By Colin Filer

Introduction: It is still commonly asserted that 97 percent of the land in Papua New Guinea (PNG) remains under customary ownership, just as it was when PNG gained its independence from Australian colonial rule in 1975 (GPNG 2007b; AusAID 2008). Indeed, some commentators believe that this abiding reality is a major constraint on the country’s economic development (Jones and McGavin 2001; Lea 2002; Gosarevski et al. 2004). But there is now some cause for these commentators to celebrate a new reality. Between the beginning of July 2003 and the end of January 2011, almost 5 million hectares of customary land (11 percent of PNG’s total land area) has passed into the hands of national and foreign corporate entities through a legal mechanism known as the ‘lease-leaseback scheme’. This is twice the amount of land which one international study found to have been ‘grabbed’ by corporate interests across five different African countries over a comparable period of time (Cotula et al. 2010).