The Buai Economy

 

Nathan Dingu

Beetlenut or Buai as is known in PNG is undeniably universal throughout Papua New Guinea. It is chewed during feasts, in bride price ceremonies, and every other ceremony, not forgetting just for daily consumption. It is a palm nut categorized as a narcotic and is in great demand in this great land of ours.

Indeed lately there has been a lot of work lately by the Governor of NCD, Hon. Powes Parkop to ban buai entirely in Port Moresby. Whether that task is feasible or not is not my problem but my question is does PNG understand the importance of buai in the economy?

Now, any consumable product that is produced by any industry for it to be successful must have a strong consumer demand whether it is internal or external. Industries such as tobacco, alcohol and food manufacturing all survive on consumer demand alone of which buai is of no exception.

This demand comes from the fact that every child growing up in Papua New Guinea knows what buai is, either they grow up chewing it or watching one of their parents into the buai habit. When they grow up they become chewers themselves and if they choose not to, certainly their spouse or someone close to them would do.

So where does economics fit into the buai scene? Port Moresby has a population of roughly 400,000 – 600,000 people. Of these people how many do we expect to be chewers – let us say 40% of all Port Moresby Residents are chewers. That would be roughly 240,000 people who are chewers.

I myself love buai and can say that I do chew more than five times a day but let us say that on the average a buai chewer would chew at least two times a day at current market prices of K1.00 per nut. This would mean that up to K2.00 times 240,000 chews = K480,000.00 is floated every day or half a million kina at that.

In NCD terms that is about half a million kina daily from the pockets of ordinary citizens that would be used to buy food from stores who do pay an income tax to the government and essentially the NCDC. So say out of that money if K200,000 goes to the shops for food than 10% of that goes to government tax daily which would amount to a whopping K7.3 million in taxes every year.

The other factor not already mentioned about the buai economy is that, that money collected from sales is goes right down to villagers who grow beetlenut to pay for their school fees, food etc.

So what is NCD doing in their current efforts to curb beetlenut in the city is basically indirectly cutting of an economic source of its own tax revenue.

What shall we do about the filthyness in NCD? Not what we are currently doing because it simply does not work and I will not elaborate about this. Instead there better and simpler ways we can solve this problem. We just have to think about it more.

Samla ting ting ting blo nupla week