As you heard earlier in the program, logging on SABLs has pushed
PNG's log exports into record territory. In 2011, 650,000 cubic
metres of logs were exported from SABLs. A prominent scientist
in tropical biology says the environmental impact of this sort
of logging is very significant. Presenter: Jemima Garrett,
Pacific Economic and Business reporter Speaker: William
Laurance, a former Australian Laureate and Senior Scientist with
the Smithsonian Institution, currently Distinguished Research
Professor in Tropical Biology at James Cook University LAURANCE:
There is a huge area of Papua New Guinea which has now been set
aside for these SABLs. It's about 5.5 million hectares, about
11% of the countries land area and one of the common concerns is
that these SABLs which were supposed to be designed for larger
scale agricultural development, in fact, in many cases are being
exploited by timber companies as a back-door or insidious way of
getting around existing forestry regulations trying to limit the
impact of ind