JOHN FOWKE
THE
PNG NATIONAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE, in cooperation with the Australian
National University, has published a very interesting paper, entitled Papua New Guinea’s economic performance between 1975 and 2008.
In Monograph 41 (available here) these facts about PNG’s development performance are highlighted:
Economic growth is insufficient to impact households.
Poor performance on social indicators compared with other Pacific countries.
There is an absence of good-quality data for Papua New Guinea.
Development plans, while in place, are not well resourced or linked with other plans and have been poorly implemented.
Lack of fiscal discipline resulting in overspending, unproductive spending and not adhering to planned priorities.
A reliance on minerals and agriculture: PNG needs to diversify to reduce economic shocks.
Political instability and poor governance hampering PNG’s development and leading to a decline in public services.
So, here are some ideas for an improved way of life for a large majority of PNG’s people.
Idea 1 – Some elementary planning
Our agriculturalists are
cash poor subsistence farmers and their land-entitlements are held under
customary clan-authorised usufructuary understandings.
The daily life of subsistence-dependant families is dictated by needs both physical and in regard to social obligations.
A trading, budgeting,
calculating sort of life it is not; and since the cessation of the need
for constant preparedness for war, men’s part in it has lacked
imperatives and become accepting of a role where a taste for leisure may
be indulged.
All these facts militate
against any inclination for a typical rural clansman to set up a
commercial farming enterprise. And yet, although modified in recent
times, our extension methods tend to focus upon technology and
business-mindedness.
Instead of creating sad
and silly monstrosities like the morbid and badly debt-ridden 20-hectare
coffee scheme and the smallholder cattle schemes of 20 years ago, I
believe we should encourage the production of cash crops using a
realistic and pragmatic, traditionally-based approach.
We should encourage
families to set themselves a cash-earning target, budgeted according to
family-estimated needs over a five–year period.
Then, using what is to
hand in terms of centuries-old knowledge, simple hand-tools, family
labour and clan-approved land-use entitlements, a farm-plan covering
family food needs and the budgeted, traditionally-farmed cash-producing
element may be made.
Not a difficult exercise,
and there is plenty of paid assistance available if growers insist upon
being helped in terms of their real requirements instead of receiving
what they are told is superior wisdom and technological expertise.
Idea 2 – Micro-loan schemes
I have to say here that,
in the late eighties, I introduced and managed just such a scheme in the
Eastern Highlands and Western Highlands provinces, in which small loans
made in terms of actual tools and materials rather than cash, were
utilised by some 200 coffee-grower families.
They paid nothing for the input of the extension officers who visited regularly. We created a cadre of “barefoot didiman”
being experienced coffeemen, ex-plantation bossboys and the like, who
would take a blanket and a few possessions in a bag and head out on a
Monday, touring, providing active, hands-on assistance, living with
their 20 or so “clients” and returning to report at the end of the
fortnight.
All loans were paid out by
the family borrowers within the allowed two-year or three-year period
of loan. The system, the Ag Banks’ “Agricultural Client Service” was
smaller but just as successful and ground-breaking as the better-known
Agbank Stretpasin Stoa scheme.
Like the Stoa scheme, it
is not just moribund. It is dead and gone for want of energy and
enterprise from the bureaucrats in charge at Waigani. And yet, 200
families demonstrably increased their earnings from coffee and thus
their welfare, to their great advantage.
Idea 3 - Small nurseries
The cash-crop concerned
might consist of an existing coffee or cocoa or coconut plot, to be
rehabilitated by planned infilling of dead trees and unproductive trees
using new plants raised from seed from established and recognisably-good
trees.
Extension services have
not performed well in providing quality planting material, even though
they insist that their clones or varieties must be used. And the history
of sponsored commercial nurseries in the coffee-industry is one of
almost total failure.
A small nursery of a few
hundred plants is easy to create, using readily-available self-sown,
selected plants - but it must be near a water-source so that young
plants may be watered in dry weather.
It must also be fenced to
keep pigs out, and whilst this can involve the use of wire, it is also
feasible to fence a nursery using traditional materials and method.
Healthy, strong,
one-year-old seedlings planted out at the onset of the wet season can be
protected from pigs by small, strong individual barriers made of four
or five sharpened stakes.
None of this work is hard
or tedious (in fact it can be very satisfying in itself) and may be
carried out within the same regime and rhythm as the establishment and
nurturing of a family food-garden and the raising of pigs.
Idea 4 - Avoid technological complexity
The upkeep of such a
cash-crop plot, sufficient to support the cash-needs of a typical
subsistence-economy-supported family is not onerous and it has many
rewards aside from the cash generated.
To be avoided, and I
emphasise this, are concepts and practices which are expensive and
technologically-complex. Those who have completed training at some level
in agricultural science and who are employed to help growers by the
various PNG commodity boards have a vested interest in pushing the
industrial or capital intensive concepts they have learned, and they do
this.
They are telling people
about a future whilst the peoples’ needs are in the present. They have
no Good Book full of understandable parables and meaningful experience.
The peoples’ eyes show that they are not listening.
The well-dressed
technology-evangelists get into the 4WD and head back to town, instead
of remaining to talk when everyone comes home in the evening and are
ready to listen. That’s how it is today.
Idea 5 - Listen to the people doing it
Unless, and this seems
unlikely in PNG, there is a violent overthrow of custom-sanctioned
land-tenure practices, similar to the takeover of peasant-worked
tributary land-use systems by the class-and-wealth empowered landlords
of England and Scotland at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, much
of what is being taught and imparted by extension officers is
irrelevant.
This is made obvious by
slow take-up. One reads constant references by political brief-case
carriers to the laxity of the commodity boards in terms of pushing big
new plantings and raising exports to targets like the one for coffee
chosen years ago of “2 Million Bags by Year 2000.”
In fact, the nation’s
coffee-growers have shown that in three decades of rapid population
growth they have found it possible only to maintain an average of 1
million bags - and have maintained this average ever since 1987- 25
years ago.
This has been a period of increasing age-related yield decline, so some coffee has indeed been planted.
But the growers are saying
something. Why doesn’t anyone listen? The tree-population in the cocoa
and copra industries is also moribund and the decline, almost the
disappearance of the coastal shipping services of yesteryear also
militates strongly against these coastal industries.
For coffee, an immediate
input of 150 million seedlings is just the start for replacement, let
alone augmentation of planted areas
Idea 6 - Transport as a key investment area
What I am saying here
about coffee applies equally to copra and cocoa, but these crops,
especially copra, are extremely-badly served by the coastal shipping
services.
Their commodity-boards may want a shake-up, too.
The major coffee-growing
areas have road and access problems in plenty, but they are not as
bereft of services as road-less coastal villages are. This aspect alone
has killed the trade in copra in many once-productive coastal and
island areas.
Idea 7 - Respect the traditions
PNG has made the great jump from stone-age to Toyota-age in 100 years - a feat worthy of great praise and due recognition.
But rural people and their
families and livelihoods and customs can only be pushed faster than
this by violent, authoritarian means, by dispossession as was done in
England and Scotland 250 years ago. It's not going to happen that way in
PNG.
Traditional land-ownership
custom and practice will be modified only very slowly as long as the
rule of law prevails, so let's just do cash-crop development our way,
the traditional PNG way.
It's not simply cash
income as such that we are talking about here. Its the building of an
active, healthy, progressive rural lifestyle to encompass modern
aspirations and views. Frustration and idleness is a prison without
bars.
Satisfaction of aspirations and ambition in rural areas is an important element in building a positive, modern PNG.
