Governor Juffa, as you so correctly say in the recent piece featured on this blog, any possible dream of making more than a hand-to-mouth living from one's traditional share of the clan's lands is often sabotaged before it even enters the consciousness of youth, having been already sold by the "dream-sellers" you have identified. These are the half-educated- despite many being "well-qualified professionals" - whose hearts are laden with inhuman greed instead of the idealism and positivism which a fully-educated person normally perceives as his duty to adopt. Its a problem, and it will remain one.
However, Governor, as one with long experience of the effects of PNG's version of forestry-policy, and the social effects of nucleus-estate developments, developments where second, third, and fourth sons become landless and thus live from their wits in a shroud of frustration, I have a really attractive dream for you, quite aside from advising you to look at coffee and cocoa-growing as areas ripe for expansion in your Province.
For all its vicissitudes, occasional political interference and the giant rip-off perpetrated by the late Walter Perdacher of Mt Hagen, who died owing PNG's small coffee growers 47 million kina, PNG’s coffee industry is a model enterprise for villagers.
It does not involve monetary investment other than the tools which any subsistance-farming family already possesses, and as a seasonal crop, coffee fits the traditional rhythms and way-of-life which has existed in rural PNG for several thousand years..
Despite the occasional predictions of doom-sayers, PNG's coffee industry, in which 95% of volume exported comes from village-level growers, is a great success, delivering cash-in-the-hand at the roadside market where, so long as more than one buyer is present, competition ensures fair prices.
So, Governor, how about a Timber Industry Corporation owned by Provincial Timber Owners Associations appointing a board of 10 grower reps, three
government reps, a miller and transporter rep, and an exporter rep. to register landowner interest, to legislate to confine felling to trees marked by outstation-based Forestry Assessors, and lastly to legally licence and oversee the operation, conduct and sales-documentation of registered timber-exporters.
Villages/clans/tribes with harvestable timber on their land would engage an authorised, trained forestry assessor to census, categorise, physically mark and sat-nav mark trees ready for felling. The the landowners would meet regularly to agree upon the trees to be felled and the split-up of proceeds after the timber was transported out and sold.
The timber would be felled and milled with a wokabaut somil owned by the group.
The product would be standard-size flitches for eventual breaking-down into desired sizes by foreign end-users. Size suitable for
dragging or mini-tractor pulling out to roadhead, and for compact loading into shipping containers.
A trade in container-lots of dried export flitches of named size and species would be developed by Board-licenced timber export companies-
private and competitive- not centrally-controlled "quazi-governmental" shit-fights.
Owners groups would sell to the licenced exporters either by tender per container lot as specified, or by monthly auction. Transport from
roadhead or riverhead to the exporter would be the subject of separate negotiation.
Okay- its a vast and tangled bamboo-jungle to negotiate, even only considering existing, huge vested interests and their firmly anchored political links.
And a huge drafting job to build up an Act and to modify other Acts as necessary for presentation to Parliament.
But, hell, its a really good idea, isnt it? Its not cargo-cult, though there are lots of pitfalls. So do spend some time thinking and
talking and maybe getting a few heads together.
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