the government should consider this as a priority to assist the farmers to protect the value of kava before they fall into the hands of investors,” they said.

The kava farmers said they would do their best to protect and defend their kava businesses as most of them rely on their businesses to sustain their livelihood.

Glenda Willie is a Vanuatu Daily Post reporter.

In response to last weekend’s reports of complaints about allegedly “tainted” kava, Vanuatu-based exporter Peter Colmar has provided clear scientific evidence that the product he provided to American suppliers is “noble” and shows no trace of tainting.

When the Vanuatu Daily Post shared these results with Agriculture Minister Matai Seremaiah, he replied: “The results submitted to me today will be shared to our officials for assessment.”

In a follow-up telephone call, he applauded Colmar’s efforts to defend the good name of his company.

At the heart of last weekend’s article was a complaint from an American source about the quality of kava allegedly supplied by Sarami, Colmar’s Santo-based kava export operation.

The complaint originated from a letter written by Garry Stoner, founder of Pure Kava, a kava advocacy group.

Stoner wrote to Starwest Botanicals, an herb wholesaler/retailer based in Sacramento, California, founded in 1975. Stoner’s letter included a chemical analysis, which he claimed was derived from a 2015 test of the company’s retail kava powder product.

Part of the analysis consisted, he said, of what is known as an HPLC chromatogram. The letter claims to show signs of Chlorophyll A, which is only found in leaves.

Stoner wrote that so-called “aerial” matter was present in the sample—leaves, twigs and skin, for example—that contain “pipermethystine, an alkaloid with a known history of toxicity”.

Warehouse visit
Another component of the story alleged that Colmar was responsible for “drowning” the US market with what is colloquially known as “two-day” kava. The basis of this complaint was a visit paid to Colmar’s warehouse by kava proponent Mathias Schmidt.

Dr Schmidt holds post-doctoral qualifications in plant biology and is a leading advocate for the safe and responsible marketing of kava in the European Union.

In the article, Dr Schmidt alleged that approximately 60 tons of kava tainted with “two day” varieties had been shipped to the United States recently. He listed four companies, Kumars Import, Naturex Inc, Concentrated Alie Corps, and Starwest Botanicals, as recipients.

The Daily Post requested further documentation concerning these other companies, but received only bill of lading records for the Kumars, Naturex and Concentrated Alie shipments. The accusation, it transpired, was based on a single sample from Starwest.

Following the publication of the article, Colmar angrily and vehemently rejected these accusations as “lies”. He asserted that Dr Schmidt’s allegations of “two day” kava dated back to a visit to his Santo warehouse “5-7 years ago”.

At the time, Colmar said, he provided Dr Schmidt with two samples, at least one of which was known to contain impurities. Colmar stated that he provided the knowingly tainted material in order to dissuade local farmers from attempting to bulk out their product with substandard material.

Presented with Stoner’s chemical analysis, Colmar responded with two separate analyses. One was supplied by Root of Happiness, a California-based kava supplier. The other was supplied by Starwest, the company that received the original complaint from Stoner.

Calm, euphoric feeling
Both the Root of Happiness and Starwest analyses show clear indications of kavalactones, the chemical component of kava that provides the calm, euphoric feeling that makes kava so popular.

Neither of the samples showed any sign of Chlorophyll A, nor did they show any signs of Flavokavain, a chemical compound present in so-called “two day” kava varieties.

As the Daily Post continued its investigation of the complaints and followed up extensively with Colmar and his representatives, a number of key facts became clear:

There is no direct link between the allegedly adulterated Starwest sample and Colmar’s kava.

According to the Stoner’s letter, the sample was obtained from a customer, who presumably bought the retail product either online or in a shop.

Starwest purchases kava from multiple suppliers, so even if that particular batch of kava did contain impurities—which Colmar insists is not the case—it does not follow that they originated from Colmar’s Santo operation.

The Starwest analysis, by contrast, is based on a shipment received from Colmar. The test was conducted months after Stoner’s analysis, but on the same dried powder product. It unambiguously shows that Colmar’s kava is “noble” and without “aerial” components.

Identical results
The Root of Happiness analysis shows identical results.

Both analyses were certified. According to a CV supplied following a request from the Daily Post, Stoner has no formal certifications relevant to the conduct of these tests. He has written one paper and made at least one presentation on the topic, however.

Colmar claims that Stoner’s equipment is antiquated and sub-par. When we asked Stoner to tell us more about his operations and methodology, he declined to provide any detail, stating only: “Analyses were made with state of the art instrumentation.”

Addressing the accusation that Colmar’s export operation was using the Palisi variety of kava, which he labelled a “two day” variety, Dr Schmidt was adamant.

In an early response to the Daily Post, Dr Schmidt wrote: “I have been in Peter Colmar’s warehouse myself, saw the piles of two-day material for myself, took a sample of his peelings, and could demonstrate that this was Palisi.”

Asked about this, Colmar replied that this visit took place “5-7 years ago”, before Dr Vincent Lebot had even formalised the concept of two-day kava, and long before any regulation or legislation was in place controlling its export.

He further stated that “an independent Santo kava exporter has had Palisi tested by the Vanuatu food lab and the result was noble, so either the classification of this kava type is wrong or the testing is not reliable”.

Visit happened in 2011
Only when asked specifically about the timing of his visit did Dr Schmidt admit that it took place in 2011, supporting Colmar’s version of events.

Colmar told the Daily Post he had concluded that Dr Schmidt was not acting in good faith, and he was considering his legal options.

Given the information obtained in our follow-up to this story, and based on numerous lengthy conversations with the parties concerned, it is now clear that, despite a good faith effort to contact the company for comment, the Daily Post did not present a complete picture in its original story.

This newspaper has sent emails containing the additional chemical analyses to Ambassador Joy, to Biosecurity and to Minister Matai Seremaiah, and asked them whether they still maintain their original opinion of the Santo-based kava exporter.

The Minister of Agriculture replied: “I am not a scientist to evaluate the results provided. However, my position as minister for MALFFB, if the exported kava is of good quality then there is no need for VCMB to cancel his/her licence.

“Every exporter must understand the difficulty of getting the kava cleared in the EU etc. and the least they could do is support the government to ensure only good quality if purchased from the farmers and to be exported.

“The ministry will be getting hard on those exporters who intentionally export low quality kava once the Kava [Act] Amendment is gazetted next week. In many occasions our staff at bio security were threatened while on duty to carry out quality checks. This has to stop.

“As long as the exporter (Sarami) complies with our laws and regulations, there will be no need for cancellation of their licence.”

‘Clean’ test testimonials
According to testimonials received by the Daily Post, Colmar is a supplier with a sterling reputation, whose products test “clean” on a consistent and regular basis. Any suggestion that his operation is not operating to a high standard is not supported by the evidence now in our possession.

The Daily Post sincerely apologises if readers inferred anything else from last week’s article. We regret that these mitigating and exculpatory facts were not available at the time the original article was printed.

Furthermore, we thank Colmar and his son Chris for their positive and helpful engagement in setting the record straight.

The Daily Post will report further on allegations of unequal treatment of kava suppliers, and will provide updates concerning reactions to the new data by public officials as and when they become available.

Dan McGarry is editorial director of the Vanuatu Daily Post. This article was published today in response to an earlier article published by the Daily Post and Asia Pacific Report.

Tess Newton Cain: We need a new law about kava … or do we?

The writing is on the wall for the fate of Peter Colmar’s kava exporting company, Sarami Plantation, now that the Minister of Agriculture, Matai Seremaiah has said: “I strongly recommend that the Vanuatu Commodities Marketing Board (VCMB) terminate his export licence forthwith”.

READ MORE: New data dispels reports of ‘tainted’ kava fears

The minister sent the short instruction to the Acting Director-General (ADG) of Trade, George Borugu, this week.

The minister recommended to the ADG to ask the board to take drastic steps to deal with Sarami Plantation in the face of growing concerns abroad, especially from Dr Mathias Schmidt in Germany and the Vanuatu Ambassador to the European Union, Roy Mickey Joy, in Brussels, both of whom fought tooth and nail to successfully defend the Pacific kava-producing countries’ export market in Europe.

Their tireless commitments since the kava ban in 2001, finally resulted in the ruling by the German Administrative Court to lift the kava ban in 2014.

In his urgent email to Ambassador Joy this week, Dr Schmidt wrote: “Today on Tuesday, January 10, I received a complaint from the US: they are being drowned in two-day kava, all exported from Peter Colmar in Santo. He is operating as ‘Sarami Plantation’, shipping ground, leaves and stalks as ‘kava’ to the US via New Zealand.”

Dr Schmidt listed the following export figures for 2016:

• Kumars Import: 25.82 tons

• Naturex Inc.: 24.52 tons

• Concentrated Alie Corps.: 7.02 tons and

• Starwest Botanicals: 2 tons

Dr Schmidt explained: “That’s almost 60 tons of non-noble non-root material sold as kava in 2016 by just one exporter. I thought the Vanuatu Kava Act had been changed, but if someone like Sarami Plantation can sell such quantities without any consequences, there must be more than just one person closing their eyes.

‘Next catastrophe’
“We need to stop this before the next catastrophe happens.”

In his letter to the Director of Biosecurity, Ambassador Joy wrote: “I am shocked and alarmed by the way and the manner in which Mr Peter Colmar has continued to conduct his shipment with ‘blind eyes’ from your staff and even those in the Customs and Border Controls.

“I am lost for words but can only compel the way and the easy manner by which the ‘Sarami Plantation’ has continued to effectively trade its kava shipment against all odds and without any sense of regularity control or SPS from our authorities.”

Ambassador Joy said he was disappointed that he and his exceptional team had spent six solid years and substantial resources to eventually revive the kava trade in Europe, only for one company to come in and destroy everything by exporting trash instead of noble kava.

He continued: “I am appealing to you to launch a swift investigation into the conduct of ‘Sarami Plantation’ and withdraw its export licence as soon as possible.”

The ambassador also copied his letter to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Meanwhile, the owner of the export company, Peter Colmar, lives in China and is understood to visit Vanuatu on a regular basis.

No call back
The Daily Post called Sarami Plantation in Luganville to speak to someone responsible concerning the reports leveled at the company.

In the latest development, all kava growers and exporters have from now until the end of next month to clean up their operations and cease for good, from the sale or export of two-day kava or kava mixed with ‘makas’ (adulterated kava).

The new Kava Export Standard is going to come into force on March 1 and all kava exporters are expected to comply with it.

The Biosecurity Director has already given the warning to all kava farmers and exporters from Luganville and Port Vila. He is reiterating the warning again because he has received pictures of dishes of ‘makas’ from his officers in Luganville only two days ago.

The director said: “My officers went to a particular nakamal and found kava ‘makas’ placed on the roof to dry. When they asked why, the owner confirmed a company is buying the ‘makas’ for export.”

He said Sarami Plantation is reported to be buying and mixing kava ‘makas’ with real kava for export to the United States.

The report has already reached the European Union.

Appeal to government
Asked to comment, he replied: “We at Biosecurity are appealing to the government to gazette the Kava Act Amendment of 2015 to give us extra-legal enforcement power to enforce kava export.

“While the existing law already provides us with legal power, we need the extra legal backing to put stricter control measures against farmers and exporters and other people for that matter, in particular owners of kava bars who sell ‘makas’ to the exporters”.

As of the middle of next month, all farmers are warned to stop selling two-day kava to buyers for local consumption and kava exporters.

The new law comes into effect on March 1 and if kava farmers and exporters are caught still selling and exporting two-day kava, the Director of Biosecurity reiterated that they would go one step further by blacklisting those farmers by advising exporters not to buy anymore kava from them.

“We are prepared to take such drastic measures to clean up the industry of kava export”, he confirmed.

Len Garae is a senior Vanuatu Daily Post journalist.

• New data dispels Vanuatu reports of ‘tainted’ kava fears – Vanuatu Daily Post

According to a PACNEWS report, a three-day meeting hosted by FAO is expected to take place in Suva this week to contribute a resolution to the crisis.

‘Health and wealth’

The report quoted FAO’s Policy Officer in Fiji, Dr Tim Martyn, who said NCDs threatened the health and wealth of the 34 Small Island Developing States.

“In the Pacific alone, on average, NCDs account for 70 percent of all deaths, in Fiji that number is 80 percent. A third of the regional population suffers from anaemia, and a quarter from vitamin A deficiency.”

He said most of the deaths are preventable, but access to nutritious food would need to be made available and affordable for many.

Dr Martyn said almost a quarter of Fiji’s population suffers from diabetes.

“One outcome is an amputation conducted in one of Fiji’s hospitals every 12 hours.  A third of Fiji’s population is now considered obese, which puts many at a health risk.

‘Just as startling’

“In the Pacific Islands the statistics are just as startling.  Fifty percent of the male population of Tonga is estimated to be obese, the highest prevalence out of 188 countries worldwide; and over 45 percent of American Samoa’s population have diabetes. Indeed, the Pacific has the highest rate of diabetes in the world.”

The FAO are expected to host up to 40 representatives from the three geographic SIDS regions: Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and South China Sea (AIMS), the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

The meeting is expected to review and update the draft Action Plan which responds to the food and nutrition challenges faced by SIDS.

• Read the full report on PACNEWS
• FAO’s draft prospectus of this weeks meeting in Suva

Businessman and landowner leader of Hides PDL 1 of the PNG LNG Project, Larry Andagali, has set a deadline for government officials to meet with landowners and address the demands that have led to the lock down of the Project this week.

Andagali called on Prime Minister Peter O’Neill and senior government ministers to be in Hides Nogoli camp before August, 12, 2016 to start the negotiation process.

He has issued a media release and said Hides landowners will not re-open until the Licensed Based Benefit Sharing Agreement (LBBSA) is reviewed and a new agreement is negotiated and executed.

O’Neill confirmed he is away of the issue and would send a ministerial government team to meet with disgruntled landowners in Hides.

The PNG LNG Project sites were locked down this week with landowners demanding the government pay overdue royalties that are owed to them.

The group have cut down trees to block the roads and stop vehicles from entering into the project site.

Andagali said all Hides wellheads will remain closed until landowners and people of Hela get their fair share of the PNG LNG Project.

‘This time around we are now calling on ExxonMobil as an operator to come as a party on their community investment programs and sponsorship programs for Hides and Hela children,’ he said.

In the meantime he has called on the people of Hides to remain calm and protect the LNG project facilities without using any form of force and weapons.

• Don’t use force to resolve LNG shut down, warns PNG opposition